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Title: A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century


Author: Henry A. Beers

Release Date: March 24, 2005  [eBook #15447]

Language: English

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***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
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of James Hayward.



A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

by

HENRY A. BEERS

Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Vale_, etc.







"Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben Muss im Leben untergehen."
          --Schiller




PREFACE

Historians of French and German literature are accustomed to set off a
period, or a division of their subject, and entitle it "Romanticism" or
"the Romantic School."  Writers of English literary history, while
recognizing the importance of England's share in this great movement in
European letters, have not generally accorded it a place by itself in the
arrangement of their subject-matter, but have treated it cursively, as a
tendency present in the work of individual authors; and have maintained a
simple chronological division of eras into the "Georgian,", the
"Victorian," etc.  The reason of this is perhaps to be found in the fact
that, although Romanticism began earlier in England than on the Continent
and lent quite as much as it borrowed in the international exchange of
literary commodities, the native movement was more gradual and scattered.
It never reached so compact a shape, or came so definitely to a head, as
in Germany or France.  There never was precisely a "romantic school" or
an all-pervading romantic fashion in England.

There is, therefore, nothing in English corresponding to Heine's
fascinating sketch "Die Romantische Schule," or to Theophile Gautier's
almost equally fascinating and far more sympathetic "Histoire du
Romantisme."  If we can imagine a composite personality of Byron and De
Quincey, putting on record his half affectionate and half satirical
reminiscences of the contemporary literary movement, we might have
something nearly equivalent.  For Byron, like Heine, was a repentant
romanticist, with "radical notions under his cap," and a critical theory
at odds with his practice; while De Quincey was an early disciple of
Wordsworth and Coleridge,--as Gautier was of Victor Hugo,--and at the
same time a clever and slightly mischievous sketcher of personal traits.

The present volume consists, in substance, of a series of lectures given
in elective courses in Yale College.  In revising it for publication I
have striven to rid it of the air of the lecture room, but a few
repetitions and didacticisms of manner may have inadvertently been left
in.  Some of the methods and results of these studies have already been
given to the public in "The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement,"
by my present associate and former scholar, Professor William Lyon
Phelps.  Professor Phelps' little book (originally a doctorate thesis)
follows, in the main, the selection and arrangement of topics in my
lectures.  _En revanche_ I have had the advantage of availing myself of
his independent researches on points which I have touched but slightly;
and particularly of his very full treatment of the Spenserian imitations.

I had at first intended to entitle the book "Chapters toward a History of
English Romanticism, etc."; for, though fairly complete in treatment, it
makes no claim to being exhaustive.  By no means every eighteenth-century
writer whose work exhibits romantic motives is here passed in review.
That very singular genius William Blake, _e.g._, in whom the influence of
"Ossian," among other things, is so strongly apparent, I leave untouched;
because his writings--partly by reason of their strange manner of
publication--were without effect upon their generation and do not form a
link in the chain of literary tendency.

If this volume should be favorably received, I hope before very long to
publish a companion study of English romanticism in the nineteenth
century.

                                            H.A.B.


_October, 1898._




CONTENTS

Chapter

    I. The Subject Defined

   II. The Augustans

  III. The Spenserians

   IV. The Landscape Poets

    V. The Miltonic Group

   VI. The School of Warton

  VII. The Gothic Revival

 VIII. Percy and the Ballads

   IX. Ossian

    X. Thomas Chatterton

   XI. The German Tributary




A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM


CHAPTER I.

The Subject Defined

To attempt at the outset a rigid definition of the word _romanticism_
would be to anticipate the substance of this volume.  To furnish an
answer to the question--What is, or was, romanticism? or, at least, What
is, or was English romanticism?--is one of my main purposes herein, and
the reader will be invited to examine a good many literary documents, and
to do a certain amount of thinking, before he can form for himself any
full and clear notion of the thing.  Even then he will hardly find
himself prepared to give a dictionary definition or romanticism.  There
are words which connote so much, which take up into themselves so much of
the history of the human mind, that any compendious explanation of their
meaning--any definition which is not, at the same time, a rather extended
description--must serve little other end than to supply a convenient mark
of identification.  How can we define in a sentence words like
renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia,
pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic?  _Definitio est negatio_.  It
may be possible to hit upon a form of words which will mark romanticism
off from everything else--tell in a clause what it is _not_; but to add a
positive content to the definition--to tell what romanticism _is_, will
require a very different and more gradual process.[1]

Nevertheless a rough, working definition may be useful to start with.
Romanticism, then, in the sense in which I shall commonly employ the
word, means the reproduction in modern art or literature of the life and
thought of the Middle Ages.  Some other elements will have to be added to
this definition, and some modifications of it will suggest themselves
from time to time.  It is provisional, tentative, classic, but will serve
our turn till we are ready to substitute a better.  It is the definition
which Heine gives in his brilliant little book on the Romantic School in
Germany.[2]  "All the poetry of the Middle Ages," he adds, "has a certain
definite character, through which it differs from the poetry of the
Greeks and Romans.  In reference to this difference, the former is called
Romantic, the latter Classic.  These names, however, are misleading, and
have hitherto caused the most vexatious confusion."[3]

Some of the sources of this confusion will be considered presently.
Meanwhile the passage recalls the fact that _romantic_, when used as a
term in literary nomenclature, is not an independent, but a referential
word.  It implies its opposite, the classic; and the ingenuity of critics
has been taxed to its uttermost to explain and develop the numerous
points of contrast.  To form a thorough conception of the romantic,
therefore, we must also form some conception of the classic.  Now there
is an obvious unlikeness between the thought and art of the nations of
pagan antiquity and the thought and art of the peoples of Christian,
feudal Europe.  Everyone will agree to call the Parthenon, the "Diana" of
the Louvre, the "Oedipus" of Sophocles, the orations of Demosthenes
classical; and to call the cathedral of Chartres, the walls of
Nuremberg--_die Perle des Mittelalters_--the "Legenda Aurea" of Jacobus
de Voragine, the "Tristan und Isolde" of Gottfried of Strasburg, and the
illuminations in a Catholic missal of the thirteenth century romantic.

The same unlikeness is found between modern works conceived in the
spirit, or executed in direct imitation, of ancient and medieval art
respectively.  It is easy to decide that Flaxman's outline drawings in
illustration of Homer are classic; that Alfieri's tragedies, Goethe's
"Iphigenie auf Tauris" Landor's "Hellenics," Gibson's statues, David's
paintings, and the church of the Madeleine in Paris are classical, at
least in intentions and in the models which they follow; while Victor
Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," Scott's "Ivanhoe," Fouque's "Der
Zauberring," and Rossetti's painting, "The Girlhood of Mary," are no less
certainly romantic in their inspiration.

But critics have given a wider extension than this to the terms classic
and romantic.  They have discerned, or imagined, certain qualities,
attitudes of mind, ways of thinking and feeling, traits of style which
distinguish classic from romantic art; and they have applied the words
accordingly to work which is not necessarily either antique or medieval
in subject.  Thus it is assumed, for example, that the productions of
Greek and Roman genius were characterized by clearness, simplicity,
restraint, unity of design, subordination of the part to the whole; and
therefore modern works which make this impression of noble plainness and
severity, of harmony in construction, economy of means and clear,
definite outline, are often spoken of as classical, quite irrespective of
the historical period which they have to do with.  In this sense, it is
usual to say that Wordsworth's "Michael" is classical, or that Goethe's
"Hermann and Dorothea" is classical; though Wordsworth may be celebrating
the virtues of a Westmoreland shepherd, and Goethe telling the story of
two rustic lovers on the German border at the time of the Napoleonic wars.

On the other hand, it is asserted that the work of mediaeval poets and
artists is marked by an excess of sentiment, by over-lavish decoration, a
strong sense of color and a feeble sense of form, an attention to detail,
at the cost of the main impression, and a consequent tendency to run into
the exaggerated, the fantastic, and the grotesque.  It is not uncommon,
therefore, to find poets like Byron and Shelly classified as
romanticists, by virtue of their possession of these, or similar,
characteristics, although no one could be more remote from medieval
habits of thought than the author of "Don Juan" or the author of "The
Revolt of Islam."

But the extension of these opposing terms to the work of writers who have
so little in common with either the antique or the medieval as
Wordsworth, on the one hand, and Byron, on the other, does not stop here.
It is one of the embarrassments of the literary historian that nearly
every word which he uses has two meanings, a critical and a popular
meaning.  In common speech, classic has come to signify almost anything
that is good.  If we look in our dictionaries we find it defined somewhat
in this way: "Conforming to the best authority in literature and art;
pure; chaste; refined; originally and chiefly used of the best Greek and
Roman writers, but also applied to the best modern authors, or their
works."  "Classic, _n._ A work of acknowledged excellence and authority."
In this sense of the word, "Robinson Crusoe" is a classic; the "Pilgrim's
Progress" is a classic; every piece of literature which is customarily
recommended as a safe pattern for young writers to form their style upon
is a classic.[4]

Contrariwise the word _romantic_, as popularly employed, expresses a
shade of disapprobation.  The dictionaries make it a synonym for
_sentimental, fanciful_, _wild_, _extravagant_, _chimerical_, all evident
derivatives from their more critical definition, "pertaining or
appropriate to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the
Middle Ages, as opposed to the classical antique."  The etymology of
_romance_ is familiar.  The various dialects which sprang from the
corruption of the Latin were called by the common name of _romans_.  The
name was then applied to any piece of literature composed in this
vernacular instead of in the ancient classical Latin.  And as the
favorite kind of writing in Provencal, Old French, and Spanish was the
tale of chivalrous adventure that was called _par excellence_, _a roman_,
_romans_, or_ romance_.  The adjective _romantic_ is much later,
implying, as it does, a certain degree of critical attention to the
species of fiction which it describes in order to a generalizing of its
peculiarities.  It first came into general use in the latter half of the
seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth; and naturally,
was marked from birth with that shade of disapproval which has been
noticed in popular usage.

The feature that struck the critics most in the romances of the Middle
Ages, and in that very different variety of romance which was cultivated
during the seventeenth century--the prolix, sentimental fictions of La
Calprenede, Scuderi, Gomberville, and D'Urfe--was the fantastic
improbability of their adventures.  Hence the common acceptation of the
word _romantic_ in such phrases as "a romantic notion," "a romantic
elopement," "an act of romantic generosity."  The application of the
adjective to scenery was somewhat later,[5] and the abstract
_romanticism_ was, of course, very much later; as the literary movement,
or the revolution in taste, which it entitles, was not enough developed
to call for a name until the opening of the nineteenth century.  Indeed,
it was never so compact, conscious, and definite a movement in England as
in Germany and France; and its baptism doubtless came from abroad, from
the polemical literature which attended the career of the German
_romanticismus _and the French _romantisme_.

While accepting provisionally Heine's definition, it will be useful to
examine some of the wider meanings that have been attached to the words
_classic_ and _romantic_, and some of the analyses that have been
attempted of the qualities that make one work of art classical and
another romantic.  Walter Pater took them to indicate opposite tendencies
or elements which are present in varying proportions in all good art.  It
is the essential function of classical art and literature, he thought, to
take care of the qualities of measure, purity, temperance.  "What is
classical comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as a
measure of what a long experience has shown us will, at least, never
displease us.  And in the classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in
the classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is
that quality of order in beauty which they possess, indeed, in a
pre-eminent degree."[6]  "The charm, then, of what is classical in art or
literature is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless
listen over and over again, because it is told so well.  To the absolute
beauty of its form is added the accidental, tranquil charm of
familiarity."

On the other hand, he defines the romantic characteristics in art as
consisting in "the addition of strangeness to beauty"--a definition which
recalls Bacon's saying, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some
strangeness in the proportion."  "The desire of beauty," continues Pater,
"being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition
of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic
temper."  This critic, then, would not confine the terms _classic_ and
_classicism_ to the literature of Greece and Rome and to modern works
conceived in the same spirit, although he acknowledges that there are
certain ages of the world in which the classical tradition predominates,
_i.e._, in which the respect for authority, the love of order and
decorum, the disposition to follow rules and models, the acceptance of
academic and conventional standards overbalance the desire for
strangeness and novelty.  Such epochs are, _e.g._, the Augustan age of
Rome, the _Siecle de Louis XIV_, in France, the times of Pope and Johnson
in England--indeed, the whole of the eighteenth century in all parts of
Europe.

Neither would he limit the word _romantic_ to work conceived in the
spirit of the Middle Ages.  "The essential elements," he says, "of the
romantic spirit are curiosity and the love of beauty; and it is as the
accidental effect of these qualities only, that it seeks the Middle Ages;
because in the overcharged atmosphere of the Middle Age there are
unworked sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty to be won by
strong imagination out of things unlikely or remote."  "The sense in
which Scott is to be called a romantic writer is chiefly that, in
opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved
strange adventure and sought it in the Middle Age."

Here again the essayist is careful to explain that there are certain
epochs which are predominately romantic.  "Outbreaks of this spirit come
naturally with particular periods: times when . . . men come to art and
poetry with a deep thirst for intellectual excitement, after a long
_ennui_."  He instances, as periods naturally romantic, the time of the
early Provencal troubadour poetry: the years following the Bourbon
Restoration in France (say, 1815-30); and "the later Middle Age; so that
the medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is often opposed to Greek or
Roman poetry, as romantic to classical poetry."

In Pater's use of the terms, then, classic and romantic do not describe
particular literature, or particular periods in literary history, so much
as certain counterbalancing qualities and tendencies which run through
the literatures of all times and countries.  There were romantic writings
among the Greeks and Romans; there were classical writings in the Middle
Ages; nay, there are classical and romantic traits in the same author.
If there is any poet who may safely be described as a classic, it is
Sophocles; and yet Pater declares that the "Philoctetes" of Sophocles, if
issued to-day, would be called romantic. And he points out--what indeed
has been often pointed out--that the "Odyssey"[7] is more romantic than
the "Iliad:" is, in fact, rather a romance than a hero-epic.  The
adventures of the wandering Ulysses, the visit to the land of the
lotus-eaters, the encounter with the Laestrygonians, the experiences in
the cave of Polyphemus, if allowance be made for the difference in
sentiments and manners, remind the reader constantly of the medieval
_romans d'aventure_.  Pater quotes De Stendhal's saying that all good art
was romantic in its day.  "Romanticism," says De Stendhal, "is the art of
presenting to the nations the literary works which, in the actual state
of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest
possible pleasure: classicism, on the contrary, presents them with what
gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great grand-fathers"--a
definition which is epigrammatic, if not convincing.[8]  De Stendhal
(Henri Beyle) was a pioneer and a special pleader in the cause of French
romanticism, and, in his use of the terms, romanticism stands for
progress, liberty, originality, and the spirit of the future; classicism,
for conservatism, authority, imitation, the spirit of the past.
According to him, every good piece of romantic art is a classic in the
making.  Decried by the classicists of to-day, for its failure to observe
traditions, it will be used by the classicists of the future as a pattern
to which new artists must conform.

It may be worth while to round out the conception of the term by
considering a few other definitions of _romantic_ which have been
proposed.  Dr. F. H. Hedge, in an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_[9]
for March, 1886, inquired, "What do we mean by romantic?"  Goethe, he
says, characterized the difference between classic and romantic "as
equivalent to [that between] healthy and morbid.  Schiller proposed
'naive and sentimental.'[10]  The greater part [of the German critics]
regarded it as identical with the difference between ancient and modern,
which was partly true, but explained nothing.  None of the definitions
given could be accepted as quite satisfactory."[11]

Dr. Hedge himself finds the origin of romantic feeling in wonder and the
sense of mystery.  "The essence of romance," he writes, "is mystery"; and
he enforces the point by noting the application of the word to scenery.
"The woody dell, the leafy glen, the forest path which leads, one knows
not whither, are romantic: the public highway is not."  "The winding
secret brook . . . is romantic, as compared with the broad river."
"Moonlight is romantic, as contrasted with daylight."  Dr. Hedge
attributes this fondness for the mysterious to "the influence of the
Christian religion, which deepened immensely the mystery of life,
suggesting something beyond and behind the world of sense."

This charm of wonder or mystery is perhaps only another name for that
"strangeness added to beauty" which Pater takes to be the distinguishing
feature of romantic art.  Later in the same article, Dr. Hedge asserts
that "the essence of romanticism is aspiration."  Much might be said in
defense of this position.  It has often been pointed out, _e.g._, that a
Gothic cathedral expresses aspiration, and a Greek temple satisfied
completeness.  Indeed if we agree that, in a general way, the classic is
equivalent to the antique, and the romantic to the medieval, it will be
strange if we do not discover many differences between the two that can
hardly be covered by any single phrase.  Dr. Hedge himself enumerates
several qualities of romantic art which it would be difficult to bring
under his essential and defining category of wonder or aspiration.  Thus
he announces that "the peculiarity of the classic style is reserve,
self-suppression of the writer"; while "the romantic is self-reflecting."
"Clear, unimpassioned, impartial presentation of the subject . . . is the
prominent feature of the classic style.  The modern writer gives you not
so much the things themselves as his impression of them."  Here then is
the familiar critical distinction between the objective and subjective
methods--Schiller's _naiv and sentimentalisch_--applied as a criterion of
classic and romantic style.  This contrast the essayist develops at some
length, dwelling upon "the cold reserve and colorless simplicity of the
classic style, where the medium is lost in the object"; and "on the other
hand, the inwardness, the sentimental intensity, the subjective coloring
of the romantic style."

A further distinguishing mark of the romantic spirit, mentioned by Dr.
Hedge in common with many other critics, is the indefiniteness or
incompleteness of its creations.  This is a consequence, of course, of
its sense of mystery and aspiration.  Schopenbauer said that music was
the characteristic modern art, because of its subjective, indefinite
character.  Pursuing this line of thought, Dr. Hedge affirms that
"romantic relates to classic somewhat as music relates to plastic
art. . .  It [music] presents no finished ideal, but suggests ideals
beyond the capacity of canvas or stone.  Plastic art acts on the
intellect, music on the feelings; the one affects us by what it presents,
the other by what it suggests.  This, it seems to me, is essentially the
difference between classic and romantic poetry"; and he names Homer and
Milton as examples of the former, and Scott and Shelley of the latter
school.

Here then we have a third criterion proposed for determining the
essential _differentia_ of romantic art.  First it was mystery, then
aspiration; now it is the appeal to the emotions by the method of
suggestion.  And yet there is, perhaps, no inconsistency on the critic's
part in this continual shifting of his ground.  He is apparently
presenting different facets of the same truth; he means one thing by this
mystery, aspiration, indefiniteness, incompleteness, emotion
suggestiveness: that quality or effect which we all feel to be present in
romantic and absent from classic work, but which we find it hard to
describe by any single term.  It is open to any analyst of our critical
vocabulary to draw out the fullest meanings that he can, from such pairs
of related words as classic and romantic, fancy and imagination, wit and
humor, reason and understanding, passion and sentiment.  Let us, for
instance, develop briefly this proposition that the ideal of classic art
is completeness[12] and the ideal of romantic art indefiniteness, or
suggestiveness.

A.W. Schlegel[13] had already made use of two of the arts of design, to
illustrate the distinction between classic and romantic, just as Dr.
Hedge uses plastic art and music.  I refer to Schlegel's famous saying
that the genius of the antique drama was statuesque, and that of the
romantic drama picturesque.  A Greek temple, statue, or poem has no
imperfection and offers no further promise, indicates nothing beyond what
it expresses.  It fills the sense, it leaves nothing to the imagination.
It stands correct, symmetric, sharp in outline, in the clear light of
day.  There is nothing more to be done to it; there is no concealment
about it.  But in romantic art there is seldom this completeness.  The
workman lingers, he would fain add another touch, his ideal eludes him.
Is a Gothic cathedral ever really finished?  Is "Faust" finished?  Is
"Hamlet" explained?  The modern spirit is mystical; its architecture,
painting, poetry employ shadow to produce their highest effects: shadow
and color rather than contour.  On the Greek heroic stage there were a
few figures, two or three at most, grouped like statuary and thrown out
in bold relief at the apex of the scene: in Greek architecture a few
clean, simple lines: in Greek poetry clear conceptions easily expressible
in language and mostly describable in sensuous images.

The modern theater is crowded with figures and colors, and the distance
recedes in the middle of the scene.  This love of perspective is repeated
in cathedral aisles,[14] the love of color in cathedral windows, and
obscurity hovers in the shadows of the vault.  In our poetry, in our
religion these twilight thoughts prevail.  We seek no completeness here.
What is beyond, what is inexpressible attracts us.  Hence the greater
spirituality of romantic literature, its deeper emotion, its more
passionate tenderness.  But hence likewise its sentimentality, its
melancholy and, in particular, the morbid fascination which the thought
of death has had for the Gothic mind.  The classic nations concentrated
their attention on life and light, and spent few thoughts upon darkness
and the tomb.  Death was to them neither sacred nor beautiful.  Their
decent rites of sepulture or cremation seem designed to hide its
deformities rather than to prolong its reminders.  The presence of the
corpse was pollution.  No Greek could have conceived such a book as the
"Hydriotaphia" or the "Anatomy of Melancholy."

It is observable that Dr. Hedge is at one with Pater, in desiring some
more philosophical statement of the difference between classic and
romantic than the common one which makes it simply the difference between
the antique and the medieval.  He says: "It must not be supposed that
ancient and classic, on one side, and modern and romantic, on the other,
are inseparably one; so that nothing approaching to romantic shall be
found in any Greek or Roman author, nor any classic page in the
literature of modern Europe. . .  The literary line of demarcation is not
identical with the chronological one."  And just as Pater says that the
Odyssey is more romantic than the Iliad, so Dr. Hedge says that "the
story of Cupid and Psyche,[15] in the 'Golden Ass' of Apuleius, is as
much a romance as any composition of the seventeenth or eighteenth
century."  Medievalism he regards as merely an accident of romance:
Scott, as most romantic in his themes, but Byron, in his mood.

So, too, Mr. Sidney Colvin[16] denies that "a predilection for classic
subjects . . . can make a writer that which we understand by the word
classical as distinguished from that which we understand by the word
romantic.  The distinction lies deeper, and is a distinction much less of
subject than of treatment. . .  In classical writing every idea is called
up to the mind as nakedly as possible, and at the same time as
distinctly; it is exhibited in white light, and left to produce its
effect by its own unaided power.[17]  In romantic writing, on the other
hand, all objects are exhibited, as it were, through a colored and
iridescent atmosphere.  Round about every central idea the romantic
writer summons up a cloud of accessory and subordinate ideas for the sake
of enhancing its effect, if at the risk of confusing its outlines.  The
temper, again, of the romantic writer is one of excitement, while the
temper of the classical writer is one of self-possession. . .  On the one
hand there is calm, on the other hand enthusiasm.  The virtues of the one
style are strength of grasp, with clearness and justice of presentment;
the virtues of the other style are glow of the spirit, with magic and
richness of suggestion."  Mr. Colvin then goes on to enforce and
illustrate this contrast between the "accurate and firm definition of
things" in classical writers and the "thrilling vagueness and
uncertainty," the tremulous, coruscating, vibrating or colored light--the
"halo"--with which the romantic writer invests his theme.  "The romantic
manner, . . . with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich suggestions,
may be more attractive than the classic manner, with its composed and
measured preciseness of statement. . .  But on the other hand the
romantic manner lends itself, as the true classical does not, to inferior
work.  Second-rate conceptions excitedly and approximately put into words
derive from it an illusive attraction which may make them for a time, and
with all but the coolest judges, pass as first-rate.  Whereas about true
classical writing there can be no illusion.  It presents to us
conceptions calmly realized in words that exactly define them,
conceptions depending for their attraction, not on their halo, but on
themselves."

As examples of these contrasting styles, Mr. Colvin puts side by side
passages from "The Ancient Mariner" and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale,"
with passages, treating similar themes, from Landor's "Gebir" and
"Imaginary Conversations."  The contrast might be even more clearly
established by a study of such a piece as Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"
where the romantic form is applied to classical content; or by a
comparison of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "The Lotus Eaters," in which
Homeric subjects are treated respectively in the classic and the romantic
manner.

Alfred de Musset, himself in early life a prominent figure among the
French romanticists, wrote some capital satire upon the baffling and
contradictory definitions of the word _romantisme_ that were current in
the third and fourth decades of this century.[18]  Two worthy provincials
write from the little town of La Ferte-sous-Jouarre to the editor of the
"Revue des Deux Mondes," appealing to him to tell them what romanticism
means.  For two years Dupuis and his friend Cotonet had supposed that the
term applied only to the theater, and signified the disregard of the
unities.  "Shakspere, for example makes people travel from Rome to
London, and from Athens to Alexandria in a quarter of an hour.  His
heroes live ten or twenty years between two acts.  His heroines, angels
of virtue during a whole scene, have only to pass into the _coulisses_,
to reappear as wives, adulteresses, widows, and grandmothers.  There, we
said to ourselves, is the romantic.  Contrariwise, Sophocles makes
Oedipus sit on a rock, even at the cost of great personal inconvenience,
from the very beginning of his tragedy.  All the characters come there to
find him, one after the other.  Perhaps he stands up occasionally, though
I doubt it; unless, it may be, out of respect for Theseus, who, during
the entire play, obligingly walks on the high-way, coming in or going out
continually. . .  There, we said to ourselves, is the classic."

But about 1828, continues the letter, "we learned that there were
romantic poetry and classical poetry, romantic novels and classical
novels, romantic odes and classical odes; nay, a single line, my dear
sir, a sole and solitary line of verse might be romantic or classic,
according as the humor took it.  When we received this intelligence, we
could not close our eyes all night.  Two years of peaceful conviction had
vanished like a dream.  All our ideas were turned topsy-turvy; for it the
rules of Aristotle were no longer the line of demarcation which separated
the literary camps, where was one to find himself, and what was he to
depend upon?  How was one to know, in reading a book, which school it
belonged to? . . .  Luckily in the same year there appeared a famous
preface, which we devoured straightway[19]. . .  This said very
distinctly that romanticism was nothing else than the alliance of the
playful and the serious, of the grotesque and the terrible, of the jocose
and the horrible, or in other words, if you prefer, of comedy and
tragedy."

This definition the anxious inquirers accepted for the space of a year,
until it was borne in upon them that Aristophanes--not to speak of other
ancients--had mixed tragedy and comedy in his drama.  Once again the
friends were plunged in darkness, and their perplexity was deepened when
they were taking a walk one evening and overheard a remark made by the
niece of the _sous-prefet_.  This young lady had fallen in love with
English ways, as was--somewhat strangely--evidenced by her wearing a
green veil, orange-colored gloves, and silver-rimmed spectacles.  As she
passed the promenaders, she turned to look at a water-mill near the ford,
where there were bags of grain, geese, and an ox in harness, and she
exclaimed to her governess, "_Voila un site romantique_."

This mysterious sentence roused the flagging curiosity of MM. Dupuis and
Contonet, and they renewed their investigations.  A passage in a
newspaper led them to believe for a time that romanticism was the
imitation of the Germans, with, perhaps, the addition of the English and
Spanish.  Then they were tempted to fancy that it might be merely a
matter of literary form, possibly this _vers brise_ (run-over lines,
_enjambement_) that they are making so much noise about.  "From 1830 to
1831 we were persuaded that romanticism was the historic style (_genre
historique_) or, if you please, this mania which has lately seized our
authors for calling the characters of their novels and melodramas
Charlemagne, Francis I., or Henry IV., instead of Amadis, Oronte, or
saint-Albin. . .  From 1831 to the year following we thought it was the
_genre intime,_ about which there was much talk.  But with all the pains
that we took we never could discover what the _genre intime_ was.  The
'intimate' novels are just like the others.  They are in two volume
octavo, with a great deal of margin. . .  They have yellow covers and
they cost fifteen francs."  From 1832 to 1833 they conjectured that
romanticism might be a system of philosophy and political economy.  From
1833 to 1834 they believed that it consisted in not shaving one's self,
and in wearing a waistcoat with wide facings very much starched.

At last they bethink themselves of a certain lawyer's clerk, who had
first imported these literary disputes into the village, in 1824.  To
him, they expose their difficulties and ask for an answer to the
question, What is romanticism?  After a long conversation, they receive
this final definition.  "Romanticism, my dear sir!  No, of a surety, it
is neither the disregard of the unities, nor the alliance of the comic
and tragic, nor anything in the world expressible by words.  In vain you
grasp the butterfly's wing; the dust which gives it its color is left
upon your fingers.  Romanticism is the star that weeps, it is the wind
that wails, it is the night that shudders, the bird that flies and the
flower that breathes perfume: it is the sudden gush, the ecstasy grown
faint, the cistern beneath the palms, rosy hope with her thousand loves,
the angel and the pearl, the white robe of the willows.  It is the
infinite and the starry," etc., etc.

Then M. Ducoudray, a magistrate of the department, gives his theory of
romanticism, which he considers to be an effect of the religious and
political reaction under the restored Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII,
and Charles X.  "The mania for ballads, arriving from Germany, met the
legitimist poetry one fine day at Ladvocat's bookshop; and the two of
them, pickax in hand, went at nightfall to a churchyard, to dig up the
Middle Ages."  The taste for medievalism, M. Ducoudray adds, has survived
the revolution of 1830, and romanticism has even entered into the service
of liberty and progress, where it is a manifest anachronism, "employing
the style of Ronsard to celebrate railroads, and imitating Dante when it
chants the praises of Washington and Lafayette."  Dupuis was tempted to
embrace M. Ducoudray's explanation, but Cotonet was not satisfied.  He
shut himself in, for four months, at the end of which he announced his
discovery that the true and only difference between the classic and the
romantic is that the latter uses a good many adjectives.  He illustrates
his principle by giving passages from "Paul and Virginia" and the
"Portuguese Letters," written in the romantic style.

Thus Musset pricks a critical bubble with the point of his satire; and
yet the bubble declines to vanish.  There must really be some more
substantial difference than this between classic and romantic, for the
terms persist and are found useful.  It may be true that the romantic
temper, being subjective and excited, tends to an excess in adjectives;
the adjective being that part of speech which attributes qualities, and
is therefore most freely used by emotional persons.  Still it would be
possible to cut out all the adjectives, not strictly necessary, from one
of Tieck's _Maerchen_ without in the slightest degree disturbing its
romantic character.

It remains to add that romanticism is a word which faces in two
directions.  It is now opposed to realism, as it was once opposed to
classicism.  As, in one way, its freedom and lawlessness, its love of
novelty, experiment, "strangeness added to beauty," contrast with the
classical respect for rules, models, formulae, precedents, conventions;
so, in another way, its discontent with things as they are, its idealism,
aspiration, mysticism contrast with the realist's conscientious adherence
to fact.  "Ivanhoe" is one kind of romance; "The Marble Faun" is
another.[20]


[1] Les definitions ne se posent pas _a priori_, si ce n'est peutetre en
mathematiques.  En histoire, c'est de l'etude patiente de is la realite
qu'elles se degagent insensiblement.  Si M. Deschanel ne nous a pas donne
du _romantisme_ la definition que nous reclamions tout a l'heure, c'est,
a vrai dire, que son enseignement a pour objet de preparer cette
definition meme.  Nous la trouverons ou elle doit etre, a la fin du cours
et non pas a debut.--_F. Brunetiere: "Classiques et Romantiques, Etudes
Critiques," _Tome III, p. 296.

[2] Was war aber dis romantische Schule in Deutschland?  Sie war nichts
anders als die Wiedererweckung der Poesie des Mittelalters, wie sie sich
in dessen Liedern, Bild- und Bauwerken, in Kunst und Leben, manifestiert
hatte.--_Die romanticsche Schule (Cotta edition)_, p. 158.

[3] "The Romantic School" (Fleishman's translation), p. 13.

[4] Un classique est tout artiste a l'ecole de qui nous pouvons nous
mettre sans craindre que ses lecons on ses exemples nous fourvoient.  Ou
encore, c'est celui qui possede . . . des qualites dont l'imitation, si
elle ne peut pas faire de bien, ne peut pas non plus faire de mal.--_F.
Brunetiere, "Etudes Critiques,"_ Tome III, p. 300.

[5] Mr. Perry thinks that one of the first instances of the use of the
word _romantic _is by the diarist Evelyn in 1654: "There is also, on the
side of this horrid alp, a very romantic seat."--_English Literature in
the Eighteenth Century, by Thomas Sergeant Perry, _p. 148, _note_.

[6] "Romanticism," _Macmillan's Magazine_, Vol. XXXV.

[7] The Odyssey has been explained throughout in an allegorical sense.
The episode of Circe, at least, lends itself obviously to such
interpretation.  Circe's cup has become a metaphor for sensual
intoxication, transforming men into beasts; Milton, in "Comus,"  regards
himself as Homer's continuator, enforcing a lesson of temperance in
Puritan times hardly more consciously than the old Ionian Greek in times
which have no other record than his poem.

[8] "Racine et Shakespeare, Etudes en Romantisme" (1823), p. 32, ed. of
Michel Levy Freres, 1954.  Such would also seem to be the view maintained
by M. Emile Deschanel, whose book "Le Romantisme des Classiques" (Paris,
1883) is reviewed by M. Brunetiere in an article already several times
quoted.  "Tous les classiques," according to M. Deschanel--at least, so
says his reviewer--"ont jadis commence par etre des romantiques." And
again: "Un _romantique_ seraut tout simplement un classique en route pour
parvenir; et, reciproquement, un classique ne serait de plus qu'un
romantique arrive."

[9] "Classic and Romantic," Vol. LVII.

[10] See Schiller's "Ueber naive and sentimentalische Dichtung."

[11] Le mot de romantisme, apres cinquante ans et plus de discussions
passionnees, ne laisse pas d'etre encore aujourd'hui bien vague et bien
flottant.--_Brunetiere, ibid._

[12] Ce qui constitue proprement un classique, c'est l'equilibre en lui de
toutes les facultes qui concourent a la perfection de l'oeuvre
d'art.--_Brunetiere, ibid._

[13] "Vorlesungen ueber dramatische Kunst und Litteratur."

[14] Far to the west the long, long vale withdrawn,
    Where twilight loves to linger for a while.
       --_Beattie's "Minstrel."_

[15] The modernness of this "latest born of the myths" resides partly in
its spiritual, almost Christian conception of love, partly in its
allegorical theme, the soul's attainment of immortality through love.
The Catholic idea of penance is suggested, too, in Psyche's "wandering
labors long."  This apologue has been a favorite with platonizing poets,
like Spenser and Milton.  See "The Fairie Queene," book iii. canto vi.
stanza 1., and "Comus," lines 1002-11

[16] "Selections from Walter Savage Landor," Preface, p. vii.

[17] See also Walter Bagehot's essay on "Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art,"
"Literary Studies, Works" (Hartford, 1889), Vol I. p. 200.

[18] Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet (1836), "Oeuvres Completes" (Charpentier
edition, 1881), Tome IX. p. 194.

[19] Preface to Victor Hugo's "Cromwell," dated October, 1827.  The play
was printed, but not acted, in 1828.

[20] In modern times romanticism, typifying a permanent tendency of the
human mind, has been placed in opposition to what is called realism. . .
[But] there is, as it appears to us, but one fundamental note which all
romanticism . . . has in common, and that is a deep disgust with the
world as it is and a desire to depict in literature something that is
claimed to be nobler and better.--_Essays on German Literature, by H. H.
Boyesen_, pp. 358 and 356.




CHAPTER II.

The Augustans

The Romantic Movement in England was a part of the general European
reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century.  This began
somewhat earlier in England than in Germany, and very much earlier than
in France, where literacy conservatism went strangely hand in hand with
political radicalism.  In England the reaction was at first gradual,
timid, and unconscious.  It did not reach importance until the seventh
decade of the century, and culminated only in the early years of the
nineteenth century.  The medieval revival was only an incident--though a
leading incident--of this movement; but it is the side of it with which
the present work will mainly deal.  Thus I shall have a great deal to say
about Scott; very little about Byron, intensely romantic as he was in
many meanings of the word.  This will not preclude me from glancing
occasionally at other elements besides medievalism which enter into the
concept of the term "romantic."

Reverting then to our tentative definition--Heine's definition--of
romanticism, as the reproduction in modern art and literature of the life
of the Middle Ages, it should be explained that the expression, "Middle
Ages," is to be taken here in a liberal sense.  Contributions to romantic
literature such as Macpherson's "Ossian," Collins' "Ode on the
Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," and Gray's translations form
the Welsh and the Norse, relate to periods which antedate that era of
Christian chivalry and feudalism, extending roughly from the eleventh
century to the fifteenth, to which the term, "Middle Ages," more strictly
applies.  The same thing is true of the ground-work, at least, of ancient
hero-epics like "Beowulf" and the "Nibelungen Lied," of the Icelandic
"Sagas," and of similar products of old heathen Europe which have come
down in the shape of mythologies, popular superstitions, usages, rites,
songs, and traditions.  These began to fall under the notice of scholars
about the middle of the last century and made a deep impression upon
contemporary letters.

Again, the influence of the Middle Age proper prolonged itself beyond the
exact close of the medieval period, which it is customary to date from
the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The great romantic poets of Italy,
Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, wrote in the full flush of the pagan revival and
made free use of the Greek and Roman mythologies and the fables of Homer,
Vergil, and Ovid; and yet their work is hardly to be described as
classical.  Nor is the work of their English disciples, Spenser and
Sidney; while the entire Spanish and English drama of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (down to 1640, and with an occasional exception,
like Ben Jonson) is romantic.  Calderon is romantic; Shakspere and
Fletcher are romantic.  If we agree to regard medieval literature, then,
as comprising all the early literature of Europe which drew its
inspiration from other than Greek-Latin sources, we shall do no great
violence to the usual critical employment of the word.  I say _early_
literature, in order to exclude such writings as are wholly modern, like
"Robinson Crusoe," or "Gulliver's Travels," or Fielding's novels, which
are neither classic nor romantic, but are the original creation of our
own time.  With works like these, though they are perhaps the most
characteristic output of the eighteenth century, our inquiries are not
concerned.

It hardly needs to be said that the reproduction, or imitation, of
mediaeval life by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romanticists,
contains a large admixture of modern thought and feeling.  The brilliant
pictures of feudal society in the romances of Scott and Fouque give no
faithful image of that society, even when they are carefully correct in
all ascertainable historical details.[1]  They give rather the impression
left upon an alien mind by the quaint, picturesque features of a way of
life which seemed neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived it,
but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, or at
least familiar, conditions of the modern world.  The offspring of the
modern imagination, acting upon medieval material, may be a perfectly
legitimate, though not an original, form of art.  It may even have a
novel charm of its own, unlike either parent, but like Euphorion, child
of Faust by Helen of Troy, a blend of Hellas and the Middle Age.  Scott's
verse tales are better poetry than the English metrical romances of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  Tennyson has given a more perfect
shape to the Arthurian legends than Sir Thomas Malory, their compiler, or
Walter Map and Chrestien de Troyes, their possible inventors. But, of
course, to study the Middle Ages, as it really was, one must go not to
Tennyson and Scott, but to the "Chanson de Roland," and the "Divine
Comedy," and the "Romaunt of the Rose,"  and the chronicles of
Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart.

And the farther such study is carried, the more evident it becomes that
"mediaeval" and "romantic" are not synonymous.  The Middle Ages was not,
at all points, romantic:  it is the modern romanticist who makes, or
finds, it so.  He sees its strange, vivid peculiarities under the glamour
of distance.  Chaucer's temper, for instance, was by no means romantic.
This "good sense" which Dryden mentions as his prominent trait; that "low
tone" which Lowell praises in him, and which keeps him close to the
common ground of experience, pervade his greatest work, the "Canterbury
Tales," with an insistent realism.  It is true that Chaucer shared the
beliefs and influences of his time and was a follower of its literary
fashions.  In his version of the "Romaunt of the Rose," his imitations of
Machault, and his early work in general he used the mediaeval machinery
of allegory and dreams.  In "Troilus and Cresseide" and the tale of
"Palamon and Arcite," he carries romantic love and knightly honor to a
higher pitch than his model, Boccaccio.  But the shrewdly practical
Pandarus of the former poem--a character almost wholly of Chaucer's
creation--is the very embodiment of the anti-romantic attitude, and a
remarkable anticipation of Sancho Panza; while the "Rime of Sir Thopas"
is a distinct burlesque of the fantastic chivalry romances.[2]  Chaucer's
pages are picturesque with tournament, hunting parties, baronial feasts,
miracles of saints, feats of magic; but they are solid, as well, with the
everyday life of fourteenth-century England.  They have the _naivete_ and
garrulity which are marks of mediaeval work, but not the quaintness and
grotesquerie which are held to be marks of romantic work.  Not archaic
speech, but a certain mental twist constitutes quaintness.  Herbert and
Fuller are quaint; Blake is grotesque; Donne and Charles Lamb are
willfully quaint, subtle, and paradoxical.  But Chaucer is always
straight-grained, broad, and natural.

Even Dante, the poet of the Catholic Middle Ages; Dante, the mystic, the
idealist, with his intense spirituality and his passion for symbolism,
has been sometimes called classic, by virtue of the powerful construction
of his great poem, and his scholastic rigidity of method.

The relation between modern romanticizing literature and the real
literature of the Middle Ages, is something like that between the
literature of the renaissance and the ancient literatures of Greece and
Rome.  But there is this difference, that, while the renaissance writers
fell short of their pattern, the modern schools of romance have outgone
their masters--not perhaps in the intellectual--but certainly in the
artistic value of their product.  Mediaeval literature, wonderful and
stimulating as a whole and beautiful here and there in details of
execution, affords few models of technical perfection.  The civilization
which it reflected, though higher in its possibilities than the classic
civilization, had not yet arrived at an equal grade of development, was
inferior in intelligence and the natured results of long culture.  The
epithets of Gothic ignorance, rudeness, and barbarism, which the
eighteenth-century critics applied so freely to all the issue of the
so-called dark ages, were not entirely without justification.  Dante is
almost the only strictly mediaeval poet in whose work the form seems
adequate to the content; for Boccaccio and Petrarca stand already on the
sill of the renaissance.

In the arts of design the case was partly reversed.  If the artists of
the renaissance did not equal the Greeks in sculpture and architecture,
they probably excelled them in painting.  On the other hand, the
restorers of Gothic have never quite learned the secret of the mediaeval
builders.  However, if the analogy is not pushed too far, the romantic
revival may be regarded as a faint counterpart, the fragments of a
half-forgotten civilization were pieced together; Greek manuscripts
sought out, cleaned, edited, and printed: statues, coins, vases dug up
and ranged in museums: debris cleared away from temples, amphitheaters,
basilicas; till gradually the complete image of the antique world grew
forth in august beauty, kindling an excitement of mind to which there are
few parallels in history; so, in the eighteenth century, the despised
ages of monkery, feudalism, and superstition began to reassert their
claims upon the imagination.  Ruined castles and abbeys, coats of mail,
illuminated missals, manuscript romances, black-letter ballads, old
tapestries, and wood carvings acquired a new value.  Antiquaries and
virtuosos first, and then poets and romancers, reconstructed in turn an
image of medieval society.

True, the later movement was much the weaker of the two.  No such fissure
yawned between modern times and the Middle Ages as had been opened
between the ancient world and the Middle Ages by the ruin of the Roman
state and by the barbarian migrations.  Nor had ten centuries of rubbish
accumulated over the remains of mediaeval culture.  In 1700 the Middle
Ages were not yet so very remote.  The nations and languages of Europe
continued in nearly the same limits which had bounded them two centuries
before.  The progress in the sciences and mechanic arts, the discovery
and colonizing of America, the invention of printing and gunpowder, and
the Protestant reformation had indeed drawn deep lines between modern and
mediaeval life.  Christianity, however, formed a connecting link, though,
in Protestant countries, the continuity between the earlier and later
forms of the religion had been interrupted.  One has but to compare the
list of the pilgrims whom Chaucer met at the Tabard, with the company
that Captain Sentry or Peregrine Pickle would be likely to encounter at a
suburban inn, to see how the face of English society had changed between
1400 and 1700.  What has become of the knight, the prioress, the sumner,
the monk, pardoner, squire, alchemist, friar; and where can they or their
equivalents be found in all England?

The limitations of my subject will oblige me to treat the English
romantic movement as a chapter in literary history, even at the risk of
seeming to adopt a narrow method.  Yet it would be unphilosophical to
consider it as a merely aesthetic affair, and to lose sight altogether of
its deeper springs in the religious and ethical currents of the time.
For it was, in part, a return of warmth and color into English letters;
and that was only a symptom of the return of warmth and color--that is,
of emotion and imagination--into English life and thought: into the
Church, into politics, into philosophy.  Romanticism, which sought to
evoke from the past a beauty that it found wanting in the present, was
but one phase of that revolt against the coldness and spiritual deadness
of the first half of the eighteenth century which had other sides in the
idealism of Berkeley, in the Methodist and Evangelical revival led by
Wesley and Whitefield, and in the sentimentalism which manifested itself
in the writings of Richardson and Sterne.  Corresponding to these on the
Continent were German pietism, the transcendental philosophy of Kant and
his continuators, and the emotional excesses of works like Rousseau's
"Nouvelle Heloise" and Goethe's "Sorrows of Werther."

Romanticism was something more, then, than a new literary mode; a taste
cultivated by dilettante virtuosos, like Horace Walpole, college recluses
like Gray, and antiquarian scholars like Joseph and Thomas Warton.  It
was the effort of the poetic imagination to create for itself a richer
environment; but it was also, in its deeper significance, a reaching out
of the human spirit after a more ideal type of religion and ethics than
it could find in the official churchmanship and the formal morality of
the time.  Mr. Leslie Stephen[3] points out the connection between the
three currents of tendency known as sentimentalism, romanticism, and
naturalism.  He explains, to be sure, that the first English
sentimentalists, such as Richardson and Sterne, were anything but
romantic.  "A more modern sentimentalist would probably express his
feelings[4] by describing some past state of society.  He would paint
some ideal society in mediaeval times and revive the holy monk and the
humble nun for our edification."  He attributes the subsequent interest
in the Middle Ages to the progress made in historical inquiries during
the last half of the eighteenth century, and to the consequent growth of
antiquarianism.  "Men like Malone and Stevens were beginning those
painful researches which have accumulated a whole literature upon the
scanty records of our early dramatists.  Gray, the most learned of poets,
had vaguely designed a history of English poetry, and the design was
executed with great industry by Thomas Warton.  His brother Joseph
ventured to uphold the then paradoxical thesis that Spenser was as great
a man as Pope.  Everywhere a new interest was awakening in the minuter
details of the past."  At first, Mr. Stephen says, the result of these
inquiries was "an unreasonable contempt for the past.  The modern
philosopher, who could spin all knowledge out of his own brain; the
skeptic, who had exploded the ancient dogma; or the free-thinker of any
shade, who rejoiced in the destruction of ecclesiastical tyranny, gloried
in his conscious superiority to his forefathers.  Whatever was old was
absurd; and Gothic--an epithet applied to all medieval art, philosophy,
or social order--became a simple term of contempt."  But an antiquarian
is naturally a conservative, and men soon began to love the times whose
peculiarities they were so diligently studying.  Men of imaginative minds
promptly made the discovery that a new source of pleasure might be
derived from these dry records. . .  The 'return to nature' expresses a
sentiment which underlies . . . both the sentimental and romantic
movements. . .  To return to nature is, in one sense, to find a new
expression for emotions which have been repressed by existing
conventions; or, in another, to return to some simpler social order which
had not yet suffered from those conventions.  The artificiality
attributed to the eighteenth century seems to mean that men were content
to regulate their thoughts and lives by rules not traceable to first
principles, but dependent upon a set of special and exceptional
conditions. . .  To get out of the ruts, or cast off the obsolete
shackles, two methods might be adopted.  The intellectual horizon might
be widened by including a greater number of ages and countries; or men
might try to fall back upon the thoughts and emotions common to all
races, and so cast off the superficial incrustation.  The first method,
that of the romanticists, aims at increasing our knowledge: the second,
that of the naturalistic school, at basing our philosophy on deeper
principles.[5]

The classic, or pseudo-classic, period of English literature lasted from
the middle of the seventeenth till the end of the eighteenth century.
Inasmuch as the romantic revival was a protest against this reigning
mode, it becomes necessary to inquire a little more closely what we mean
when we say that the time of Queen Anne and the first two Georges was our
Augustan or classical age.  In what sense was it classical?  And was it
any more classical than the time of Milton, for example, or the time of
Landor?  If the "Dunciad," and the "Essay on Man," are classical, what is
Keats' "Hyperion"?  And with what propriety can we bring under a common
rubric things so far asunder as Prior's "Carmen Seculare" and Tennyson's
"Ulysses," or as Gay's "Trivia" and Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon"?
Evidently the Queen Anne writers took hold of the antique by a different
side from our nineteenth-century poets.  Their classicism was of a
special type.  It was, as has been often pointed out, more Latin than
Greek, and more French than Latin.[6]  It was, as has likewise been said,
"a classicism in red heels and a periwig."  Victor Hugo speaks of "cette
poesie fardee, mouchetee, poudree, du dix-huitieme siecle, cette
literature a paniers, a pompons et a falbalas."[7]  The costumes of
Watteau contrast with the simple folds of Greek drapery very much as the
"Rape of the Lock," contrasts with the Iliad, or one of Pope's pastorals
with an idyl of Theocritus.  The times were artificial in poetry as in
dress--

    "Tea-cup times of hood and hoop,
    And when the patch was worn."

Gentlemen wore powdered wigs instead of their own hair, and the power and
the wig both got into their writing.  _Perruque_ was the nickname applied
to the classicists by the French romanticists of Hugo's generation, who
wore their hair long and flowing--_cheveaux merovigiennes_--and affected
an _outre_ freedom in the cut and color of their clothes.  Similarly the
Byronic collar became, all over Europe, the symbol of daring independence
in matters of taste and opinion.  Its careless roll, which left the
throat exposed, seemed to assist the liberty of nature against cramping
conventions.

The leading Queen Anne writers are so well known that a somewhat general
description of the literary situation in England at the time of Pope's
death (1744) will serve as an answer to the question, how was the
eighteenth century classical.  It was remarked by Thomas Warton[8] that,
at the first revival of letters in the sixteenth century, our authors
were more struck by the marvelous fables and inventions of ancient poets
than by the justness of their conceptions and the purity of their style.
In other words, the men of the renaissance apprehended the ancient
literature as poets: the men of the _Eclaircissement_ apprehended them as
critics.  In Elizabeth's day the new learning stimulated English genius
to creative activity.  In royal progresses, court masques, Lord Mayors'
shows, and public pageants of all kinds, mythology ran mad.  "Every
procession was a pantheon."  But the poets were not careful to keep the
two worlds of pagan antiquity and mediaeval Christianity distinct.  The
art of the renaissance was the flower of a double root, and the artists
used their complex stuff naively.  The "Faerie Queene" is the typical
work of the English renaissance; there hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods
mingle unblushingly with knights, dragons, sorcerers, hermits, and
personified vices and virtues.  The "machinery" of Homer and Vergil--the
"machinery" of the "Seven Champions of Christendom" and the "Roman de la
Rose"!  This was not shocking to Spenser's contemporaries, but it seemed
quite shocking to classical critics a century later.  Even Milton, the
greatest scholar among English poets, but whose imagination was a strong
agent, holding strange elements in solution, incurred their censure for
bringing Saint Peter and the sea-nymphs into dangerous juxtaposition in
"Lycidas."

But by the middle of the seventeenth century the renaissance schools of
poetry had become effete in all European countries.  They had run into
extravagances of style, into a vicious manner known in Spain as
Gongorism, in Italy as Marinism, and in England best exhibited in the
verse of Donne and Cowley and the rest of the group whom Dr. Johnson
called the metaphysical poets, and whose Gothicism of taste Addison
ridiculed in his _Spectator_ papers on true and false wit.  It was France
that led the reform against this fashion.  Malherbe and Boileau insisted
upon the need of discarding tawdry ornaments of style and cultivating
simplicity, clearness, propriety, decorum, moderation; above all, good
sense.  The new Academy, founded to guard the purity of the French
language, lent its weight to the precepts of the critics, who applied the
rules of Aristotle, as commented by Longinus and Horace, to modern
conditions.  The appearance of a number of admirable writers--Corneille,
Moliere, Racine, Bossuet, La Fontaine, La Bruyere--simultaneously with
this critical movement, gave an authority to the new French literature
which enabled it to impose its principles upon England and Germany for
over a century.  For the creative literature of France conformed its
practice, in the main, to the theory of French criticism; though not, in
the case of Regnier, without open defiance.  This authority was
re-enforced by the political glories and social _eclat_ of the _siecle de
Louis Quatorze_

It happened that at this time the Stuart court was in exile, and in the
train of Henrietta Maria at Paris, or scattered elsewhere through France,
were many royalist men of letters, Etherege, Waller, Cowley, and others,
who brought back with them to England in 1660 an acquaintance with this
new French literature and a belief in its aesthetic code.  That French
influence would have spread into England without the aid of these
political accidents is doubtless true, as it is also true that a reform
of English versification and poetic style would have worked itself out
upon native lines independent of foreign example, and even had there been
so such thing as French literature.  Mr. Gosse has pointed out couplets
of Waller, written as early as 1623, which have the formal precision of
Pope's; and the famous passage about the Thames in Denham's "Cooper's
Hill" (1642) anticipates the best performance of Augustan verse:

    "O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
    My great example, as it is my theme!
    Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
    Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."

However, as to the general fact of the powerful impact of French upon
English literary fashions, in the latter half of the seventeenth century,
there can be no dispute.[9]

This change of style was symptomatic of a corresponding change in the
national temper.  It was the mission of the eighteenth century to assert
the universality of law and, at the same time, the sufficiency of the
reason to discover the laws, which govern in every province: a service
which we now, perhaps, undervalue in our impatience with the formalism
which was its outward sign.  Hence its dislike of irregularity in art and
irrationality in religion.  England, in particular, was tired of
unchartered freedom, of spiritual as well as of literary anarchy.  The
religious tension of the Commonwealth period had relaxed--men cannot be
always at the heroic pitch--and theological disputes had issued in
indifference and a skepticism which took the form of deism, or "natural
religion."  But the deists were felt to be a nuisance.  They were
unsettling opinions and disturbing that decent conformity with generally
received beliefs which it is the part of a good citizen to maintain.
Addison instructs his readers that, in the absence of certainty, it is
the part of a prudent man to choose the safe side and make friends with
God.  The freethinking Chesterfield[10] tells his son that the profession
of atheism is ill-bred.  De Foe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson all
attack infidelity.  "Conform! Conform!" said in effect the most
authoritative writers of the century.  "Be sensible: go to church: pay
your rates: don't be a vulgar deist--a fellow like Toland who is poor and
has no social position.  But, on the other hand, you need not be a
fanatic or superstitious, or an enthusiast.  Above all, _pas de zele!_"

"Theology," says Leslie Stephen, "was, for the most part, almost as
deistical as the deists.  A hatred for enthusiasm was as strongly
impressed upon the whole character of contemporary thought as a hatred of
skepticism. . .  A good common-sense religion should be taken for granted
and no questions asked. . .  With Shakspere, or Sir Thomas Browne, or
Jeremy Taylor, or Milton, man is contemplated in his relations to the
universe; he is in presence of eternity and infinity; life is a brief
drama; heaven and hell are behind the veil of phenomena; at every step
our friends vanish into the abyss of ever present mystery.  To all such
thoughts the writers of the eighteenth century seemed to close their eyes
as resolutely as possible. . .  The absence of any deeper speculative
ground makes the immediate practical questions of life all the more
interesting.  We know not what we are, nor whither we are going, nor
whence we come; but we can, by the help of common sense, discover a
sufficient share of moral maxims for our guidance in life. . .  Knowledge
of human nature, as it actually presented itself in the shifting scene
before them, and a vivid appreciation of the importance of the moral law,
are the staple of the best literature of the time."[11]

The God of the deists was, in truth, hardly more impersonal than the
abstraction worshiped by the orthodox--the "Great Being" of Addison's
essays, the "Great First Cause" of Pope's "Universal Prayer," invoked
indifferently as "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord."  Dryden and Pope were
professed Catholics, but there is nothing to distinguish their so-called
sacred poetry from that of their Protestant contemporaries.  Contrast the
mere polemics of "The Hind and the Panther" with really Catholic poems
like Southwell's "Burning Babe" and Crashaw's "Flaming Heart," or even
with Newman's "Dream of Gerontius."  In his "Essay on Man," Pope
versified, without well understanding, the optimistic deism of Leibnitz,
as expounded by Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke.  The Anglican Church itself
was in a strange condition, when Jonathan Swift, a dean and would-be
bishop, came to its defense with his "Tale of a Tub" and his ironical
"Argument against the Abolition of Christianity."  Among the Queen Anne
wits Addison was the man of most genuine religious feeling.  He is always
reverent, and "the feeling infinite" stirs faintly in one or two of his
hymns.  But, in general, his religion is of the rationalizing type, a
religion of common sense, a belief resting upon logical deductions, a
system of ethics in which the supernatural is reduced to the lowest
terms, and from which the glooms and fervors of a deep spiritual
experience are almost entirely absent.  This "parson in a tie-wig" is
constantly preaching against zeal, enthusiasm, superstition, mysticism,
and recommending a moderate, cheerful, and reason religion.[12]  It is
instructive to contrast his amused contempt for popular beliefs in
ghosts, witches, dreams, prognostications, and the like, with the
reawakened interest in folk lore evidenced by such a book as Scott's
"Demonology and Witchcraft."

Queen Anne literature was classical, then, in its lack of those elements
of mystery and aspiration which we have found described as of the essence
of romanticism.  It was emphatically a literature of this world.  It
ignored all vague emotion, the phenomena of subconsciousness, "the
electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound," the shadow that rounds
man's little life, and fixed its attention only upon what it could
thoroughly comprehend.[13]  Thereby it escaped obscurity.  The writings
of the Augustans in both verse and prose are distinguished by a perfect
clearness, but it is a clearness without subtlety or depth.  They never
try to express a thought, or to utter a feeling, that is not easily
intelligible.  The mysticism of Wordsworth, the incoherence of Shelley,
the darkness of Browning--to take only modern instances--proceed,
however, not from inferior art, but from the greater difficulty of
finding expression for a very different order of ideas.

Again the literature of the Restoration and Queen Anne periods--which may
be regarded as one, for present purposes--was classical, or at least
unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of
curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of
feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect
sense of beauty.  It was a literature not simply of this world, but of
_the_ world, of the _beau monde_, high life, fashion, society, the court
and the town, the salons, clubs, coffee-houses, assemblies,
ombre-parties.  It was social, urban, gregarious, intensely though not
broadly human.  It cared little for the country or outward nature, and
nothing for the life of remote times and places.  Its interest was
centered upon civilization and upon that peculiarly artificial type of
civilization which it found prevailing.  It was as indifferent to Venice,
Switzerland, the Alhambra, the Nile, the American forests, and the
islands of the South Sea as it was to the Middle Ages and the manners of
Scotch Highlanders.  The sensitiveness to the picturesque, the liking for
local color and for whatever is striking, characteristic, and peculiarly
national in foreign ways is a romantic note.  The eighteenth century
disliked "strangeness added to beauty"; it disapproved of anything
original, exotic, tropical, bizarre for the same reason that it
disapproved of mountains and Gothic architecture.

Professor Gates says that the work of English literature during the first
quarter of the present century was "the rediscovery and vindication of
the concrete.  The special task of the eighteenth century had been to
order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods had been
analysis and generalization.  It asked for no new experience. . .  The
abstract, the typical, the general--these were everywhere exalted at the
expense of the image, the specific experience, the vital fact."[14]
Classical tragedy, _e.g._, undertook to present only the universal,
abstract, permanent truths of human character and passion.[15]  The
impression of the mysterious East upon modern travelers and poets like
Byron, Southey, De Quincey, Moore, Hugo,[16] Ruckert, and Gerard de
Nerval, has no counterpart in the eighteenth century.  The Oriental
allegory or moral apologue, as practiced by Addison in such papers as
"The Vision of Mirza," and by Johnson in "Rasselas," is rather faintly
colored and gets what color it has from the Old Testament.  It is
significant that the romantic Collins endeavored to give a novel turn to
the decayed pastoral by writing a number of "Oriental Eclogues," in which
dervishes and camel-drivers took the place of shepherds, but the
experiment was not a lucky one.  Milton had more of the East in his
imagination than any of his successors.  His "vulture on Imaus bred,
whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds"; his "plain of Sericana where
Chinese drive their cany wagons light"; his "utmost Indian isle
Taprobane," are touches of the picturesque which anticipate a more modern
mood than Addison's.

"The difference," says Matthew Arnold, "between genuine poetry and the
poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school is briefly this: their
poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is
conceived and composed in the soul."  The representative minds of the
eighteenth century were such as Voltaire, the master of persiflage,
destroying superstition with his _souriere hideux_; Gibbon, "the lord of
irony," "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer"; and Hume, with his
thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt
for "zeal" of any kind.  The characteristic products of the era were
satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel,"
"The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock."
There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on
the Taking of Namur" and "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse";
Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Swift's "Meditation on a Broomstick";
mock-heroics, like the "Dunciad" and "MacFlecknoe" and Garth's
"Dispensary," and John Phillips' "Splendid Shilling" and Addison's
"Machinae Gesticulantes"; Prior's "Alma," a burlesque of philosophy;
Gay's "Trivia" and "The Shepherd's Week," and "The Beggars' Opera"-a
"Newgate pastoral"; "Town Eclogues" by Swift and Lady Montague and
others.  Literature was a polished mirror in which the gay world saw its
own grinning face.  It threw back a most brilliant picture of the surface
of society, showed manners but not the elementary passions of human
nature.  As a whole, it leaves an impression of hardness, shallowness,
and levity.  The polite cynicism of Congreve, the ferocious cynicism of
Swift, the malice of Pope, the pleasantry of Addison, the early
worldliness of Prior and Gay are seldom relieved by any touch of the
ideal.  The prose of the time was excellent, but the poetry was merely
rhymed prose.  The recent Queen Anne revival in architecture, dress, and
bric-a-brac, the recrudescence of society verse in Dobson and others, is
perhaps symptomatic of the fact that the present generation has entered
upon a prosaic reaction against romantic excesses and we are finding our
picturesque in that era of artifice which seemed so picturesque to our
forerunners.  The sedan chair, the blue china, the fan, farthingale, and
powdered head dress have now got the "rime of age" and are seen in
fascinating perspective, even as the mailed courser, the buff jerkin, the
cowl, and the cloth-yard shaft were seen by the men of Scott's generation.

Once more, the eighteenth century was classical in its respect for
authority.  It desired to put itself under discipline, to follow the
rules, to discover a formula of correctness in all the arts, to set up a
tribunal of taste and establish canons of composition, to maintain
standards, copy models and patterns, comply with conventions, and
chastise lawlessness.  In a word, its spirit was academic.  Horace was
its favorite master--not Horace of the Odes, but Horace of the Satires
and Epistles, and especially Horace as interpreted by Boileau.[17]  The
"Ars Poetica" had been englished by the Earl of Roscommon, and imitated
by Boileau in his "L'Art Poetique," which became the parent of a numerous
progeny in England; among others as "Essay on Satire" and an "Essay on
Poetry," by the Earl of Mulgrave;[18] an "Essay on Translated Verse" by
the Earl of Roscommon, who, says Addison, "makes even rules a noble
poetry";[19] and Pope's well-known "Essay on Criticism."

The doctrine of Pope's essay is, in brief, follow Nature, and in order
that you may follow nature, observe the rules, which are only "Nature
methodized," and also imitate the ancients.

    "Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem;
    To copy nature is to copy them."

Thus Vergil when he started to compose the Aeneid may have seemed above
the critic's law, but when he came to study Homer, he found that Nature
and Homer were the same.  Accordingly,

                "he checks the bold design,
    And rules as strict his labor'd work confine."

Not to stimulate, but to check, to confine, to regulate, is the unfailing
precept of this whole critical school.  Literature, in the state in which
they found it, appeared to them to need the curb more than the spur.

Addison's scholarship was almost exclusively Latin, though it was
Vergilian rather than Horatian.  Macaulay[20] says of Addison's "Remarks
on Italy"; "To the best of our remembrance, Addison does not mention
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bolardo, Berni, Lorenzo de' Medici, or
Machiavelli.  He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of
Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso.
But for Tasso and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flaccus and
Sidonius Apollinaris.  The gentle flow of the Ticino brings a line of
Silius to his mind.  The sulphurous stream of Albula suggests to him
several passages of Martial.  But he has not a word to say of the
illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna[21]
without recollecting the specter huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini
without one thought of Francesca.  At Paris he had eagerly sought an
introduction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that
at Florence he was in the vicinity of a poet with whom Boileau could not
sustain a comparison: of the greatest lyric poet of modern times [!]
Vincenzio Filicaja. . .  The truth is that Addison knew little and cared
less about the literature of modern Italy.  His favorite models were
Latin.  His favorite critics were French.  Half the Tuscan poetry that he
had read seemed to him monstrous and the other half tawdry."[22]

There was no academy in England, but there was a critical tradition that
was almost as influential.  French critical gave the law: Boileau,
Dacier, LeBossu, Rapin, Bouhours; English critics promulgated it: Dennis,
Langbaine, Rymer, Gildon, and others now little read.  Three writers of
high authority in three successive generations--Dryden, Addison, and
Johnson--consolidated a body of literary opinion which may be described,
in the main, as classical, and as consenting, though with minor
variations.  Thus it was agreed on all hands that it was a writer's duty
to be "correct."  It was well indeed to be "bold," but bold with
discretion.  Dryden thought Shakspere a great poet than Jonson, but an
inferior artist.  He was to be admired, but not approved.  Homer, again,
it was generally conceded, was not so correct as Vergil, though he had
more "fire."  Chesterfield preferred Vergil to Homer, and both of them to
Tasso.  But of all epics the one he read with most pleasure was the
"Henriade."  As for "Paradise Lost," he could not read it through.
William Walsh, "the muses' judge and friend," advised the youthful Pope
that "there was one way still left open for him, by which he might excel
any of his predecessors, which was by correctness; that though indeed we
had several great poets, we as yet could boast of none that were
perfectly correct; and that therefore he advised him to make this quality
his particular study."  "The best of the moderns in all language," he
wrote to Pope, "are those that have the nearest copied the ancients."
Pope was thankful for the counsel and mentions its giver in the "Essay on
Criticism" as one who had

                "taught his muse to sing,
    Prescribed her heights and pruned her tender wing."

But what was correct?  In the drama, _e.g._, the observance of the
unities was almost universally recommended, but by no means universally
practiced.  Johnson, himself a sturdy disciple of Dryden and Pope,
exposed the fallacy of that stage illusion, on the supposed necessity of
which the unities of time and place were defended.  Yet Johnson, in his
own tragedy "Irene," conformed to the rules of Aristotle.  He pronounced
"Cato" "unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius," but
acknowledge that its success had "introduced, or confirmed among us, the
use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaffecting elegance and chill
philosophy."  On the other hand Addison had small regard for poetic
justice, which Johnson thought ought to be observed.  Addison praised old
English ballads, which Johnson thought mean and foolish; and he guardedly
commends[23] "the fairy way of writing," a romantic foppery that Johnson
despised.[24]

Critical opinion was pronounced in favor of separating tragedy and
comedy, and Addison wrote one sentence which condemns half the plays of
Shakspere and Fletcher: "The tragi-comedy, which is the product of the
English theater, is one the most monstrous inventions that ever entered
into a poet's thought."[25]  Dryden made some experiments in
tragi-comedy, but, in general, classical comedy was pure comedy--the
prose comedy of manners--and classical tragedy admitted no comic
intermixture.  Whether tragedy should be in rhyme, after the French
manner, or in blank verse, after the precedent of the old English stage,
was a moot point.  Dryden at first argued for rhyme and used it in his
"heroic plays"; and it is significant that he defended its use on the
ground that it would act as a check upon the poet's fancy.  But afterward
he grew "weary of his much-loved mistress, rhyme," and went back to blank
verse in his later plays.

As to poetry other than dramatic, the Restoration critics were at one in
judging blank verse too "low" for a poem of heroic dimensions; and though
Addison gave it the preference in epic poetry, Johnson was its persistent
foe, and regarded it as little short of immoral.  But for that matter,
Gray could endure no blank verse outside of Milton.  This is curious,
that rhyme, a mediaeval invention, should have been associated in the
last century with the classical school of poetry; while blank verse, the
nearest English equivalent of the language of Attic tragedy, was a
shibboleth of romanticizing poets, like Thomson and Akenside.  The reason
was twofold: rhyme came stamped with the authority of the French tragic
alexandrine; and, secondly, it meant constraint where blank verse meant
freedom, "ancient liberty, recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome
and modern bondage of rhyming."[26]  Pope, among his many thousand rhymed
couplets, has left no blank verse except the few lines contributed to
Thomson's "Seasons."  Even the heroic couplet as written by earlier poets
was felt to have been too loose in structure.  "The excellence and
dignity of it," says Dryden, "were never fully known till Mr. Waller
taught it; he first made writing easily an art; first showed us how to
conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of
those before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is
out of breath to overtake it."[27]  All through the classical period the
tradition is constant that Waller was the first modern English poet, the
first correct versifier.  Pope is praised by Johnson because he employed
but sparingly the triplets and alexandrines by which Dryden sought to
vary the monotony of the couplet; and he is censured by Cowper because,
by force of his example, he "made poetry a mere mechanic art."
Henceforth the distich was treated as a unit: the first line was balanced
against the second, and frequently the first half of the line against the
second half.

     "To err is human, to forgive divine."
    "And so obliging, that he ne'er obliged."
    "Charms strike the eye, but merit wins the soul," etc., etc.

This type of verse, which Pope brought to perfection, and to which he
gave all the energy and variety of which it was capable, so prevailed in
our poetry for a century or more that one almost loses sight of the fact
that any other form was employed.  The sonnet, for instance, disappeared
entirely, until revived by Gray, Stillingfleet, Edwards, and Thomas
Warton, about the middle of the eighteenth century.[28]  When the poets
wished to be daring and irregular, they were apt to give vent in that
species of pseudo-Pindaric ode which Cowley had introduced--a literary
disease which, Dr. Johnson complained, infected the British muse with the
notion that "he who could do nothing else could write like Pindar."

Sir Charles Eastlake in his "History of the Gothic Revival" testifies to
this formal spirit from the point of view of another art than literature.
"The age in which Batty Langley lived was an age in which it was
customary to refer all matters of taste to rule and method.  There was
one standard of excellence in poetry--a standard that had its origin in
the smooth distichs of heroic verse which Pope was the first to perfect,
and which hundreds of later rhymers who lacked his nobler powers soon
learned to imitate.  In pictorial art, it was the grand school which
exercised despotic sway over the efforts of genius and limited the
painter's inventions to the field of Pagan mythology.  In architecture,
Vitruvius was the great authority.  The graceful majesty of the
Parthenon--the noble proportions of the temple of Theseus--the chaste
enrichment which adorns the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, were
ascribed less to the fertile imagination and refined perceptions of the
ancient Greek, than to the dry and formal precepts which were invented
centuries after their erection.  Little was said of the magnificent
sculpture which filled the metopes of the temple of the Minerva; but the
exact height and breadth of the triglyphs between them were considered of
the greatest importance.  The exquisite drapery of caryatids and
canephorae, no English artist, a hundred years ago, thought fit to
imitate; but the cornices which they supposed were measured inch by inch
with the utmost nicety.  Ingenious devices were invented for enabling the
artificer to reproduce, by a series of complicated curves, the profile of
a Doric capital, which probably owed its form to the steady hand and
uncontrolled taste of the designer.  To put faith in many of the theories
propounded by architectural authorities in the last century, would be to
believe that some of the grandest monuments which the world has ever seen
raised, owe their chief beauty to an accurate knowledge of arithmetic.
The diameter of the column was divided into modules: the modules were
divided into minutes; the minutes into fractions of themselves.  A
certain height was allotted to the shaft, another to the entablature. . .
Sometimes the learned discussed how far apart the columns of a portico
might be."[29]

This kind of mensuration reminds one of the disputes between French
critics as to whether the unity of time meant thirty hours, or
twenty-four, or twelve, or the actual time that it took to act the play;
or of the geometric method of the "Saturday papers" in the _Spectator_.
Addison tries "Paradise Lost" by Aristotle's rules for the composition of
an epic.  Is it the narrative of a single great action?  Does it begin
_in medias res_, as is proper, or _ab ovo Ledae_, as Horace has said that
an epic ought not?  Does it bring in the introductory matter by way of
episode, after the approved recipe of Homer and Vergil?  Has it
allegorical characters, contrary to the practice of the ancients?  Does
the poet intrude personally into his poem, thus mixing the lyric and epic
styles? etc.  Not a word as to Milton's puritanism, or his
_Weltanschauung_, or the relation of his work to its environment.
Nothing of that historical and sympathetic method--that endeavor to put
the reader at the poet's point of view--by which modern critics, from
Lessing to Sainte-Beuve, have revolutionized their art.  Addison looks at
"Paradise Lost" as something quite distinct from Milton: as a
manufactured article to be tested by comparing it with standard fabrics
by recognized makers, like the authors of the Iliad and Aeneid.

When the Queen Anne poetry took a serious turn, the generalizing spirit
of the age led it almost always into the paths of ethical and didactic
verse.  "It stooped to truth and moralized its song," finding its
favorite occupation in the sententious expression of platitudes--the
epigram in satire, the maxim in serious work.  It became a poetry of
aphorisms, instruction us with Pope that

    "Virtue alone is happiness below;"

or, with Young, that

    "Procrastination is the thief of time;"

or, with Johnson, that

    "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed."

When it attempted to deal concretely with the passions, it found itself
impotent.  Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard" rings hollow: it is
rhetoric, not poetry.  The closing lines of "The Dunciad"--so strangely
overpraised by Thackeray--with their metallic clank and grandiose
verbiage, are not truly imaginative.  The poet is simply working himself
up to a climax of the false sublime, as an orator deliberately attaches a
sounding peroration to his speech.  Pope is always "heard," never
"overheard."

The poverty of the classical period in lyrical verse is particularly
significant, because the song is the most primitive and spontaneous kind
of poetry, and the most direct utterance of personal feeling.  Whatever
else the poets of Pope's time could do, they could not sing.  They are
the despair of the anthologists.[30]  Here and there among the brilliant
reasoners, _raconteurs_, and satirists in verse, occurs a clever
epigrammatist like Prior, or a ballad writer like Henry Carey, whose
"Sally in Our Alley" shows the singing, and not talking, voice, but
hardly the lyric cry.  Gay's "Blackeyed Susan" has genuine quality,
though its _rococo_ graces are more than half artificial.  Sweet William
is very much such an opera sailor-man as Bumkinet or Grubbinol is a
shepherd, and his wooing is beribboned with conceits like these:

    "If to fair India's coast we sail,
      Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright,
    Thy breath is Afric's spicy gale,
      Thy skin is ivory so white.
    Thus every beauteous prospect that I view,
    Wakes in my soul some charm of lovely Sue."

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

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

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

    "From bard to bard the frigid caution crept,
    Till Declamation roared whilst Passion slept;
    Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread,
    Philosophy remained though Nature fled,. . .
    Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day,
    And Pantomime and Song confirmed her sway."[33]

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

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

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

    "'The shining leather that encased the limb.'

"Coffee became

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

"For the direct appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific objects,"
says Mr. Gosse,[36] "they substituted generalities and second-hand
allusions.  They no longer mentioned the gillyflower and the daffodil,
but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath.
It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising; the gentlemanly expression
was, 'Cynthia is lifting her silver horn!'  Women became nymphs in this
new phraseology, fruits became 'the treasures of Pomona,' a horse became
'the impatient courser.'  The result of coining these conventional
counters for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was lost
in literature.  Apples were the treasures of Pomona, but so were
cherries, too, and if one wished to allude to peaches, they also were the
treasures of Pomona.  This decline from particular to general language
was regarded as a great gain in elegance.  It was supposed that to use
one of these genteel counters, which passed for coin of poetic language,
brought the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity.  It was thought that
the old direct manner of speaking was crude and futile; that a romantic
poet who wished to allude to caterpillars could do so without any
exercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the word 'caterpillars,'
whereas the classical poet had to prove that he was a scholar and a
gentleman by inventing some circumlocution, such as 'the crawling scourge
that smites the leafy plain.'. . .  In the generation that succeeded Pope
really clever writers spoke of a 'gelid cistern,' when they meant a cold
bath, and 'the loud hunter-crew' when they meant a pack of foxhounds."

It would be a mistake to suppose that the men of Pope's generation,
including Pope himself, were altogether wanting in romantic feeling.
There is a marked romantic accent in the Countess of Winchelsea's ode "To
the Nightingale"; in her "Nocturnal Reverie"; in Parnell's "Night Piece
on Death," and in the work of several Scotch poets, like Allan Ramsay and
Hamilton of Bangour, whose ballad, "The Braces of Yarrow," is certainly a
strange poem to come out of the heart of the eighteenth century.  But
these are eddies and back currents in the stream of literary tendency.
We are always in danger of forgetting that the literature of an age does
not express its entire, but only its prevailing, spirit.  There is
commonly a latent, silent body of thought and feeling underneath which
remains inarticulate, or nearly so.  It is this prevailing spirit and
fashion which I have endeavored to describe in the present chapter.  If
the picture seems to lack relief, or to be in any way exaggerated, the
reader should consult the chapters on "Classicism" and "The
Pseudo-Classicists" in M. Pellisier's "Literary Movement in France,"
already several times referred to.  They describe a literary situation
which had a very exact counterpart in England.


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

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

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

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

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

[5] Ruskin, too indicates the common element in romanticism and
naturalism--a desire to escape from the Augustan formalism.  I condense
the passage slightly: "To powder the hair, to patch the cheek, to hoop
the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel of the same system
which reduced streets to brick walls and pictures to brown stains.
Reaction from this state was inevitable, and accordingly men steal out to
the fields and mountains; and, finding among these color and liberty and
variety and power, rejoice in all the wildest shattering of the mountain
side, as an opposition to Gower Street.  It is not, however, only to
existing inanimate nature that our want of beauty in person and dress has
driven us.  The imagination of it, as it was seen in our ancestors,
haunts us continually.  We look fondly back to the manners of the age
sought in the centuries which we profess to have surpassed in
everything. . .  This romantic love of beauty, forced to seek in history
and in external nature the satisfaction it cannot find in ordinary
life."--_Modern Painters_, Vol. III. p. 260.

[6] Although devout in their admiration for antiquity, the writers of the
seventeenth century have by no means always clearly grasped the object of
their cult.  Though they may understand Latin tradition, they have
certainly never entered into the freer, more original spirit of Greek
art.  They have but an incomplete, superficial conception of
Hellenism. . .  Boileau celebrates but does not understand Pindar. . .
The seventeenth century comprehended Homer no better than Pindar.  What
we miss in them is exactly what we like best in his epopee--the vast
living picture of semi-barbarous civilization. . .  No society could be
less fitted than that of the seventeenth century to feel and understand
the spirit of primitive antiquity.  In order to appreciate Homer, it was
thought necessary to civilize the barbarian, make him a scrupulous
writer, and convince him that the word "ass" is a "very noble" expression
in Greek--_Pellisier: "The Literary Movement in France" (Brinton's
translation, _1897), pp. 8-10.  So Addison apologizes for Homer's failure
to observe those qualities of nicety, correctness, and what the French
call _bienseance_ (decorum,) the necessity of which had only been found
out in later times.  See _The Spectator_, No. 160.

[7] Preface to "Cromwell."

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

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

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

[11] "History of English Thought in the Eighteen Century," Vol. II. chap.
xii. Section iv.  See also "Selections from Newman," by Lewis E. Gates,
Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii.  (1895).

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

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

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

[15] Racine observes that good sense and reason are the same in all ages.
What is the result of this generalization?  Heroes can be transported
from epoch to epoch, from country to country, without causing surprise.
Their Achilles is no more a Greek than is Porus an Indian; Andromache
feels and talks like a seventeenth-century princess: Phaedra experiences
the remorse of a Christian.--_Pellissier, "Literary Movement in France,"_
p. 18.

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

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

[17]  The rules a nation, born to serve, obeys;
      And Boileau still in right of Horace sways.
             --_Pope, "Essay on Criticism,"_

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

[19] "Epistle to Sacheverel."

[20] "Essay on Addison."

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

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

[23] _Spectator_, No. 419.

[24] See his "Life of Collins."

[25] _Spectator_, No. 40.

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


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

[28] Mr. Gosse says that a sonnet by Pope's friend Walsh is the only one
"written in English between Milton's in 1658, and Warton's about 1750,"
Ward's "English Poets," Vol. III, p. 7. The statement would have been
more precise if he had said published instead of _written_.

[29] "History of the Gothic Revival," pp. 49-50 (edition of 1872).

[30] Palgrave says that the poetry of passion was deformed, after 1660, by
"levity and an artificial time"; and that it lay "almost dormant for the
hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and the days of
Burns and Cowper," "Golden Treasury" (Sever and Francis edition, 1866).
pp. 379-80.

[31] Excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage
or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period
intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and the
"Seasons" [1667-1726] does not contain a single new image of external
nature.--_Wordsworth.  Appendix to Lyrical Ballads_, (1815).

[32] _Gild_ is a perfect earmark of eighteenth-century descriptive verse:
the shore is gilded and so are groves, clouds, etc.  Contentment gilds
the scene, and the stars gild the gloomy night (Parnell) or the glowing
pole (Pope).

[33] Johnson, "Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane," 1747.

[34] See Coleridge, "Biographia Literaria," chap. Xviii

[35] Essay on Pope, in "My Study Windows."

[36] "From Shakespere to Pope," pp. 9-11.




CHAPTER III.

The Spenserians

Dissatisfaction with a prevalent mood or fashion in literature is apt to
express itself either in a fresh and independent criticism of life, or in
a reversion to older types.  But, as original creative genius is not
always forthcoming, a literary revolution commonly begins with imitation.
It seeks inspiration in the past, and substitutes a new set of models as
different as possible from those which it finds currently followed.  In
every country of Europe the classical tradition had hidden whatever was
most national, most individual, in its earlier culture, under a smooth,
uniform veneer.  To break away from modern convention, England and
Germany, and afterward France, went back to ancient springs of national
life; not always, at first, wisely, but in obedience to a true instinct.

How far did any knowledge or love of the old romantic literature of
England survive among the contemporaries of Dryden and Pope?  It is not
hard to furnish an answer to this question.  The prefaces of Dryden, the
critical treatises of Dennis, Winstanley, Oldmixon, Rymer, Langbaine,
Gildon, Shaftesbury, and many others, together with hundreds of passages
in prologues and epilogues to plays; in periodical essays like the
_Tatler_ and _Spectator_; in verse essays like Roscommon's, Mulgrave's
and Pope's; in prefaces to various editions of Shakspere and Spenser; in
letters, memoirs, etc., supply a mass of testimony to the fact that
neglect and contempt had, with a few exceptions, overtaken all English
writers who wrote before the middle of the seventeenth century.  The
exceptions, of course, were those supreme masters whose genius prevailed
against every change of taste: Shakspere and Milton, and, in a less
degree, Chaucer and Spenser.  Of authors strictly mediaeval, Chaucer
still had readers, and there were reprints of his works in 1687, 1721,
and 1737,[1] although no critical edition appeared until Tyrwhitt's in
1775-78.  It is probable, however, that the general reader, if he read
Chaucer at all, read him in such modernized versions as Dryden's "Fables"
and Pope's "January and May."  Dryden's preface has some admirable
criticism of Chaucer, although it is evident, from what he says about the
old poet's versification, that the secret of Middle English scansion and
pronunciation had already been lost.  Prior and Pope, who seem to have
been attracted chiefly to the looser among the "Canterbury Tales," made
each a not very successful experiment at burlesque imitation of
Chaucerian language.

Outside of Chaucer, and except among antiquarians and professional
scholars, there was no remembrance of the whole _corpus poetarum_ of the
English Middle Age: none of the metrical romances, rhymed chronicles,
saints' legends, miracle plays, minstrel ballads, verse homilies, manuals
of devotion, animal fables, courtly or popular allegories and love songs
of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.  Nor was there
any knowledge or care about the masterpieces of medieval literature in
other languages than English; about such representative works as the
"Nibelungenlied," the "Chanson de Roland," the "Roman de la Rose," the
"Parzival" of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the "Tristan" of Gottfried of
Strasburg, the "Arme Heinrich" of Harmann von Aue, the chronicles of
Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart, the "Morte Artus," the "Dies
Irae," the lyrics of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadour, and of the
minnesinger Walter von der Vogelweide, the Spanish Romancero, the poems
of the Elder Edda, the romances of "Amis et Amile" and "Aucassin et
Nicolete," the writings of Villon, the "De Imitatione Christi" ascribed
to Thomas a Kempis. Dante was a great name and fame, but he was virtually
unread.

There is nothing strange about this; many of these things were still in
manuscript and in unknown tongues, Old Norse, Old French, Middle High
German, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin.  It would be hazardous to assert
that the general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much
more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the
eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with
Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand.  But it may be
confidently asserted that he knows much more _about_ them; that he thinks
them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of
them--through poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays and
what not--he has in his mind's eye a picture of the Middle Age, perhaps
as definite and fascinating as the picture of classical antiquity.  That
he has so is owing to the romantic movement.  For the significant
circumstance about the attitude of the last century toward the whole
medieval period was, not its ignorance, but its incuriosity.  It did not
want to hear anything about it.[2]  Now and then, hints Pope, an
antiquarian pedant, a university don, might affect an admiration for some
obsolete author:

    "Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote,
    And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote:
    One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen';
    A Scot will fight for 'Christ's Kirk o' the Green.'"[3]

But, furthermore, the great body of Elizabethan and Stuart literature was
already obsolescent.  Dramatists of the rank of Marlowe and Webster,
poets like George Herbert and Robert Herrick--favorites with our own
generation--prose authors like Sir Thomas Browne--from whom Coleridge and
Emerson drew inspiration--had fallen into "the portion of weeds and
outworn faces."  Even writers of such recent, almost contemporary, repute
as Donne, whom Carew had styled

    "--a king who ruled, as he thought fit,
    The universal monarch of wit":

Or as Cowley, whom Dryden called the darling of his youth, and who was
esteemed in his own lifetime a better poet than Milton; even Donne and
Cowley had no longer a following.  Pope "versified" some of Donne's
rugged satires, and Johnson quoted passages from him as examples of the
bad taste of the metaphysical poets.  This in the "Life of Cowley," with
which Johnson began his "Lives of the Poets," as though Cowley was the
first of the moderns.  But,

    "Who now reads Cowley?"

asks Pope in 1737.[4]  The year of the Restoration (1660) draws a sharp
line of demarcation between the old and the new.  In 1675, the year after
Milton's death, his nephew, Edward Philips, published "Theatrum
Poetarum," a sort of biographical dictionary of ancient and modern
authors.  In the preface, he says: "As for the antiquated and fallen into
obscurity from their former credit and reputation, they are, for the most
part, those that have written beyond the verge of the present age; for
let us look back as far as about thirty or forty years, and we shall find
a profound silence of the poets beyond that time, except of some few
dramatics."

This testimony is the more convincing, since Philips was something of a
_laudator temporis acti_.  He praises several old English poets and
sneers at several new ones, such as Cleaveland and Davenant, who were
high in favor with the royal party.  He complains that nothing now
"relishes so well as what is written in the smooth style of our present
language, taken to be of late so much refined"; that "we should be so
compliant with the French custom, as to follow set fashions"; that the
imitation of Corneille has corrupted the English state; and that Dryden,
"complying with the modified and gallantish humour of the time," has, in
his heroic plays, "indulged a little too much to the French way of
continual rime."  One passage, at least, in Philips' preface has been
thought to be an echo of Milton's own judgment on the pretensions of the
new school of poetry.  "Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse; even
elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing.  True native
poetry is another; in which there is a certain air and spirit which
perhaps the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly
apprehend, much less is it attainable by any study or industry.  Nay,
though all the laws of heroic poem, all the laws of tragedy were exactly
observed, yet still this _tour entrejeant_--this poetic energy, if I may
so call it, would be required to give life to all the rest; which shines
through the roughest, most unpolished, and antiquated language, and may
haply be wanting in the most polite and reformed.  Let us observe
Spenser, with all his rusty, obsolete words, with all his rough-hewn
clouterly verses; yet take him throughout, and we shall find in him a
graceful and poetic majesty.  In like manner, Shakspere in spite of all
his unfiled expressions, his rambling and indigested fancies--the
laughter of the critical--yet must be confessed a poet above many that go
beyond him to literature[5] some degrees."

The laughter of the critical!  Let us pause upon the phrase, for it is a
key to the whole attitude of the Augustan mind toward "our old tragick
poet."  Shakspere was already a national possession.  Indeed it is only
after the Restoration that we find any clear recognition of him, as one
of the greatest--as perhaps himself the very greatest--of the dramatists
of all time.  For it is only after the Restoration that criticism begins.
"Dryden," says Dr. Johnson, "may be properly considered as the father of
English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine, upon
principles, the merit of composition. . .  Dryden's 'Essay of Dramatic
Poesy' [1667] was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of
writing."[6]  The old theater was dead and Shakspere now emerged from
amid its ruins, as the one unquestioned legacy of the Elizabethan age to
the world's literature.  He was not only the favorite of the people, but
in a critical time, and a time whole canons of dramatic art were opposed
to his practice, he united the suffrages of all the authoritative leader
of literacy opinion.  Pope's lines are conclusive as to the veneration in
which Shakspere's memory was held a century after his death.

    "On Avon's banks, where flowers eternal blow,
    If I but ask, if any weed can grow;
    One tragic sentence if I dare deride
    Which Betterton's grave action dignified . . .
    How will our fathers rise up in a rage,
    And swear, all shame is lost in George's age."[7]

The Shaksperian tradition is unbroken in the history of English
literature and of the English theater.  His plays, in one form or
another, have always kept the stage even in the most degenerate condition
of public taste.[8]  Few handsomer tributes have been paid to Shakspere's
genius than were paid in prose and verse, by the critics of our classical
age, from Dryden to Johnson.  "To begin then with Shakspere," says the
former, in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy," "he was the man who, of all
modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive
soul."  And, in the prologue to his adaptation of "The Tempest," he
acknowledges that

    "Shakspere's magic could not copied be:
    Within that circle none durst walk but he."

"The poet of whose works I have undertaken the revision," writes Dr.
Johnson, "may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim
the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration."[9]

    "Each change of many-colored life he drew,
    Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new."[10]

Yet Dryden made many petulant, and Johnson many fatuous mistakes about
Shakspere; while such minor criticasters as Thomas Rymer[11] and Mrs.
Charlotte Lenox[12] uttered inanities of blasphemy about the finest
touches in "Macbeth" and "Othello."  For if we look closer, we notice
that everyone who bore witness to Shakspere's greatness qualified his
praise by an emphatic disapproval of his methods.  He was a prodigious
genius, but a most defective artist.  He was the supremest of dramatic
poets, but he did not know his business.  It did not apparently occur to
anyone--except, in some degree, to Johnson--that there was an absurdity
in this contradiction; and that the real fault was not in Shakspere, but
in the standards by which he was tried.  Here are the tests which
technical criticism has always been seeking to impose, and they are not
confined to the classical period only.  They are used by Sidney, who took
the measure of the English buskin before Shakspere had begun to write; by
Jonson, who measured socks with him in his own day; by Matthew Arnold,
who wanted an English Academy, but in whom the academic vaccine, after so
long a transmission, worked but mildly.  Shakspere violated the unities;
his plays were neither right comedies nor right tragedies; he had small
Latin and less Greek; he wanted art and sometimes sense, committing
anachronisms and Bohemian shipwrecks; wrote hastily, did not blot enough,
and failed of the grand style.  He was "untaught, unpractised in a
barbarous age"; a wild, irregular child of nature, ignorant of the rules,
unacquainted with ancient models, succeeding--when he did succeed--by
happy accident and the sheer force of genius; his plays were
"roughdrawn," his plots lame, his speeches bombastic; he was guilty on
every page of "some solecism or some notorious flaw in sense."[13]

Langbaine, to be sure, defends him against Dryden's censure.  But Dennis
regrets his ignorance of poetic art and the disadvantages under which he
lay from not being conversant with the ancients.  If he had known his
Sallust, he would have drawn a juster picture of Caesar; and if he had
read Horace "Ad Pisones," he would have made a better Achilles.  He
complains that he makes the good and the bad perish promiscuously; and
that in "Coriolanus"--a play which Dennis "improved" for the new
stage--he represents Menenius as a buffoon and introduces the rabble in a
most undignified fashion.[14]  Gildon, again, says that Shakspere must
have read Sidney's "Defence of Posey" and therefore, ought to have known
the rules and that his neglect of them was owing to laziness.  "Money
seems to have been his aim more than reputation, and therefore he was
always in a hurry . . . and he thought it time thrown away, to study
regularity and order, when any confused stuff that came into his head
would do his business and fill his house."[15]

It would be easy, but it would be tedious, to multiply proofs of this
patronizing attitude toward Shakspere.  Perhaps Pope voices the general
sentiment of his school, as fairly as anyone, in the last words of his
preface.[16]  "I will conclude by saying of Shakspere that, with all his
faults and with all the irregularity of his _drama_, one may look upon
his works, in comparison of those that are more finished and regular, as
upon an ancient, majestic piece of Gothic architecture compared with a
neat, modern building.  The latter is more elegant and glaring, but the
former is more strong and solemn. . .  It has much the greater variety,
and much the nobler apartments, though we are often conducted to them by
dark, odd and uncouth passages.  Nor does the whole fail to strike us
with greater reverence, though many of the parts are childish, ill-placed
and unequal to its grandeur."  This view of Shakspere continued to be the
rule until Coleridge and Schlegel taught the new century that this child
of fancy was, in reality, a profound and subtle artist, but that the
principles of his art--as is always the case with creative genius working
freely and instinctively--were learned by practice, in the concrete,
instead of being consciously thrown out by the workman himself into an
abstract _theoria_; so that they have to be discovered by a reverent
study of his work and lie deeper than the rules of French criticism.
Schlegel, whose lectures on dramatic art were translated into English in
1815, speaks with indignation of the current English misunderstanding of
Shakspere.  "That foreigners, and Frenchmen in particular, who frequently
speak in the strangest language about antiquity and the Middle Age, as if
cannibalism had been first put an end in Europe by Louis XIV., should
entertain this opinion of Shakspere might be pardonable.  But that
Englishmen should adopt such a calumniation . . . is to me
incomprehensible."[17]

The beginnings of the romantic movement in England were uncertain.  There
was a vague dissent from current literary estimates, a vague discontent
with reigning literary modes, especially with the merely intellectual
poetry then in vogue, which did not feed the soul.  But there was, at
first, no conscious, concerted effort toward something of creative
activity.  The new group of poets, partly contemporaries of Pope, partly
successors to him--Thomson, Shenstone, Dyer, Akenside, Gray, Collins, and
the Warton brothers--found their point of departure in the loving study
and revival of old authors.  From what has been said of the survival of
Shakspere's influence it might be expected that his would have been the
name paramount among the pioneers of English romanticism. There are
several reasons why this was not the case.

In the first place, the genius of the new poets was lyrical or
descriptive, rather than dramatic.  The divorce between literature and
the stage had not yet, indeed, become total; and, in obedience to the
expectation that every man of letters should try his hand at
play-writing, Thomson, at least, as well as his friend and disciple
Mallet, composed a number of dramas.  But these were little better than
failures even at the time; and while "The Seasons" has outlived all
changes of taste, and "The Castle of Indolence" has never wanted
admirers, tragedies like "Agamemnon" and "Sophonisba" have been long
forgotten.  An imitation of Shakspere to any effective purpose must
obviously have take the shape of a play; and neither Gray nor Collins nor
Akenside, nor any of the group, was capable of a play.  Inspiration of a
kind, these early romanticists did draw from Shakspere.  Verbal
reminiscences of him abound in Gray.  Collins was a diligent student of
his works.  His "Dirge in Cymbeline" is an exquisite variation on a
Shaksperian theme.  In the delirium of his last sickness, he told Warton
that he had found in an Italian novel the long-sought original of the
plot of "The Tempest."  It is noteworthy, by the way, that the
romanticists were attracted to the poetic, as distinguished from the
dramatic, aspect of Shakspere's genius; to those of his plays in which
fairy lore and supernatural machinery occur, such as "The Tempest" and "A
Midsummer Night's Dream."

Again, the stage has a history of its own, and, in so far as it was now
making progress of any kind, it was not in the direction of a more poetic
or romantic drama, but rather toward prose tragedy and the sentimental
comedy of domestic life, what the French call _la tragedie bourgeoise_
and _la comedie larmoyante_.  In truth the theater was now dying; and
though, in the comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan, it sent up one bright,
expiring gleam, the really dramatic talent of the century had already
sought other channels in the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett.

After all, a good enough reason why the romantic movement did not begin
with imitation of Shakspere is the fact that Shakspere is inimitable.  He
has no one manner that can be caught, but a hundred manners; is not the
poet of romance, but of humanity; nor medieval, but perpetually modern
and contemporaneous in his universality.  The very familiarity of his
plays, and their continuous performance, although in mangled forms, was a
reason why they could take little part in a literary revival; for what
has never been forgotten cannot be revived.  To Germany and France, at a
later date, Shakspere came with the shock of a discovery and begot
Schiller and Victor Hugo.  In the England of the eighteenth century he
begot only Ireland's forgeries.

The name inscribed in large letters on the standard of the new school was
not Shakspere but Spenser.  If there is any poet who is _par excellence_
the poet of romance, whose art is the antithesis of Pope's, it is the
poet of the "Faerie Queene."  To ears that had heard from childhood the
tinkle of the couplet, with its monotonously recurring rhyme, its
inevitable caesura, its narrow imprisonment of the sense, it must have
been a relief to turn to the amplitude of Spencer's stanza, "the full
strong sail of his great verse."  To a generation surfeited with Pope's
rhetorical devices--antithesis, climax, anticlimax--and fatigued with the
unrelaxing brilliancy and compression of his language; the escape from
epigrams and point (snap after snap, like a pack of fire-crackers), from
a style which has made his every other line a proverb or current
quotation--the escape from all this into Spenser's serene, leisurely
manner, copious Homeric similes, and lingering detail must have seemed
most restful.  To go from Pope to Spenser was to exchange platitudes,
packed away with great verbal cunning in neat formulas readily portable
by the memory, for a wealth of concrete images: to exchange saws like,

    "A little learning is a dangerous thing,"

for a succession of richly colored pictures by the greatest painter among
English poets.  It was to exchange the most prosaic of our poets--a poet
about whom question has