WITH a Fraser and a Fuller holding the bureaucratic sceptre there could be little doubt which of the two alternatives would recommend itself to the authorities. Sir Andrew Fraser, hampered with the traditions of legality and bureaucratic formalism, has begun cautiously, thundering loudly but sparing the lightning flash. Mr. Fuller, violent, rude and truculent in character and accustomed to the autocracy of a non-regulated province, has rushed like a mad bull at the obnoxious object; his violence may or may not temporarily defeat itself by compelling the Government of India or the Secretary of State to intervene, but even should this happen it will make little difference. The policy of repression is a necessity to the Government and will only be foregone, if the national leaders on their side desist from the new Nationalism.
This being the situation, what must be the attitude of the nation in the face of this crisis in its destinies? The result of the first violent collision between the opposing armies of despotism and liber;y, has not been encouraging to the lovers of freedom. No Bengali can read the account of the interview between. Mr. Fuller and the Barisal leaders, without a blush of shame for himself and his nation. A headstrong and violent man, presuming insufferably on the high position to which an inscrutable Providence has suffered him to climb, summons the leaders of a spirited community, men of culture, worth and dignity, strong in the trust and support of the people, and, after subjecting them to insults of an unprecedented grossness, compels them at the point of the bludgeon to withdraw a public appeal which their position as leaders had made it their mere duty to publish and circulate. What ought these men to have done in reply? Surely they should have repelled the insults with a calm and simple dignity, or if that would not serve, with a self-assertion as haughty, if less violent than the self-assertion of the unmannerly official before them, and to the demand for the withdrawal of their appeal they should have returned a plain and quiet negative. And if as a result Mr. Fuller were immediately to send them to the prison, or the whipping-post, or the gallows itself, what difference would that make to their duty
as public men and national leaders? But the Barisal leaders instead submitted as meekly as rebuked and beaten schoolboys; to a hectoring pedagogue cane in hand. The citizens of Rungpur showed at least a firmer spirit.
Nevertheless the Barisal leaders have strong excuses for their failure of nerve. Decades of selfish ease and comfort, of subservience to officialdom, of traditional meekness and docility have taken the strong fibre out of the middle-class Bengali and left him a mass of mere softness and pliability. Out of such material champions of liberty cannot be made in a single day, nor has the national movement as yet reached that stage of high pressure surcharged with electricity and fiery vitality when weaklings are turned into giants and the timid into martyrs and heroes. Confronted with the formidable and frowning aspect of Mr. Fuller, deafened with the thunders of this self-important Godling, cut off from the accustomed inspiration of cheering crowds, what wonder if the citizens of Barisal were browbeaten, [.. .]1 and cowed into submission.
Moreover, the Calcutta leaders are not without blame for their failure of courage. It should never have been left to an out of the way township like Barisal to issue the proclamations which have awaked the Fullerian thunders; that was the duty of the leaders of the nation in the metropolis. A small locality cannot be strong enough to fight the battles of the nation unaided, and if local leaders feel themselves in the critical moment, too weak and isolated to resist violent oppression, they are to be more pitied than blamed. We are suffering for our defective organisation. Had the Calcutta chiefs organized these local Committees throughout the land before the Partition became an accomplished fact, had Barisal felt that it had not only the enthusiasm but the organized strength of the nation behind it, the present situation would have soon been made impossible.
Enough of the past; let us turn to our duty in the future. The one thing that would be impossible and intolerable is any kind of submission to the Fullerian policy Whatever form of public activity has been stopped by the threat of the Gurkha rifles, must be recon-tinued. If the Barisal proclamation has been withdrawn, it must be reissued and this time not by the Barisal leaders to their district but
1 One illegible word.
by the national leaders in Calcutta to every district, town and village whether in West, East or North Bengal. The words Bande Mataram must be written printed, would be better, — on every door in Barisal. Public meetings must be held as before and if they are dispersed by the police, the people must assemble in every compound where there is room for even fifty people to stand and record an oath never to submit or crouch down before the oppressor. [...]1 and in order to constitute the Barisal committees, let Babu Surendranath Banerji go down in person aided by Mr. A. Chowdhury and Babu Bipin Chandra Pal, who, if summoned by Mr. Fuller or any Government official, shall refuse to have any dealings with them, until the former shall have publicly apologised for his disgraceful and un-gentlemanly conduct and given guarantees against its recurrence. We will see whether even Mr. Fuller in his madness, will dare to touch these sacred heads guarded as they are by the love and trust of a nation of 40 millions. And if to punish this popular self-assertion, the rifles of England's mercenaries be indeed called into play, if Indian blood be shed, with those who shed it shall rest the guilt and on those who commanded it shall fall the Divine Vengeance. It will not come to that, for Heaven has not as yet deprived the British Government so utterly of its reason as to command, or the British nation as to condone, such an outrage. But the possibility of it should have no terrors for men vindicating their legal rights and the small measure of freedom the laws have allowed to them.
The actions of Mr. Fuller have throughout been characterized by the most cynical violence and disregard of legality. Illegally he has terrorised the people of Barisal, illegally he has abolished the right of public meeting, illegally he has banned the singing of the national anthem and sent emissaries to erase its opening words from the doors of private houses, illegally he has forbidden organisation for a lawful object. Let the authorities remember this, that when a Government breaks the Law, by their very act the people are absolved from the obligation of obeying the Law. But let the people on their side so long as they are permitted to do so abstain from aggressive violence, let them study carefully to put their oppressors always in the wrong: but from no legitimate kind of passive resistance should
1 Blank in manuscript.
they shrink. This much their mother demands from them. For what use to cry day and night Adoration to the Mother, if we have not the courage to suffer for the Mother.
It is a sweet and noble thing to die for motherland; and if that supreme happiness be denied to us, it is no small privilege to suffer illegal violence, arbitrary imprisonment and cruel oppression for her sake.
THE banquet was half over and the wine in lively progress round the table; yet the ladies did not retire. The presence of women over the wine was one of the cardinal articles of Julian's social creed.
The conversation turned on the Christian religion which finally emerged from the arena stripped of all its plumes and in a condition woefully besmirched and bedraggled. Julian, who had taken the lead in blasphemy, closed the subject by observing, "The popular Gods should be denied but respected."
"My presence here refutes you,"1 said Erinna.2
"Oh, my friend, I only observe Nature's ordinances: in social life sex does not exist. Besides, conversation requires3 speech as well as reason."
"You insinuate?"
"Nature gave man reason, speech to woman."4 The men laughed.
"I will quote you two sentences from my new catechism, Julian," said Helen Woodward. "To what end has man used reason? To make Truth incredible. To what purpose has woman employed speech? To say nothing."5
Julian felt that the tone of talk was becoming too serious and he glided away from the subject. During the flow of the wine someone coupled the names of Aphrodite and Bacchus.
"Ah yes," said Julian, "how is it that we have not honoured the goddess who presides over this feast."
"Let Julian do it in his master's fashion," suggested Corydon.
"I cannot tread beaten ground,6 Lionel."
"Ah, but Love is as bottomless as the sea."
1 Or, convicts you of inconsistency.
2 Or, "Yet you couple women and wine in your banquet-room," said Erinna.
3 Or, wants.
4 Or, "Nature gave reason to man, to woman speech."
5 Or. "How has man used reason? To stultify himself. How has woman used speech? To say nothing.
6 Or. discuss an exhausted subject
"Yet Plato was an excellent diver and brought up the richest pearls."
"Scarcely in one dive, Julian," said Powell.
"In five, if I remember aright."
"Yet Agathon's pearl was not flawless."
"Do you propose to amend it?"
"I should but spoil it; but I could dive for a pearl of my own finding perhaps."
"You shall have a rich meed of praise."
"But, my dear critic," said Erinna, "what ground was untrod by Plato?"
"Agathon painted the loveliness of Love but not Love himself." "Describe him then you," said Julian and raised his hand for silence.
Powell lay back a moment with his dark Welsh eyes fixed upon the ceiling and then spoke.
"I am told to describe Love," began Powell, "yet in order to describe I must first define. And how is that possible with a being intangible as the air and inconstant as the moon? For Love is as slippery and mutable as Proteus, chameleon-hued, multiform, amorphous, infinite; the transmigrations of a Hindu soul are not more various and elastic; the harmony of his outlines are not blurred by chaos or the weird; rather like poetry and summer he wraps himself in a cool soft robe of velvet air and his feet are kissed by the laughing sea. But the translucent air which promises to reveal is a cloak far thicker than the gathering dusk. Thus the Eros of Praxiteles is not Love himself, but the soul of the sculptor in one of her phases. Yet though Love has no one form, the idea, the soul of Love, that strange essence which walks for ever in the peopled shadow-land, he is shackled in a single and uniform shape.. How then shall I paint the idea of Love. The Greeks have described a child with a warlike bow of horn and bitter arrows tipped with steel, and modern poets inspired by this rude conception have fabled of the smart which is the herald of Love's shaft. But these ideas however happy in themselves are by no means suitable to Love; for they are without two of his most essential elements, the subtle and the impalpable. The Hindus are more felicitous when they sing of Kama for poetry alone can express him the divine and radiant youth mounted on an emerald parrot, and bearing in his right hand a bow of flowers; the arrows too must
be of the same soft and voluptuous material for a preference I would name the shefali, the only blossom which has a soul. For Love's arrow never pains while in the wound — it is too subtle and flower-like if a lover is in pain, it is because he loves himself more than Love — and that is the fault of Nature, not of Eros.1 Again Love has been painted as blind; and in this2 too the poets of Europe have conceived a lyrical3 fiction; for they say that Love looses his shafts and knows not whom they strike, whereas indeed he knows too well. It is his delight to unite those who should never have so much as met and to blind them to their own misery until the shefali arrow has withered in their hearts; and this,he does with eyes open and of deliberate purpose. So far poets have sinned; but it is a vulgar error to suppose Love garrulous, a bastard child of Momus and Aphrodite; whereas in truth he is the lawful son of Hephaistos; but he has swallowed his father down, and for that reason those lovely lips, the scarlet portals of Passion's treasury,4 do not yield up their store of pearls and rubies — nay dare not so much as open lest Hephaistos escape and in his anger blast the world. Thus then I paint Love."
A murmur of applause flew like a wild spirit from mouth to mouth.
"Record me a confirmed Pythagorean," said Julian, "the soul of Agathon did not perish in Macedonia."
"Yet I dare say, Vernon," replied Erinna, "you do not believe a word of what Agathon has been saying?"
"Yet your belief is the bastard of Momus rather than the heir of Peitho," rejoined Helen Woodward.
"I confess, Powell," replied Julian, "that the manner pleased me better than the matter."
1 The following passage seems to he an alternative for the description given above : He sits* in a rose-leaf chariot drawn by lotus-coloured sparrows and a wreath of forget-me-nots and poppies bind his white and gracious brows. He is a young man in the first blush of perfection and his eyes are two weird lamps in a wizard's tower; his mouth has been painted with a crimson rose and is redolent of beautiful meanings but his are lips that dare not smile.* * His left hand grasps the shefali arrows, his right hand holds the flowery bow. His footstool is the empire of earth and heaven and the sea
* Or, is seated.
** Or. his lips have been painted with the red rose and are redolent of beautiful meanings but they are lips which dare not smile
2 Or, here 3 Or. beautiful 4 Or, treasure-house
"Your reason, Julian?"
"Your picture was too beautiful to be true."
"That is a recommendation," said Erinna.
"To the artist but not to the critic."
"How would you define Love, Julian?" asked Corydon.
"Give me a moment to think."
"You will be harshly criticised."
"Heine speed me! How will this do — the smile of a drunken God." There was applause.
"Ah but it is perfect," exclaimed Dufresne, between a laugh and a sigh.
"But Marc might give us a better," suggested Philip.
"In its own way," assented Marc, "Love is spiritual champagne, the best of wines if the briefest."
The characteristic answer set the echoes rocking to Homeric mirth.
"A poisonous purple flower," said Helen, "but its chalice collects1 the pure wine of heaven."
"It is the paean of the soul heavenward or its dithyramb hellward," subjoined Corydon.
O'Roark dissented: "It is a strange mania which everyone is bound to catch, mostly at a certain age — in short the spiritual measles."
A burst of laughter greeted this Irish flight.
"Love is a runner in the race of life with the parsley wreath of joy2 for his prize," said Philip, formulating the sensations of the moment in an aphorism.
"Alas, to wear it for a day,"3 said Pattison Ely, "he is the bridegroom of Sin and the father of Satiety."
"Ah no, but the child of Sin," corrected Julian, "beautiful child of a more beautiful mother."
"Is it not Sin itself," suggested Erinna, "Sin, the true philosopher's stone which turns life from dull lead to gold."4
1 Or, receives. 2 Or. happiness 3 Or, only to lose it.
4 In an earlier version the same idea is dealt with more extensively
"Is i( not Sin herself in her subtlest form," suggested Erinna.
"What is Sin?" asked Julian smiling
"The invention of spiritual alchemists, it turns a leaden life to gold." "A modern discovery, I think." said Powell
"She who could best tell us what Love is, sits silent,"1 said Helen Woodward, looking at Ella.
"It is the sole motive of man's existence," replied Ella. It was the first time she had opened her lips, but the thought in her mind leaped out before she could bring it back.
There was tender laughter as of disillusioned September lenient to the emerald hopes of April; yet in the company no one save only Julian had passed the farther bourne of youth. In these days men live too fast to reckon their age by years.
But Helen Woodward looked at Ella with a world of compassion in her beautiful wild eyes.
Night flew on winged feet and the wine was in their speech. At last the ladies rose and left the room; to the heart of Ella it seemed as
Incomplete
"A modern revival," corrected Erinna, "they lost the secret in the Dark Ages; that is why the history of the time is so dull. Sin was legalised and therefore gave no pleasure." Julian laughed. "You have given me what I have long been in search of." "What is that, Julian?"
"A good reason for the existence of Laws."
Erinna smiled and went on. "They lost the secret of Love too and found in its place* the gorgeous phantasm of chivalry. I maintain that Love is only a form of Sin." "Yet they recognise marriage."
"They raise a monument over the corpse of Love."* *
* Or. had to substitute. * * Alternative for these two lines:
"Marriage is recognised by law," said Powell. "They recognise the sepulchre of Love."
1 Or. define Love, is silent.
POETRY I take to be the measured expression of emotion. Of prose one asks, does the matter please, stimulate or instruct the intellect; does the style satisfy a cultured taste and observant literary sense; if it does so, it is good prose, whether it moves the heart or not. Of poetry we ask, does the matter move, stimulate, enlarge, heighten, or deepen the feelings; does it excite emotions of delight, sorrow, awe, sublimity, passionate interest, or if the nature of the subject matter is not such as to excite actual emotions, does it excite certain vague and nameless sensations, the quiet stirring of the heart which attends the perception of beauty, or the august tumult which goes with the sense of largeness and space or the quick delight of increased horizons and heart-searching perceptions; does it give us the sense of power and passion. If it does, we have the material of poetry, but not yet poetry. Prose can and often does create similar effects. Great thoughts, beautiful description, noble narrative will always have this power on the soul. We have also to ask, does the language and verse harmonise with the emotion, become part of it and expressive of it, swell with its fullness and yet bound and restrain it. If it does, then we have poetry, a thing mighty and unanalysable, to usurp whose place prose vainly aspires. Matter by itself does not make poetry; skill in verse and diction is not poetry; striking and brilliant phrases, melodious weavings of sound are not poetry; it is the natural and predestined blending or rather inseparable existence of great matter with great verse producing high emotions or beautiful matter with beautiful verse producing soft emotions that gives us genuine poetry. An identity of word and sound, of thought and word, of sound and emotion which seems to have been preordained from the beginning of the world and only awaited its destined our to leap into existence, or rather was there from the beginning of the world and only dawned into sight at the right time, this rare identity is what we call poetry.
Sketch of the Progress of Poetry
from Thomson to Wordsworth
THE Age of transition from the poetry of Pope to that of Wordsworth begins strictly speaking with Thomson This transition was not an orderly and consistent development, but consisted of different groups of poets or sometimes even single poets each of whom made a departure in some particular direction which was not followed up by his or their successors. The poetry of the time has the appearance of a number of loose and disconnected threads abruptly broken off in the middle. It was only in the period from 1798 to 1830 thai these threads were gathered together and a definite, consistent tendency imparted to poetry. It was an age of tentatives and for the most part of failures. Meanwhile the main current of verse up till 1798 followed the direction given it by Pope only slightly modified by the greater and more original writers.
These different groups of writers may be thus divided. (1) The school of natural description and elegiac moralising, consisting of Thomson, Dyer, Green, Young and other inferior writers. (2) The school of Miltonic Hellenists, begun by Warton and consisting besides of Gray, Collins, Akenside and a number of followers. (3) The school of Johnson, Goldsmith and Churchill, who continued the eighteenth-century style tho' some of them tried to infuse it with emotion, directness or greater simplicity. To this school belong the minor writers who formed the main current of verse during the time; of whom Erasmus Darwin and Gifford are the only notable ones. (4) The school of country life and the simpler feelings, consisting of Cowper and Crabbe. (5) The school of romantic poets and restorers of mediaevalism, consisting of Chatterton, Macpherson and Percy. (6) The Scotch lyric poets of whom Ferguson and Burns are the head. (7) William Blake standing by himself as a romantic, mystical and lyric poet. Besides these there are two writers who cannot be classed, Smart and Beattie. Last come the first nineteenth-century poets, who published their earliest work in 1798-1800, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Landor and Campbell.
School of Natural Description
The first to break away from Pope were Thomson and Dyer. The original departures made by their school were as follows. (1) In subject-matter an almost exclusive devotion of their poetry to the description of natural objects and natural scenery. In dealing with human emotion or human life they are generally even more incapable than the Pope school.1 There is beside a tendency to force poetry to the service of the most unpoetical subjects, Armstrong writing in verse of the Art of Medicine, Dyer of Agriculture and Thomson of jail reform. On the other hand Satire is less practised or even abandoned. (2) In language, the discarding of the idea of wit as the basis of poetry; there i no straining for wit and cleverness, but its place is taken by a pseudo-Miltonic eloquence or an attempt at Miltonic imaginativeness. The influence of Milton is paramount in these writers. (3) In metre an almost entire abandonment of the heroic couplet and the return to old metres, especially blank verse, the Spenserian stanza and the octosyllabic couplet as used by the later Elizabethans. The main influences of this school on future poetry are : (1) the habit of describing Nature for its own sake, (2) the Thomsonian form of blank verse which was afterwards adopted by Cowper and Wordsworth and improved by Shelley, (3) the use of the Spenserian stanza in narrative poetry, (4) the sense for antiquity and for the picturesque as regards ruins, (5) the habit of moralising on subjects of general human interest as opposed to those which concern towns and highly civilized society only.
The Thomsonian school however broke off suddenly about the middle of the century and was replaced by the school of Gray.
School of Gray
There are considerable differences between Gray, Collins and Akenside, who are the chief representatives of the school, but they all resemble each other in certain main tendencies. The general aim of all seems to have been to return to the Miltonic style of writing while preserving the regularity and correctness of the eighteenth-century
1 An attempt is made to reintroduce emotion and a more general appeal to all humanity, in the form of elegiac moralising on the subjects of death and decay, as shown in Dyer's Ruins of Rome and Young's Night Thoughts.
style. They attempted in other words to substitute the true classical style of writing for the pseudo-classical. By classical poetry is meant verse which with entire correctness and perfection of form, i.e. of metre and language and a careful observance of restraint, that is to say avoidance of that extravagance and excess which injure the work of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, unites a high imagination and deep emotion. This is the character of Milton's poetry, which is based upon Greek and Latin models. Pope and his school aimed at correctness and restraint without high imagination and deep emotion; their poetry is therefore not really classical. Gray, Collins and Akenside endeavoured by study of Milton and the Greek writers to recover the true classical style. They were however all greatly hampered by the traditions of eighteenth-century poetry and none of them quite succeeded.
Besides this similarity in general aim, there are several particular resemblances. First in metre. They all avoided the heroic couplet. Collins' Persian Eclogues, the work of his youth, and a few of Gray's fragments are in this metre, but in their mature and accomplished work it is not represented. Akenside wrote either in blank verse or in lyrical metres. Secondly Gray and Collins are the restorers of the English lyric; since the reign of Charles II no one had written any even decently good lyrics, if a few of Gay's and Prior's are excepted, until this school appeared. The only form of lyric however which the three writers tried were Odes, which is the most stately and the least lyrical of lyrical forms; i.e. the true lyrical stanza is always short and simple so as to express particular emotion freely and naturally; the stanza of an Ode is long and elaborate and expresses properly high and broad, not intense emotions. This restriction to the statelier lyrical forms partly results from the attempt at classical dignity. But the Augustan tradition of smooth and regular verse has also hampered the writers; the cadences are not managed with sufficient subtlety and the infinitely varied and flexible verse of Shakespeare and Milton has remained beyond their reach. Their verse at its best is on the second plane, not on the first; it shows however a great advance in freedom and variety on that of the Augustans.
Second in language. The aim of all three is at an elevated style of language, a diction more or less Miltonic. Here again none of them are successful. Akenside's elevation is mainly rhetorical, rarely.
at his best, as in the Hymn to the Naiads it is poetical; there he almost catches something of the true Miltonic tone; Gray's is marked by nobleness, strength, much real sublimity, but he is often betrayed into rhetoric tho' even then more vigorous than Akenside's and the Augustan love of epigram and antithesis often spoil his work; Collins' elevation tho' free from these faults is usually wanting in power. There is to some extent in Collins and still more in Gray a tendency to what the eighteenth century thought noble language, to the avoidance of simple and common words and phrases as below the dignity of poetry.1
Third in subject-matter. It was in this that there was the farthest departure from the eighteenth century. All the poets have a tendency to dwell on rural life and rural scenes; all turn away from town life. Both Gray and Collins, so far as they deal with Nature, deal with it in a really poetical manner, but unlike the Thomsonian school, they have not described Nature for the sake of describing it but only in connection with the thoughts or feelings suggested by it. The one exception to this is Collins' Ode to Evening. There is also an attempt to reintroduce the supernatural into poetry. This is partly done by carrying the eighteenth-century habit of personification to an almost ridiculous extreme, but more successfully by dwelling like Milton on the images of Greek mythology, as in the Hymn to the Naiads, or Gray's earlier poems, especially The Progress of Poesy; also by dwelling on the ideas of the Celtic romantic fancy, such as ghosts, fairies, spirits, as in Gray's Bard and Collins' Ode, or of Norwegian mythology, as in Gray's translations from the Norse. This impulse towards the supernatural is extremely marked in Gray and finds its way even into his humorous poems; tho' less prominent in Collins, it was sufficient to offend Johnson, the chief critic of the Pope school, who especially animadverts on it in his life of Collins and his remarks on Gray's sister Odes. Again they tried to deal with human emotion, but there also they were hampered by the Augustan tradition. They deal with it rather in an abstract than a direct manner; Collins' Ode on the Passions2 is the main instance of this abstract handling of
1 On the other hand their language is mainly imaginative and not drily intellectual like the Augustan language. 2 The Passions, an Ode for Music.
emotion which is peculiar to the school. In the same spirit they dealt with high and general feelings, especially the love of Liberty, which inspires Collins' Ode to Liberty, Gray's Bard and Progress of Poesy, and much of Akenside's writing. It is noticeable that Collins was a republican, Akenside had republican sympathies and Gray was a pronounced Whig. Over the personal emotions Collins and Akenside had no mastery, and Gray only shows it occasionally as in the Elegy and then only over the most general of all of them, the love of life and the melancholy feelings attending death.
(4) In spirit, the school departed from the critical, didactic and satiric tendency of eighteenth-century poetry; so far as their poetry teaches or criticises it is, with some exceptions, in the indirect, incidental and emotional manner proper to poetry. Even Akenside who wrote on a philosophical theme aimed at teaching poetically, tho' he did not succeed. Their poetry is inspired not by intellect and reason, but by imagination and feeling. On the other hand it must be noticed that their ideas and sentiments are always obvious and on the surface like those of the Pope school and the feeling that inspires their poetry, tho' not false, is not very deep; Collins and Akenside are extremely cold compared with poets of other periods and Gray is rather enthusiastic or at his best sublime than impassioned.1
(5) It was in the influences which governed their poetry that this school departed most radically from Pope. They rejected French influence altogether and were little influenced by the inferior Latin poets; they were above all things Hellenists, lovers and followers of Greek literature; the English poet who influenced them most was Milton, whom Johnson considers to be rough in his verse and language; Gray even declared the diction of Shakespeare to be the true poetic diction. Besides this they opened new fields of interest. Collins took an interest in late mediaeval history and literature and Gray was the first Englishman of eminence who studied the Norse language or interested himself in Welsh literature or was a competent and appreciative critic of Gothic architecture.
The Thomsonian school had a little, but only a little, influence
1 It was perhaps partly as a result of this that none of these poets was able to write much or to write long poems: Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination is the only exception and that is a failure.
on that of Gray. The Elegy carries to its highest point of perfection the vein of elegiac moralising started by Young and Dyer, Collins' Ode to Evening is a study of Nature as faithful but more sympathetic and imaginative than Thomson's descriptions; and his Ode on Popular Superstitions1 recalls several passages in the Seasons; but this is practically all.
The influences of Gray's school on future poetry consist mainly in (1) the first attempt to handle Nature in a new poetic fashion afterwards perfected by Wordsworth; (2) the reintroduction of the supernatural influencing all subsequent writers, but mainly Coleridge, Shelley and Keats; (3) the introduction of Hellenism into poetry, carried out by Keats and Shelley; and (4) the restoration of the lyric and especially the Ode form, which became a favourite one in the early nineteenth century and of the general subjects suited to the Ode form.
Later Augustan School
The Gray school exhausted itself almost as quickly as the Thomsonian school. It was followed by a reaction in favour of the eighteenth-century ideal, This movement had been already anticipated by Johnson who wrote contemporaneously with Gray and even with Thomson. It was now taken up by Goldsmith, carried on by Churchill and culminated in Erasmus Darwin.
Johnson and Goldsmith returned to the ideals of Pope, they violently opposed and disparaged Gray, they kept to the use of the heroic couplet and conventional language, to the narrowness of culture and to the exclusion of all that does not square with or proceed from the reason and intellect; their characteristics are broadly the same as the Pope school's, but there is a difference which shows that the dryness of this school could no longer satisfy the mind. In Johnson, at least in his Vanity of Wishes,2 there is a far deeper and wider tone of thought and feeling and a far greater sincerity; tho' the style is so different, the tone is almost the same as that of Gray's Elegy; in fact in tone and subject-matter it belongs to the same type of elegiac moralising as the Elegy and the Night Thoughts. Goldsmith carried
1 Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands.
2 The Vanity of Human Wishes.
this departure in tone from Pope yet farther; he wrote what were professedly didactic poems, but instead of teaching by satirical portraits [and] epigrammatic maxims, he tried to do it by touching the feelings and drawing portraits full of humour rather than wit, of natural truth and pathos rather than cleverness and eloquence. While not touching subjects of general appeal like Johnson and Gray, he goes more widely afield than Pope, dealing with foreign countries in The Traveller, with the rural life of an Irish village in The Deserted Village. [There is a sort of natural lyrical power in Goldsmith which is always breaking through the restraints of the mechanical metre and style he chose to adopt.]1 Churchill reverted to Pope far more than either Goldsmith or Johnson; he is purely satirical and has neither Goldsmith's feeling and sweetness nor Johnson's depth and strength; he is hardly a poet at all, but he also helped the disintegration of the eighteenth-century style by a complete abandonment of Pope's elaborate and rhetorical art, which he attempted to replace by a rude and direct vigour. Lastly Erasmus Darwin took the exact model of Pope's style, not only the metre and language but the very construction and balance of his sentences and reduced this and the didactic spirit to absurdity by trying to invest with poetical pomp of style and imagery a treatise on botany. This school may be considered as an attempt in various directions to make the eighteenth-century style compatible with the new impulses in poetry, the impulses towards sincerity on the one hand and sublimity on the other. In the poetry of Darwin this attempt finally breaks down. No poet of eminence except Byron afterwards attempted the style. Besides these four writers, however, there was a crowd of versifiers, of whom only Gifford need be named, who went on making feeble copies of Pope right into the nineteenth century.
1 Sentence bracketed in the original
TEST QUESTIONS
(a)
The Mediaevalists
1. Describe the nature and influence on English poetry of Percy's Reliques.
2. Sketch the career of Chatterton.
3. Describe the character of Chatterton's forgeries and estimate their effects on the value of his poetry.
4. Discuss the conflicting estimates of Chatterton's poetry.
5. What is the Ossian controversy? What stage has the controversy reached at present?
6. Macpherson's work is often condemned as empty and turgid declamation. How far is this view justified?
7. State the author and nature of the following works: Ella, an Interlude; Bristow Tragedy.
8. Who were the distinctly mediaevalist writers of the period? What was their importance in the history of the period?
*
[Draft-answers to the first three questions.]
1. 1765 Percy's Reliques.
2. Chatterton born 1752. Colston's Hospital. 1764 first Rowley forgery, Elinoure and Juga. 1767 apprenticed to Lambert. 1768-9 contributions to London magazines. 1768 attempt to get Dodsley to publish
especially Ella. 1769 attempt to interest Horace Walpole. 1770 life in London and death.
3. Speght's Glossary to Chaucer. Kersey's Dictionary.
Metres not fifteenth-century; rhymes inconsistent with fifteenth-century pronunciation; words either noted down from above1 and often incorrectly used, or invented by Chatterton himself.
1 i.e. from Speght's Glossary or Kersey's Dictionary. [Ed.]
(b)
Pope School
1. Trace the history of the classical eighteenth-century style thro' this period.
2. Describe the career of Goldsmith, or of a typical man of letters during this period.
3. Estimate Goldsmith as a poet.
4. Describe briefly the subject and character of the following poems: The Deserted Village, The Traveller, Retaliation.
5. What rank would you assign to Churchill among English satirists? Give your reasons for your answer.
6. Describe briefly the subject and character of The Rosciad, The Ghost, Gotham, The Times, The Prophecy of Famine.
*
[Incomplete draft-answer to the second question.]
1728 Goldsmith born in Ireland. Father a clergyman, the original of Dr. Primrose. Education. 1744 Dublin University. Made attempts to become clergyman, private tutor...
Where is the man whom hope nor fear can move?
Him the wise Gods approve.
The man divine of motive pure and steadfast will
Unbent to ill,
Whose way is plain nor swerves for power or gold
The high, straight path to hold:—
Him only wise the wise Gods deem, him pure of lust;
Him only just.
Tho' men give rubies, tho' they bring a prize
Sweeter than Helen's eyes —
Yea, costlier things than these things were, they shall not win
That man to sin.
Tho' the strong lords of earth his doom desire.
He shall not heed their ire,
Nor shall the numerous common's stormy voice compel
His heart nor quell.
Tho' Ocean all her purple pride unroll,
It stirs, not shakes his soul.
He sees the billows lift their cowled heads on high
With undimmed eye.
Pure fields he sees and groves of calm delight;
He turns into the night.
Hell is before; the swords await him; friends betray;
He holds his way.
He shall not fear tho' heaven in lightnings fall
Nor thunder's furious call,
Nor earthquake nor the sea: tho' fire, tho' flood assail,
He shall not quail.
Tho' God tear out the heavens like a page
And break the hills for rage,
Blot out the sun from being and all the great stars quench.
He will not blench.