Preliminaries. CHAPTER III EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LYRIC, ETC. Preliminaries-The Transition—Addison, Parnell, and RoweHughes-Gay-Granville, etc.-Watts - Byrom-Shenstone Spenserian imitation Akenside Smart-Collins - The "Ode to Evening "The others-Gray-The "Elegy" and the minor Odes-The two great Odes, etc.—Note, Mason-Goldsmith-Cowper-Chatterton-The Ballad-The 1723 Collection-The Reliques-Evans-Some minor lyrics-The hymnwriters Charles Wesley-Toplady-Cowper again-Note on latter eighteenth-century anapæst and octosyllable-Dyer and Anstey. THE above heading may alarm some readers, and prompt others to suggest the celebrated mode of treatment which is supposed to have originated either with regard to the Irish snake or with regard to the Icelandic owl.1 But the one set should be consoled, and the other corrected, by the remembrance of three persons at least—Collins, Gray, and Chatterton-who will fall to be substantively mentioned here, though Blake will be postponed. Nor, from the point of view of prosody, is even the remainder so dry a biscuit as it is sometimes thought to be. The highest spirit of poetry is, no doubt, almost uniformly lacking in it. But even so it is interesting to trace the extraordinary intimacy of the connection of spirit and form; while in the history of the great prosodic 1 It seems to be one of the great unsettled points of literary history whether "There are no snakes in Ireland" or "There are no owls in Iceland" is the original form of the chapter, and whether this form was due to Horrebow or to Van Troil. Some good men, relying on Johnson, plump for Horrebow, snakes, and Iceland. kinds-especially the common or ballad measure—this Within an unfrequented grove, As late I laid alone; A tender maid, in deep distress, tion. which was written sometime before 1740, by the Reverend William Thompson, Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, imitator of Spenser, one of almost the first flight of blank-verse writers after his all but namesake, etc., etc. We saw how Dryden, throughout his life, managed, The Transipartly by actual poetic survival of spirit, and partly by his consummate craftsmanship in varying the forms of lyric, to preserve some of its quality; and how a few of his earlier contemporaries actually retained, though in an uncertain fashion, something of the unearthly tone of the earlier music. The degradation, though not yet quite at its uttermost, of the instrument, may be seen in a man like Duke, who has interspersed his more serious work, mainly couplet in form and translated in matter, with a few songs not quite contemptible; and the effort to supply the place of the vanishing beauty with new charms may be traced distinctly in Prior, whose establishment of the anapæst indeed positively widens the range of the lyre. On the whole, however, the lyric of the latest seventeenth and almost the whole eighteenth century steadily flattens. That it, too, like blank verse and like the octosyllable, is used as a variation and relief from the couplet, is true of all its forms, and not merely of the new anapæstic; and this once more enforces the lesson which we shall gather up and codify Addison, in the Interchapter. But poetry does not change its character in proportion to the changes of its position and attitude. As in French, so in English, the fatal image of prose cut into lengths survives. The prevailing singsong does not help, but rather intensifies, this effect; and nowhere is the artificial poetic diction of the century more strongly prominent. It is perhaps not least because the necessary biblical phrase, free from the taint, is substituted in religious poetry, that this poetry acquires such remarkable relative excellence, and, in the work of Charles Wesley, Smart, Cowper, and others, becomes more positively poetical than most of the profane. The process, and this curious phenomenon in it, become manifest almost at once. Addison's verse, couplet, blank, or lyric, is nowhere very stimulating; but it nowhere possesses such spirit and body, such throb and quiver, as in the stanzaed octosyllables of The spacious firmament on high, and the modest cadence, not enchanting but not merely jog-trot, of and How are thy servants blest, O Lord! The Lord my pasture shall prepare. Parnell is mostly Drydenian in his songs; but he too can practise something like the Miltonic (not the Hudibrastic) octosyllable in the “ Night Piece," and the " Hymn to Contentment," and some sacred poems. Rowe, who has very little name for a poet with most of us, keeps perhaps more prosodic freshness in his lyrics than most of his contemporaries. When in fair Celia's eyes I gaze, And bless their light divine; has something of the past swell, the dying wave, of the old Jonsonian volume. Side by side with it we find examples of the new tripod anapast, which Byrom and Shenstone were to popularise, which was a favourite with the eighteenth century, but which, even in Cowper's hands, was never quite satisfactory till somebody turned it, by making the odd line hypercatalectic, into the glorious measure of the addresses to Araminta and Dolores. The short-stanzaed poem to Miss Anne Devenish, whom he afterwards married, is pretty and uncommon;1 and the Willow song is partially caught. He may have “had no heart" for Mr. Pope; but he managed to put some into the prosody of these songs. In another of the Addisonian set, however, the degradation of lyric is much more strongly exhibited. Although the members of the "little senate" received, like those of others, at least sufficient salaries of praise, John Hughes seems to have been a man of parts, learning, Hughes. and amiability; and he has the credit of going outside stock subjects for that of his rather popular tragedy The Siege of Damascus, which takes one of the most romantic episodes of the early Caliphate. But I cannot say, as "L. Duncombe e Coll. Mert.," a youthful poet who died in his teens said, of Hughes Aonidum decus ille dolorque sororum, as far as English lyric was concerned, though he seems to have been very prone to the composition of it. He wrote Odes on the House of Nassau, in the halfregularised Pindaric; others with less ponderous credentials; lesser songs in common measure, long measure, heroic 1 As on a summer's day In the green wood shade I lay. As her fancy moved, Came walking forth that way. By accident or intention, he improves on this lower down by an internal rhyme-- Then the nymphs of our green, So trim and so sheen, Or the brightest Queen of May. 2 Pope seems to have been curiously exercised about the hearts of the Rowe family. He was also much shocked at Mrs. Rowe for marrying again six years after her husband's death. quatrains, a good many of them in various forms for music. He even had the modest assurance to rearrange Dryden's "Cecilia Major," and the more lawful ambition of writing masques. Yet in all this variation of measure one hardly meets one thing thoroughly "hit off" in rhythm and cadence; though they are all decently measured off. Reading him has made me think of a passage in The Irish Sketch Book where "the waiter holds up the bottle and asks me how much I'd have." Mr. Hughes holds up his verse, and asks us how much and in what form we would have it, and he cuts it off or pours it out to the bespeak. I think he is about happiest in a not very common adaptation of the common measure.1 The thought and phrase are commonplace enough; but the measure is "lifted along" rather well, and the reduplication of the seventh line sends it home gallantly. Yet when by the accident of Chalmers's compilation we turn a page or two and stumble on I must confess I am untrue To Gloriana's eyes, noticed before and written by Mulgrave, a contemporary, though an older contemporary, of Hughes, the sense of what has been lost is itself strangely driven home. Even in Congreve, actually one of the Addison set, the same sense arises: we hear what we shall hear no more. To some readers this last sentence may seem hard on Gay; and on Gay I should be very sorry to be hard, for I think that others have recently been too hard on him, and he was always prosodically competent. But those of his continuous metres which come nearest to lyric-his famous octosyllables-are not very lyrical; and his almost 1 The Graces and the wandering Loves Are fled to distant plains, To chase the fawns, or deep in groves To wound admiring swains. With their bright mistress there they stray. From daily triumphs; yet each day And conquers while she flies. |