CHAPTER VII THE DAWN OF NATURALISM IN POETRY The work of the in the ascendant TOWARDS the close of Pope's career, a distinct change began to come over the face of English poetry. When the prestige of Pope was at its height, and the execution of his verse most highly admired, the strongest among the younger poets began to cease to follow him, partly, perhaps, because they despaired of surpassing him in his peculiar excellences-partly, no doubt, in response to an alteration in popular taste. Pope himself, by his Eloisa to Abelard, had hinted at the possibility of reintroducing poetry of a very serious and romantic type, which should deal with questions of moral passion in solemn numbers. group of poets which was then presently to be proved to be pitched mainly in this key, to which Pope never recurred, although he received the productions of the first romantic poets with sympathy, and even, it is said, with the hand and eye of a benignant technical master. The imitation of Pope was revived a generation later, and also, of course, existed widely throughout the period of which we are now speaking; but it is not always clearly enough recognised that the Augustan spirit had remarkably little part in suggesting what was best in the poetry of the second section of the eighteenth century. During the twenty-five years from the publication of Thomson's Spring in 1726 to that of Gray's Elegy in 1751, the nine or ten leading poems or collections of verse which appeared were all of a new type, sombre, as a rule, certainly stately, romantic in tone to the extreme, prepared to return, ignorantly indeed, but with respect, to what was "Gothic" in manners, architecture, and language, all showing a more or less vague aspiration towards the study of nature, and not one composed in the heroic couplet hitherto so rigorously imposed on serious verse. The Seasons, Night Thoughts, and The Grave are written in blank verse, The Castle of Indolence and The Schoolmistress in Spenserian stanza, The Spleen and Grongar Hill in octosyllabics (in the latter case very loosely strung), while the early odes of Gray and those of Collins are composed in a great variety of simple but novel lyric measures. The later elaborate odes of Gray, published in 1754, come outside our limit of date, and form in their turn a link with the nineteenth century. This group of poets, then, containing one great man of letters, Gray, and at least two poets of very high rank, Thomson and Collins, possesses an historical importance out of proportion with its popularity at the present moment. After having enjoyed a reputation considerably in excess of their merits, certain of these romantic moralists of the second quarter of the eighteenth century are now scarcely read at all. Their names, nevertheless, are still familiar to every educated person, and they live in tradition and anecdote. They mark the faint glow of the coming naturalism much more clearly than do the poets of the succeeding age, where the darkness was most solid just before the dawn. In their pomp of style and crepuscular moral splendour they appeal to a taste which is not of to-day; but a careful and sympathetic study of their writings may be urged upon the student of literature as indispensable to a proper comprehension of one very characteristic side of the intellectual development of the eighteenth century. The study of nature which is marked in the writings of this group of poets received considerable encouragement from the newly-fostered appetite for ballads and loosely-kilted Scottish songs. Allan Ramsay, in his Scots Songs of 1719, and still more in his Tea-Table Miscellany and Evergreen of 1724, had re VII "THE BRAES OF YARROW" 209 sponded to the nascent curiosity regarding the simpler lyric literature of an earlier age. His own ballads were artless, but he had encouraged the publication of those very remarkable lyrics, The Braes of Yarrow of Hamilton of Bangour (1704-1754) and the William and Margaret of David Mallet. The former of these poems contains such stanzas as the following, which, with their strange fugitive melody, must have sounded with extraordinary freshness on the ears of the subjects of Queen Anne : "Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowin'. "Flows Yarrow sweet? as sweet, as sweet flows Tweed, As green its grass, its gowan as yellow, As sweet smells on its braes the birk, The apple frae the rock as mellow. "Fair was thy love, fair, fair indeed thy love; "Busk ye, then busk, my bonny, bonny bride; (6), Although the sedateness of the style of Thomson and his school shows little superficial influence from these pathetic ballads, the simplicity of the latter and their direct appeal to nature were not without a marked effect upon the poetry of the generation. The connecting link between this group of poets and their predecessors of the Augustan age is found in the works of Edward Young (1681-1765), who was considerably older than Pope and Gay, but who did not develop his poetical genius till very late in life. Young published nothing until his thirty-second year. In 1741, at the mature age of sixty, he superintended the collection of his "poetical works," in two volumes, which, however interesting now to the student of his career, contained no single page which, had Young written no more, would call for his mention in such a volume as this. It was during his old age that he composed and published those works which have given him so prominent a literary position. Young was educated at Oxford, where he became a lay fellow of All Souls; he remained at the university, fretting against obscurity, until middle life. In 1721 he attempted to enter Parliament, but was defeated, and finally, when nearly fifty years of age, he took holy orders, and sought promotion in the Church, since he could find it nowhere else. He was made chaplain to the king in 1728, and accepted the college living of Welwyn in 1730, but here his ecclesiastical preferments ended. For the next thirty-five years, in various tones of angry protest or murmuring persuasion, he endeavoured, but in vain, to draw attention to his Iwant of a mitre. He closed his long career, rich indeed through his marriage with the Earl of Lichfield's daughter, Lady Elizabeth Lee, but petulant, proud, and solitary. The insatiable ambition of Young has been the theme of many moralists, and the tendency of his personal character was indubitably parasitic; but it would be easy to show, on the other hand, that he really was, to an eminent degree, what Hobbes calls an "episcopable" person, and that his talents, his address, his loyalty, and his moral force were qualities which not only might, but for the honour of the English Church should, have been publicly acknowledged by preferment. When he saw men like Sherlock and Secker (1693-1768), as a reward for "running a race for the old ladies," bounding into the padded ease of bishops' thrones, Young, sitting alone in the light of his austere intellect, may be forgiven if he displayed some angry indiscretion. Towards the middle of the Queen Anne period Young appeared with his first important poem, The Last Day, printed at Oxford in 1713; part of it had already been seen in the Guardian. It is a sombre essay in the heroic couplet, and in three books, on the end of the world; and, in spite of some coarse imagery and a good deal of needless bombast, it possesses considerable gloomy VII force. YOUNG'S TRAGEDIES 211 The final book is the best, and the address of the lost soul to God, beginning— "Father of mercies! why from silent earth Didst thou awake, and curse me into birth?" if of dubious piety, is not equalled for poetic felicity elsewhere in Young's writings outside Night Thoughts. This piece was succeeded in 1714 by The Force of Religion, a short poem in two books; the first containing a very commonplace account, abruptly introduced, of the feelings of Lady Jane Gray on being separated from Guildford; and the second, a relation of their meeting. There is no other point to this crude poem than the introduction of compliments to Lady Salisbury. Young's next effort was made in the direction of the theatre. He attempted to conquer distinction as a tragedian. His Busiris succeeded at Drury Lane in 1719. In this blank-verse tragedy there is very little about Busiris; the interest centres around the violent and lawless passion of Myron for the gentle Mandane. There is a perilous scene of dumb show between Mandane and Memnon, in the fourth act, which might be so played as to be very effective. But the verse and language have the violence, with some of the tragic glow, of Lee, whom Young seems to have taken as a model. The Revenge (1721), though generally admitted to be a better play, was not so successful as its predecessor. This also is in the taste and style of the Restoration, and turns upon the colossal passions and magnificent indignation of a Moor, Zanga, who talks very eloquently, and like the future poet of the Night Thoughts; it is to Young's credit that he treats a story much resembling that treated by Shakespeare, without inevitably reminding us of Othello. His third tragedy, The Brothers, was not performed until 1753. Young was too rhetorical to be a successful dramatist, and the lamp he affected to use while composing a candle stuck into a human skull-failed to inspire him satisfactorily. In 1725 he began, and in 1728 concluded, the publication of his series of seven satires, Love of Fame, the Universal Passion, for which he received £3000. These pieces preceded Pope's essays in the same |