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The Age of Pope
Swift complains that the Seasons, being all descriptive, nothing is doing, a defect inseparable from the subject. But the work has a poet's best gift – imagination – and a poet's instinct for apprehending the charm of what is minute in Nature, as well as of what is grand.
Thomson has been called the naturalist's poet, and Hartley Coleridge observes that he is 'a perfect reservoir of natural images.' In his account of what he had learnt only by report he depends sometimes on the ignorant traditions of the country people; but in describing what he observes with the bodily eye, and with the eye of the mind, he is faithful to what he sees, and to what he perceives. No Dutch painter can be more exact and accurate than Thomson in the delineation of familiar scenes, and of animal life. In illustration of this gift, which Cowper shares with him, a scene, not to be surpassed for truthfulness of description, shall be quoted from Winter:
'Through the hushed air the whitening shower descends,At first thin-wavering; till at last the flakesFall broad and wide and fast, dimming the dayWith a continual flow. The cherished fieldsPut on their winter robe of purest white.'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow meltsAlong the mazy current. Low the woodsBow their hoar head; and ere the languid sun,Faint from the west, emits his evening ray,Earth's universal face, deep-hid and chill,Is one wild dazzling waste, that buries wideThe works of man. Drooping, the labourer-oxStands covered o'er with snow, and then demandsThe fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven,Tamed by the cruel season, crowd aroundThe winnowing store, and claim the little boonWhich Providence assigns them. One alone,The redbreast, sacred to the household gods,Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky,In joyless fields and thorny thickets, leavesHis shivering mates, and pays to trusted manHis annual visit. Half afraid, he firstAgainst the window beats; then brisk, alightsOn the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor,Eyes all the smiling family askance,And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is —Till more familiar grown, the table-crumbsAttract his slender feet. The foodless wildsPour forth their brown inhabitants. The hare,Though timorous of heart and hard besetBy death in various forms, dark snares, and dogs,And more unpitying men, the garden seeksUrged on by fearless want. The bleating kindEye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth,With looks of dumb despair; then, sad-dispersedDig for the withered herb through heaps of snow.'Thomson loves also to paint the landscape on a broad scale, and though his diction is sometimes too florid, he generally satisfies the imagination, as, for instance, in the splendid description in Summer of a sand-storm in the desert.
'Breathed hotFrom all the boundless furnace of the sky,And the wide, glittering waste of burning sand,A suffocating wind the pilgrim smitesWith instant death. Patient of thirst and toil,Son of the desert! even the camel feels,Shot through his withered heart, the fiery blast.Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad,Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Straight the sands,Commoved around, in gathering eddies play;Nearer and nearer still they darkening come;Till with the general all-involving stormSwept up, the whole continuous wilds arise;And by their noonday fount dejected thrown,Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep,Beneath descending hills, the caravanIs buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streetsThe impatient merchant, wondering, waits in vain,And Mecca saddens at the long delay.'The Seasons was at one time, and for many years the most popular volume of poetry in the country. It was to be found in every cottage, and passages from the poem were familiar to every school-boy. The appreciation of the work was more affectionate than critical, and Thomson's faults were sometimes mistaken for beauties; but the popularity of the Seasons was a healthy sign, and the poem, a forerunner of Cowper's Task, brought into vigorous life, feelings and sympathies that had been long dormant.
Pope, who is twice mentioned in the poem, took a great interest in its progress through the press. Thomson consulted him frequently, and accepted many of his suggestions, while apparently retaining at all times an independent judgment. To the familiar episode of 'the lovely young Lavinia' the following graceful passage is said, but on very doubtful authority to have been added by Pope.30 The first line, given for the sake of the context, is from Thomson's pen:
'Thoughtless of beauty, she was Beauty's self,Recluse amid the close-embowering woods;As in the hollow breast of Apennine,Beneath the shelter of encircling hills,A myrtle rises, far from human eye,And breathes its balmy fragrance o'er the wild;So flourished, blooming and unseen by all,The sweet Lavinia; till, at length, compelledBy strong necessity's supreme commandWith smiling patience in her looks she wentTo glean Palemon's fields.'Thomson had now gained the highest mark of his fame, and, like Pope, had won it in a few years. Nearly two years of foreign travel followed, the poet having obtained the post of governor to a son of the Solicitor-General. The fruit of this tour was a long poem in blank verse on Liberty, which probably gave him infinite labour, but his ascent upon this occasion of what he calls 'the barren, but delightful mountain of Parnassus,' was labour lost. It is enough to say of Liberty, that it contains more than three thousand lines of unreadable blank verse. Sinecures were the rewards of genius in Thomson's day, and he was made Secretary of Briefs in the Court of Chancery. He took a cottage at Richmond, within an easy walk of Pope, and the two poets met often and lived amicably.
Thomson did not enjoy his official fortune long, for his patron died, and though he might have kept his post had he applied to the Lord Chancellor, in whose gift it was, he appears to have been too lazy to do so. His friend Lyttelton in this emergency introduced him to the Prince of Wales, who, on learning that his affairs 'were in a more poetical posture than formerly,' gave him a pension of £100 a year. There was no certainty in a gift of this nature, and in about ten years it was withdrawn.
The Castle of Indolence (1748) was the latest labour of Thomson's life, and in the judgment of many critics takes precedence of The Seasons in poetical merit. This verdict may be questioned, but the poem, written in the Spenserian stanza, has a soothing beauty and an enchanting felicity of expression which show the poet's genius in a new light. It is unlike any poetry of that age, and when compared with The Seasons, the verse, as Wordsworth justly says, 'is more harmonious and the diction more pure.' All the imagery of the poem is adopted to the vague and sleepy action of the characters represented in it. It is a veritable poet's dream, which carries the reader in its earliest stanzas into 'a pleasing land of drowsy-head:'
'In lowly dale, fast by a river's side,With woody hill o'er hill encompassed round,A most enchanting wizard did abide,Than whom a fiend more fell is nowhere found.It was, I ween, a lovely spot of ground;And there a season atween June and MayHalf prankt with Spring, with Summer half embrowned,A listless climate made, where, sooth to say,No living wight could work, ne carèd even for play.'There are verbal inspirations in a great poet which satisfy the ear, capture the imagination, and live in the memory for ever. Milton's pages are studded with them like stars; Gray has a few, Wordsworth many, and Keats some not to be surpassed for witchery. Of such poetically suggestive lines Thomson has his share, and although it seems unfair to remove them from their context, the excision may be made in a few cases, since they show not only that a new poet had appeared in an age of prose, but a poet of a new order, whose inspiration was felt by his successors. How poetically imaginative is Thomson's imagery of the 'meek-eyed morn, mother of dews;' of
'Ships dim discovered dropping from the clouds;'
of
'Autumn nodding o'er the yellow plain;'
of the summer wind
'Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn;'
and of the Hebrid-Isles
'Placed far amid the melancholy main,'
a line which may have suggested the lovelier verse of Wordsworth descriptive of the cuckoo:
'Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.'
Thomson did not live long after the publication of The Castle of Indolence. A cold caught upon the river led to a fever, which ended fatally on August 27th, 1748. He had for some years been in love with a Miss Young, the 'Amanda' of his very feeble love lyrics, and her marriage is said to have hastened his death. Men, however, do not die for love at the mature age of forty-nine, and as Thomson was 'more fat than bard beseems,' and was not always temperate in his habits, constitutional causes are more likely to have led to the poet's death than Amanda's cruelty.
Dr. Johnson says somewhere that the further authors keep apart from each other the better, and the literary squabbles of the last century afforded him good ground for the remark. It is to Thomson's credit that, like Goldsmith twenty-six years later, he died, leaving behind him many friends and not a single enemy. His fame rests upon two poems, The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, and on a song which has gained a national reputation. Apart from Rule Britannia, which appeared originally in the Masque of Alfred and is spirited rather than poetical, his attempts to write lyrical poetry resulted in failure; but from his own niche in the Temple of Fame time is not likely to dislodge Thomson.
CHAPTER III.
MINOR POETS
Sir Samuel Garth – Ambrose Philips – John Philips – Nicholas Rowe – Aaron Hill – Thomas Parnell – Thomas Tickell – William Somerville – John Dyer – William Shenstone – Mark Akenside – David Mallet – Scottish Song-Writers.
Sir Samuel Garth (1660-1717-18).
In Pope's day even the medical profession was influenced by party feeling, and Samuel Garth became known as the most famous Whig physician, but his friendships were not confined to one side, and he appears to have been universally beloved.
Garth came of a Yorkshire family, and was born in 1660. He was admitted a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1693, gained a large practice, and is said to have been very benevolent to the poor. The Dispensary (1699) is a satire called forth by the opposition of the Society of Apothecaries, to an edict of the College, and is a mock-heroic poem, which the quarrel made so effective at the time that it passed through several editions. The merit of achieving what the satirist intended may therefore be granted to the Dispensary. Few modern readers, however, will appreciate the welcome it received, and it is ludicrous to read in Anderson's edition of the poet that the poem 'is only inferior in humour, discrimination of character, and poetical ardour to the Rape of the Lock.' It would be far more accurate to say that the Dispensary has not a single merit in common with that poem, and but slight merit of any kind.
The following passage upon death is the most vigorous, and is interesting as having supplied Cowper with a line in the poem on his Mother's Picture:31
''Tis to the vulgar Death too harsh appears,The ill we feel is only in our fears;To die is landing on some silent shoreWhere billows never break, nor tempests roar;Ere well we feel th' friendly stroke 'tis o'er.The wise through thought th' insults of death defy,The fools through blest insensibility.'Tis what the guilty fear, the pious crave;Sought by the wretch and vanquished by the brave.It eases lovers, sets the captive free,And though a tyrant, offers liberty.'Addison in defending Garth in the Whig-Examiner from the criticisms of Prior in the Examiner, the organ of the Tory party, says he does not question but the author 'who has endeavoured to prove that he who wrote the Dispensary was no poet, will very suddenly undertake to show that he who gained the battle of Blenheim is no general.' The comparison was an unfortunate one. Marlborough's military reputation has grown brighter with time, Garth's fame as a poet has long ago ceased to exist.
A literary although not a poetical interest is associated with the name of "well-natured Garth," who, as Pope acknowledges, was one of his earliest friends; like Arbuthnot, he lived among the wits, and as a member of the famous Kit-cat Club he wrote verses upon the Whig beauties toasted by its members. His name is linked with Dryden's as well as with that of his illustrious successor. It will be remembered how, on the death of Dryden, the poet's body lay in state in the College of Physicians, and how, before the great procession started for Westminster Abbey, Sir Samuel, who was then President, delivered a Latin oration.
Garth died in January, 1717-18, and, according to Pope, was a good Christian without knowing it. Addison, however, who visited Garth in his last illness, told Dr. Berkeley that he rejected Christianity on the assurance of his friend Halley that its doctrines were incomprehensible, and the religion itself an imposture. According to another report which comes through Pope, he actually 'died a papist.'
Ambrose Philips (1671-1749).
Ambrose Philips, who belonged, like Tickell, to Addison's 'little senate,' was born in 1671, and educated at St. John's, Cambridge. His Pastorals were published in Tonson's Miscellany (1709), and the same volume contained the Pastorals of Pope. Log-rolling was understood in those days, and Philips's verses received warm praise in more than one number of the Guardian, the writer in one place declaring that there have been only four masters of the art in above two thousand years: 'Theocritus, who left his dominions to Virgil; Virgil, who left his to his son Spenser; and Spenser, who was succeeded by his eldest born, Philips.'
Pope's Pastorals were not mentioned, and in revenge he devised the consummate artifice of sending an anonymous paper to the Guardian, in which, while appearing to praise Philips, he exalted himself. Steele took the bait, and considering that the essay depreciated Pope would not publish it without his permission, which was of course readily granted. 'From that time,' says Johnson, 'Pope and Philips lived in a perpetual reciprocation of malevolence.'
Philips's tragedy, The Distrest Mother (1712), a translation, or nearly so, of Racine's Andromaque, was puffed in the Spectator. It is the play to which Sir Roger de Coverley was taken by his friends, and the representation supplied the good knight with an opportunity for much humorous comment.
'When Sir Roger saw Andromache's obstinate refusal to her lover's importunities, he whispered me in the ear that he was sure she would never have him; to which he added with a more than ordinary vehemence, "You cannot imagine, sir, what it is to have to do with a widow." Upon Pyrrhus his threatening afterwards to leave her, the knight shook his head, and muttered to himself, "Ay, do if you can." This part dwelt so much upon my friend's imagination that at the close of the third Act, as I was thinking of something else, he whispered in my ear, "These widows, sir, are the most perverse creatures in the world. But pray," says he, "you that are a critic, is this play according to your dramatic rules, as you call them? Should your people in tragedy always talk to be understood? Why, there is not a single sentence in this play that I do not know the meaning of."'32 Addison also inserted and praised in the Spectator Philips's translations from Sappho (Nos. 223, 229).
His odes to babes and children earned for him the sobriquet of 'Namby Pamby,' 'a term which has been incorporated into the English language to designate mawkish sentiment. Namby was the infantine pronunciation of Ambrose, and Pamby was formed by the first letter of Philips's surname and that reduplication of sound which is natural to lisping children.'33
Between simplicity and absurdity the line is a narrow one, and Philips stepped over it when he wrote to a child in the nursery —
'Dimply damsel, sweetly smiling,All caressing, none beguiling;Bud of beauty, fairly blowing,Every charm to nature owing.'The longest of his baby songs is addressed to the Hon. Miss Carteret, in which he pictures the child's progress to womanhood, and anticipates her future loveliness and maiden reign:
'Then the taper-moulded waistWith a span of ribbon braced;And the swell of either breast,And the wide high-vaulted chest;And the neck so white and round,Little neck with brilliants bound;And the store of charms which shineAbove, in lineaments divine,Crowded in a narrow spaceTo complete the desperate face;These alluring powers, and more,Shall enamoured youths adore;These and more in courtly laysMany an aching heart shall praise.'The inventory of the maiden's physical charms which follows includes veiny temples, sloping shoulders, a hazely lucid eye, and cheek of health; but in the category the only allusion to the attractions of intellect and heart is in a couplet foretelling her
'Gentleness of mind,Gentle from a gentle kind.'That Philips translated The Persian Tales is indelibly recorded by Pope:
'The bard whom pilfered Pastorals renown,Who turns a Persian tale for half-a-crown,Just writes to make his barrenness appear,And strains from hard-bound brains eight lines a year.'But even Pope could award praise to Philips. In a letter to Henry Cromwell, in 1710, he observes that he was capable of writing very nobly, 'as I guess by a small copy of his, published in the Tatler, on the Danish winter;' and two years later he says to his friend Caryll: 'Mr. Philips has two lines which seem to me what the French call very picturesque, that I cannot omit to you:
'All hid in snow in bright confusion lie,And with one dazzling waste fatigue the eye!'The lines, not quite accurately quoted by Pope, are from an epistle, addressed to Lord Dorset from Copenhagen, which contains a few striking couplets, two of which may be transcribed before bidding adieu to Ambrose Philips:
'The vast leviathan wants room to play,And spout his waters in the face of day.The starving wolves along the main sea prowl,And to the moon in icy valleys howl.'John Philips (1676-1708).
Ambrose Philips must not be confounded with his namesake John, the author of a clever burlesque of Milton, called The Splendid Shilling (1705); of Blenheim (1705), a poem which he was urged to write by the Tories in opposition to Addison's Campaign; and of a poem upon Cider (1706), in 'Miltonian verse,' which seems to have afforded several suggestions to Pope in his Windsor Forest. It is said to display a considerable knowledge of the subject, and in that its principal merit consists. From The Splendid Shilling a brief extract may be given:
'So pass my days. But when nocturnal shadesThis world envelop, and th' inclement airPersuades men to repel benumbing frostsWith pleasant wines, and crackling blaze of wood;Me, lonely sitting, nor the glimmering lightOf make-weight candle, nor the joyous talkOf loving friend delights; distressed, forlorn,Amidst the horrors of the tedious night,Darkling I sigh, and feed with dismal thoughtsMy anxious mind; or sometimes mournful verseIndite, and sing of groves and myrtle shades,Or desperate lady near a purling stream,Or lover pendent on a willow tree.Meanwhile I labour with eternal droughtAnd restless wish, and rave; my parched throatFinds no relief, nor heavy eyes repose.But if a slumber haply does invadeMy weary limbs, my fancy still awake,Thoughtful of drink, and eager, in a dreamTipples imaginary pots of aleIn vain; awake I find the settled thirstStill gnawing, and the pleasant phantom curse.''Philips,' says the poet Campbell, 'had the merit of studying and admiring Milton, but he never could imitate him without ludicrous effect, either in jest or earnest. His Splendid Shilling is the earliest and one of the best of our parodies; but Blenheim is as completely a burlesque upon Milton as The Splendid Shilling, though it was written and read with gravity, … yet such are the fluctuations of taste that contemporary criticism bowed with solemn admiration over his Miltonic cadences.'
Nicholas Rowe (1673-1718).
Nicholas Rowe had the honour, if it was one in those days, of being made Laureate on the accession of George I. His odes, epistles, and songs are without merit, but he gained reputation as the translator of Lucan's Pharsalia, of which Sir Arthur Gorges had produced a version in 1614, and his plays entitle him to a place, though not a high one, in our dramatic literature.
Rowe edited an edition of Shakespeare, and should have known his author, yet in a prologue he declares that he could not draw women – an amazing assertion echoed by Collins, who praises Fletcher for his knowledge of the 'female mind,' and adds that 'stronger Shakespeare felt for man alone.'
The chronological list of Rowe's dramas runs as follows: The Ambitious Step-mother (1700); Tamerlane (1702); The Fair Penitent (1703); Ulysses (1705); The Royal Convert (1707); the Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714); and the Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey (1715). Measured by his contemporary dramatists he is a distinguished playwright. His characters do not live, but he could invent effective scenes, though in some cases the poet's taste may be questioned.
For many years Tamerlane was acted at Drury Lane on the anniversary of King William's landing in England, and under the names of Tamerlane and Bajazet the king is belauded at the expense of Louis XIV. The Fair Penitent, a piece even more successful upon the stage, will still please the reader, though he may question the high eulogium of Johnson, that "scarcely any work of any poet is at once so interesting by the fable, and so delightful by the language." Rowe has not the tragic power which can express passion without rant, and pathos without extravagance. In The Fair Penitent Calista gives utterance to her feelings by piling up expletives. Thus, when her husband attacks the lover who has ruined her, she exclaims, 'Destruction! fury! sorrow! shame! and death!' and, on another occasion, she cries out, 'Madness! confusion!' words which give a sense of the ludicrous rather than of the tragic; and so also does Calista's last utterance when, addressing Altamont, she says:
'Had I but early known
Thy wondrous worth, thou excellent young man
We had been happier both – now 'tis too late!'
Rowe may be regarded as the principal representative of tragedy in the 'age of Pope,' but his respectable work shows a fatal degeneration from the 'gorgeous tragedy' of the Elizabethans.
Aaron Hill (1684-1749).
Aaron Hill, unlike Rowe, was not distinguished as a dramatist, and succeeded only in two or three adaptations from the French. His claims as a poet are also insignificant. He was born in London in 1684, with expectations that were not destined to be realized, but Fortune was not unkind to him. His uncle, Lord Paget, Ambassador at Constantinople, gave the youth a warm welcome, supplied him with a tutor, and sent him to travel in the East. On Lord Paget's return to England, Hill accompanied him, and together they are said to have visited a great part of Europe. Some time later Hill went abroad again, and was absent two or three years. For awhile – it could not have been long – he was secretary to the Earl of Peterborough, and at the age of twenty-six, his good star being still in the ascendant, he married a young lady 'of great merit and beauty, with whom he had a very handsome fortune.' Hill was then appointed manager of Drury Lane, and he wrote a number of plays, the very names of which are now forgotten. Few men indeed so well known in his own day have sunk into such insignificance in ours. He wrote eight books of a long and unfinished epic called Gideon, which I suppose no one in the present century has had the hardihood to read; like Young he wrote a poem on The Judgment Day, a theme attempted also, shortly before his death, by John Philips, and that, after his kind, he produced a Pindaric ode goes without saying. A long poem called The Northern Star, a panegyric on Peter the Great, is said to have passed through several editions. The poem does not prove Hill to be a poet, but it shows his command of the heroic couplet. The style of the poem, which is an indiscriminate panegyric, may be judged from the following lines: