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ENGLISH LITERATURE

AN ILLUSTRATED RECORD

CHAPTER I

THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH

1780-1815

THE period which immediately preceded and accompanied the French Revolution was one of violent and complete transition in English literature. The long frost of classicism broke up; the sealed fountains of romantic expression forced their way forth, and then travelled smoothly on upon their melodious courses. The act of release, then, is the predominant interest to us in a general survey, and the progress of liberated romance the main object of our study. Poetry once more becomes

the centre of critical attention, and proves the most important branch of literature cultivated in England. The solitary figure of Burke attracts towards the condition of prose an observation otherwise riveted upon the singularly numerous and varied forms in which poetry is suddenly transforming itself. As had been the case two hundred years before, verse came abruptly to the front in England, and absorbed all public attention.

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George III.

After the Portrait by Allan Ramsay

Among the factors which led to the enfranchisement of the imagination, several date from the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Johnson's famous and diverting Lives of the Poets was raised as a bulwark against forces which that sagacious critic had long felt to be advancing, and which he was determined to withstand. The Aristotelian rules, the monotony of versification, the insistence abstract ideas and conventional verbiage-the whole panoply of classicism under which poetry had gone forth to battle in serried ranks since 1660 was now beginning to be discredited. The Gallic code was found insufficient, for Gray had broken up the verse; Collins had introduced a plaintive, flute-like note; Thomson had looked straight at nature; then the

VOL. IV.

A

on

The Revival of Nature.

timid protest had given scandal, while Churchill and Goldsmith had gone back to the precise tradition. But 1760-70 produced a second and stronger effort in revolt, founded on archaistic research. Antiquaries had gone dimly searching after the sources of Middle English, and Chatterton had forged the Rowley poems; Warton had glorified Spenser, and Percy had edited his inspiring Reliques. Most of all, the pent-up spirit of lyricism, that instinct for untrammelled song which the eighteenth century had kept so closely caged, had been stimulated to an eager beating of its wings by the mysterious deliverances of the pseudo-Ossian.

On the whole, this last, although now so tarnished and visibly so spurious,

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seems to have been at that time the most powerful of all the influences which made for the revival of romanticism in England. Thousands of readers, accustomed to nothing more stimulating than Young and Blair, reading the Desolation of Balclutha and Ossian's Address to the Sun with rapture, found a new hunger for song awakened in their hearts, and felt their pulses tingling with mystery and melody. They did not ask themselves too closely what the rhapsody was all about, nor quibble at the poorness of the ideas and the limited range of the images. What Gessner gave and Rousseau, what the dying century longed for in that subdued hysteria which was From an Engraving by Finden presently to break forth in political violence, was produced to excess by the vibrations of those shadowy harpstrings which unseen fingers plucked above the Caledonian graves of Fingal and Malvina. Ossian had nothing of position and solid value to present to Europe; but it washed away the old order of expression, and it prepared a clear field for Goethe, Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand.

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Cowper's Mother

But in the meantime, four poets of widely various talent arrest our attention during the last years of the century. Of these, two, Cowper and Crabbe, endeavoured to support the old tradition; Burns and Blake were entirely indifferent to it-such, at least, is the impression which their work produces on us, whatever may have been their private wish or conviction. Certain dates are of value in emphasising the practically simultaneous appearance of these poets of the transition. Cowper's Table Talk was published in 1782, and the Task in 1785. Crabbe's clearly defined first period opens with the Candidate of 1780, and closes with the Newspaper of 1785. Blake's Poetical

Sketches date from 1783, and the Songs of Innocence from 1787. If the world in general is acquainted with a single bibliographical fact, it is aware that the Kilmarnock Burns was issued in 1786. Here, then, is a solid body of poetry evidently marked out for the notice of the historian, a definite group of verse inviting his inspection and his classification. Unfortunately, attractive and interesting as each of these poets is, it is exceedingly difficult to persuade ourselves that they form anything like a school, or are proceeding in approximately the same direction. If a writer less like Crabbe than Burns is to be found in literature, it is surely Blake, and a parallel between Cowper and Burns would reduce a critic to despair. At first sight we simply

see the following general phenomena. Here is WILLIAM COWPER, a writer of great elegance and amenity, the soul of gentle wit and urbane grace, engaged in continuing and extending the work of Thomson, advancing the exact observation of natural objects, without passion, without energy, without a trace of lyrical effusion, yet distinguished from his eighteenth century predecessors by a resistance to their affected, rhetorical diction; a very pure, limpid, tender talent, all light without fire or vapour.

William Cowper

After the Picture by Sir Thomas Lawrence

William Cowper (17311800) was the son of the Rev. John Cowper and his wife Ann Donne, of good family on both sides. His father was chaplain to George II. and rector of Great Berkhampstead, where the poet was born on the 15th of November 1731. He was a very delicate child, much neglected at home after his mother's death in 1737, when he was sent for two years to a school in Market Street, Herts, where his nervous strength was permanently undermined by the bullying of one of his school-fellows. His eyes became painfully inflamed, and for two years (1739-41) he was under medical care in the house of an oculist. About the age of ten he grew stronger, and was able to be sent to Westminster School, where he played cricket and football, and, under the celebrated Latinist, Vincent Bourne, became a competent scholar. Among his friends and associates at school were Churchill, Colman, Cumberland, and Warren Hastings. Cowper remained at Westminster until 1749, when he was entered

William

Cowper.

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