EMERSON THE LECTURER.

“They trowed verelye that she shoulde dye;With thatour ladye wold her helpe and spede.”

The semicolon afterdyeshows that this is not a misprint, but that the editor saw no connection between the first verse and the second. In the same volume (p. 133) we have the verse,

“He was a grete tenement man, and ryche of londe and lede,”

and toledeMr. Hazlitt appends this note: “Lede, in early English, is found in various significations, but here stands as the plural oflad, a servant.” In what conceivable sense is it the plural oflad? And doesladnecessarily mean a servant? ThePromptoriumhasladdeglossed bygarcio, but the meaningservant, as in the parallel cases of παις,puer,garçon, andboy, was a derivative one, and of later origin. The word means simplyman(in the generic sense) and in the pluralpeople. So in the “Squyr of Low Degre,”

“I will forsake both land andlede,”

and in the “Smyth and his Dame,”

“That hath both land andlyth.”

The word wasnot“used in various significations.” Even so lately as “Flodden Ffeild” we find,

“He was a nobleleedof high degree.”

Connected withlandit was a commonplace in German as well as in English. So in theTristanof Godfrey of Strasburg,

“Er Bevalch sin liut und fin lantAn sines marschalkes hant.”

Mr. Hazlitt is more nearly right than usual when he says that in the particular case cited aboveledemeansservants. But were these of only one sex? Does he not know that even in the middle of the last century whenan English nobleman spoke of “my people,” he meant simply his domestics?

Encountering the familiar phraseNo do!(Vol. IV. p. 64), Mr. Hazlitt changes it toNot do!He informs us thatGoddes are(Vol. I. p. 197) means “God’s heir”! He says (Vol. II. p. 146): “To borrow, in the sense ofto take,to guard, orto protect, is so common in early English that it is unnecessary to bring forward any illustration of its use in this way.” But he relents, and presently gives us two fromRalph Roister Doister, each containing the phrase “Saint George to borrow!” Thatborrowmeanstakeno owner of books need be told, and Mr. Hazlitt has shown great skill inborrowingother people’s illustrations for his notes, but the phrase he quotes has no such meaning as he gives it. Mr. Dyce in a note on Skelton explains it rightly, “St. George being my pledge or surety.”

We gather a few more of these flowers of exposition and etymology:—

“The while thou sittest in chirche, thi bedys schalt thou bidde.”(Vol. I. p. 181.)

i. e. thou shalt offer thy prayers. Mr. Hazlitt’s note onbiddeis, “i. e.bead. So inThe Kyng and the Hermit, line 111:—

‘That herd an hermyte there withinUnto the gate he gan to wynBedying his prayer.’”

Precisely what Mr. Hazlitt understands bybeading(or indeed by anything else) we shall not presume to divine, but weshouldlike to hear him translate “if any man bidde the worshyp,” which comes a few lines further on. Now let us turn to page 191 of the same volume. “Maydenys ben loneliche and no thing sekir.” Mr. Hazlitt tells us in a note that “sekir or sicker” is a very common form ofsecure, and quotes in illustrationfrom the proseMorte Arthure, “A! said Sir Launcelot, comfort yourselfe, for it shall bee unto us as a great honour, and much more then if we died in any other places: for of death wee besicker.” Now in the text the word meanssafe, and in the note it meanssure. Indeedsure, which is only a shorter form ofsecure, is its ordinary meaning. “I mak sicker,” said Kirkpatrick, a not unfitting motto for certain editors, if they explained it in their usual phonetic way.

In the “Frere and the Boye,” when the old man has given the boy a bow, he says:—

“Shote therin, whan thou good thynke;For yf thou shote and wynke,The prycke thow shalte hytte.”

Mr. Hazlitt’s explanation ofwynkeis “to close one eye in taking aim,” and he quotes a passage from Gascoigne in support of it. Whatever Gascoigne meant by the word (which is very doubtful), it means nothing of the kind here, and is another proof that Mr. Hazlitt does not think it so important to understand what he reads as St. Philip did. What the old man said was, “even if you shut both your eyes, you can’t help hitting the mark.” So in “Piers Ploughman” (Whitaker’s text),

“Wynkyng, as it were, wytterly ich saw hyt.”

Again, for our editor’s blunders are as endless as the heads of an old-fashioned sermon, in the “Schole-House of Women” (Vol. IV. p. 130), Mr. Hazlitt has a note on the phrase “make it nice,”

(“And yet alwaies they bible bableOf euery matter and make it nice,”)

which reads thus: “To make it pleasant orsnug. I do not remember to have seen the word used in this sense very frequently. But Gascoigne has it in a precisely similar way:—

‘The glosse of gorgeous Courtes by thee did please mine eye,A stately sight me thought it was to see the braue go by,To see their feathers flaunte, to make [marke!] their straunge deuise,To lie along in ladies lappes, to lispe, and make it nice.’”

Tomake it nicemeans nothing more nor less than toplay the fool, or rather, tomake a fool of yourself, faire le niais. In old English the Frenchniaisandnice, from similarity of form and analogy of meaning, naturally fused together in the wordnice, which, by an unusual luck, has been promoted from a derogatory to a respectful sense. Gascoigne’slispemight have put Mr. Hazlitt on his guard, if he ever considered the sense of what he quotes. But he never does, nor of what he edits either. For example, in the “Smyth and his Dame” we find the following note: “Prowe, orproffe, is not at all uncommon as a form ofprofit. In the ‘Seven Names of a Prison,’ a poem printed inReliquiæ Antiquæ, we have,—

‘Quintum nomen istius foveæ ita probatum,A place ofprofffor man to know bothe frend and foo.’”

Nowproffandproware radically different words.Proffhere meansproof, and if Mr. Hazlitt had read the stanza which he quotes, he would have found (as in all the others of the same poem) the meaning repeated in Latin in the last line,probacio amicorum.

But we wish to leave our readers (if not Mr. Hazlitt) in good humor, and accordingly we have reserved two of his notes asbonnes bouches. In “Adam Bel,” when the outlaws ask pardon of the king,

“They kneled downe without lettyngAnd each helde vp his hande.”

To this passage (tolerably plain to those nottoofamiliar with “our early literature”) Mr. Hazlitt appends this solemn note: ‘To hold up the handwas formerly a sign of respect or concurrence, or a mode of taking an oath;and thirdly as a signal for mercy. In all these senses it has been employed from the most ancient times; nor is it yet out of practice, as many savage nations still testify their respect to a superior by holding their hand [eithertheir handsorthe hand, Mr. Hazlitt!] over their head.Touching the hatappears to be a vestige of the same custom. In the present passage the three outlaws may be understood to kneel on approaching the throne, and to hold up each a hand as a token that they desire to ask the royal clemency or favour. In the lines which are subjoined it [what?] implies a solemn assent to an oath:

‘This swore the duke and all his men,And all the lordes that with him lend,And tharto to[33]held they up thaire hand.’”Minot’s Poems, ed. 1825, p. 9.

The admirable Tupper could not have done better than this, even so far as the mere English of it is concerned. Where all is so fine, we hesitate to declare a preference, but, on the whole, must give in to the passage abouttouching the hat, which is as good as “mobbled queen.” The Americans are still among the “savage nations” who “imply a solemn assent to an oath” by holding up the hand. Mr. Hazlitt does not seem to know that the question whether to kiss the book or hold up the hand was once a serious one in English politics.

But Mr. Hazlitt can do better even than this! Our readers may be incredulous; but we shall proceed to show that he can. In the “Schole-House of Women,” among much other equally delicate satire of the other sex (if we may venture still to call them so), the satirist undertakes to prove that woman was made, not of the rib of a man, but of a dog:—

‘And yet the rib, as I suppose,That God did take out of the manA dog vp caught, and a way goseEat it clene; so that as thanThe woork to finish that God beganCould not be, as we haue said,Because the dog the rib connaid.A remedy God found as yet;Out of the dog he took a rib.”

Mr. Hazlitt has a long note onway gose, of which the first sentence shall suffice us: “The origin of the term way-goose is involved in some obscurity.” We should think so, to be sure! Let us modernize the spelling and grammar, and correct the punctuation, and then see how it looks:—

“A dog up caught and away goes,Eats it up.”

We will ask Mr. Hazlitt to compare the text, as he prints it, with

“Into the hall he gose.” (Vol. III. p. 67.)

We should have expected a note here on the “hall he-goose.” Not to speak of the point of the joke, such as it is, a goose that could eat up a man’s rib could only be matched by one that could swallow such a note,—or write it!

We have made but a small florilegium from Mr. Hazlitt’s remarkable volumes. His editorial method seems to have been to print as the Lord would, till his eye was caught by some word he did not understand, and then to make the reader comfortable by a note showing that the editor is as much in the dark as he. We are profoundly thankful for the omission of a glossary. It would have been a nursery and seminary of blunder. To expose pretentious charlatanry is sometimes the unpleasant duty of a reviewer. It is a duty we never seek, and should not have assumed in this case but for the impertinence withwhich Mr. Hazlitt has treated dead and living scholars, the latchets of whose shoes he is not worthy to unloose, and to express their gratitude to whom is, or ought to be, a pleasure to all honest lovers of their mother-tongue. If he who has most to learn be the happiest man, Mr. Hazlitt is indeed to be envied; but we hope he will learn a great deal before he lays his prentice hands on Warton’s “History of English Poetry,” a classic in its own way. If he does not learn before, he will be likely to learn after, and in no agreeable fashion.

IT is a singular fact, that Mr. Emerson is the most steadily attractive lecturer in America. Into that somewhat cold-waterish region adventurers of the sensational kind come down now and then with a splash, to become disregarded King Logs before the next season. But Mr. Emerson always draws. A lecturer now for something like a third of a century, one of the pioneers of the lecturing system, the charm of his voice, his manner, and his matter has never lost its power over his earlier hearers, and continually winds new ones in its enchanting meshes. What they do not fully understand they take on trust, and listen, saying to themselves, as the old poet of Sir Philip Sidney,—

“A sweet, attractive, kind of grace,A full assurance given by looks,Continual comfort in a face,The lineaments of gospel books.”

We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees are thought to be fond of the spread-eagle style, and nothing can be more remote from that than his. We are reckoned a practical folk, who would rather hear about a new air-tight stove than about Plato; yet our favorite teacher’s practicality is not in the least of the Poor Richard variety. If he have any Buncombe constituency, it is that unrealized commonwealth of philosophers which Plotinus proposed to establish; and if he were to make an almanac, his directions to farmers wouldbe something like this: “October:Indian Summer; now is the time to get in your early Vedas.” What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he out-Yankees us all? that his range includes us all? that he is equally at home with the potato-disease and original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over-soul? that, as we try all trades, so has he tried all cultures? and above all, that his mysticism gives us a counterpoise to our super-practicality?

There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses,—none whom so many cannot abide. What does he mean? ask these last. Where is his system? What is the use of it all? What the deuse have we to do with Brahma? I do not propose to write an essay on Emerson at this time. I will only say that one may find grandeur and consolation in a starlit night without caring to ask what it means, save grandeur and consolation; one may like Montaigne, as some ten generations before us have done, without thinking him so systematic as some more eminently tedious (or shall we say tediously eminent?) authors; one may think roses as good in their way as cabbages, though the latter would make a better show in the witness-box, if cross-examined as to their usefulness; and as for Brahma, why, he can take care of himself, and won’t bite us at any rate.

The bother with Mr. Emerson is, that, though he writes in prose, he is essentially a poet. If you undertake to paraphrase what he says, and to reduce it to words of one syllable for infant minds, you will make as sad work of it as the good monk with his analysis of Homer in the “Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum.” We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom our age has produced, and there needs no better proofof it than his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds. Search for his eloquence in his books and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith of language he belongs to a better age than ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and Browne,—though he does use that abominable wordreliable. His eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely as his I know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold. The many cannot miss his meaning, and only the few can find it. It is the open secret of all true genius. It is wholesome to angle in those profound pools, though one be rewarded with nothing more than the leap of a fish that flashes his freckled side in the sun and as suddenly absconds in the dark and dreamy waters again. There is keen excitement, though there be no ponderable acquisition. If we carry nothing home in our baskets, there is ample gain in dilated lungs and stimulated blood. What does he mean, quotha? He means inspiring hints, a divining-rod to your deeper nature. No doubt, Emerson, like all original men, has his peculiar audience, and yet I know none that can hold a promiscuous crowd in pleased attention so long as he. As in all original men, there is something for every palate. “Would you know,” says Goethe, “the ripest cherries? Ask the boys and the blackbirds.”

The announcement that such a pleasure as a new course of lectures by him is coming, to people as old as I am, is something like those forebodings of spring that prepare us every year for a familiar novelty, none the less novel, when it arrives, because it is familiar. Weknow perfectly well what we are to expect from Mr. Emerson, and yet what he says always penetrates and stirs us, as is apt to be the case with genius, in a very unlooked-for fashion. Perhaps genius is one of the few things which we gladly allow to repeat itself,—one of the few that multiply rather than weaken the force of their impression by iteration? Perhaps some of us hear more than the mere words, are moved by something deeper than the thoughts? If it be so, we are quite right, for it is thirty years and more of “plain living and high thinking” that speak to us in this altogether unique lay-preacher. We have shared in the beneficence of this varied culture, this fearless impartiality in criticism and speculation, this masculine sincerity, this sweetness of nature which rather stimulates than cloys, for a generation long. If ever there was a standing testimonial to the cumulative power and value of Character, (and we need it sadly in these days,) we have it in this gracious and dignified presence. What an antiseptic is a pure life! At sixty-five (or two years beyond his grand climacteric, as he would prefer to call it) he has that privilege of soul which abolishes the calendar, and presents him to us always the unwasted contemporary of his own prime. I do not know if he seem old to his younger hearers, but we who have known him so long wonder at the tenacity with which he maintains himself even in the outposts of youth. I suppose it is not the Emerson of 1868 to whom we listen. For us the whole life of the man is distilled in the clear drop of every sentence, and behind each word we divine the force of a noble character, the weight of a large capital of thinking and being. We do not go to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear Emerson. Not that we perceive any falling-off in anything that ever was essential to the charm of Mr. Emerson’s peculiar style of thoughtor phrase. The first lecture, to be sure, was more disjointed even than common. It was as if, after vainly trying to get his paragraphs into sequence and order, he had at last tried the desperate expedient ofshufflingthem. It was chaos come again, but it was a chaos full of shooting-stars, a jumble of creative forces. The second lecture, on “Criticism and Poetry,” was quite up to the level of old times, full of that power of strangely-subtle association whose indirect approaches startle the mind into almost painful attention, of those flashes of mutual understanding between speaker and hearer that are gone ere one can say it lightens. The vice of Emerson’s criticism seems to be, that while no man is so sensitive to what is poetical, few men are less sensible than he of what makes a poem. He values the solid meaning of thought above the subtler meaning of style. He would prefer Donne, I suspect, to Spenser, and sometimes mistakes the queer for the original.

To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life; yet there are some of us who would hardly consent to be young again, if it were at the cost of our recollection of Mr. Emerson’s first lectures during the consulate of Van Buren. We used to walk in from the country to the Masonic Temple (I think it was), through the crisp winter night, and listen to that thrilling voice of his, so charged with subtle meaning and subtle music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship that came with unhoped-for food and rescue. Cynics might say what they liked. Did our own imaginations transfigure dry remainder-biscuit into ambrosia? At any rate, he brought uslife, which, on the whole, is no bad thing. Was it all transcendentalism? magic-lantern pictures on mist? As you will. Those, then, were just what we wanted. But it was not so. The delight and the benefit were that he put us in communication witha larger style of thought, sharpened our wits with a more pungent phrase, gave us ravishing glimpses of an ideal under the dry husk of our New England; made us conscious of the supreme and everlasting originality of whatever bit of soul might be in any of us; freed us, in short, from the stocks of prose in which we had sat so long that we had grown wellnigh contented in our cramps. And who that saw the audience will ever forget it, where every one still capable of fire, or longing to renew in them the half-forgotten sense of it, was gathered? Those faces, young and old, agleam with pale intellectual light, eager with pleased attention, flash upon me once more from the deep recesses of the years with an exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, brimming with love and hope, wholly vanished now in that other world we call the Past, or peering doubtfully through the pensive gloaming of memory, your light impoverishes these cheaper days! I hear again that rustle of sensation, as they turned to exchange glances over some pithier thought, some keener flash of that humor which always played about the horizon of his mind like heat-lightning, and it seems now like the sad whisper of the autumn leaves that are whirling around me. But would my picture be complete if I forgot that ample and vegete countenance of Mr. R—— of W——,—how, from its regular post at the corner of the front bench, it turned in ruddy triumph to the profaner audience as if he were the inexplicably appointed fugleman of appreciation? I was reminded of him by those hearty cherubs in Titian’s Assumption that look at you as who should say, “Did you ever see a Madonna likethat? Did you ever behold one hundred and fifty pounds of womanhood mount heavenward before like a rocket?”

To some of us that long-past experience remains as the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emersonawakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless what breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of “Chevy Chase,” and we in Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called to us with assurance of victory. Did they say he was disconnected? So were the stars, that seemed larger to our eyes, still keen with that excitement, as we walked homeward with prouder stride over the creaking snow. And weretheynot knit together by a higher logic than our mere sense could master? Were we enthusiasts? I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth something for once in our lives. If asked what was left? what we carried home? we should not have been careful for an answer. It would have been enough if we had said that something beautiful had passed that way. Or we might have asked in return what one brought away from a symphony of Beethoven? Enough that he had set that ferment of wholesome discontent at work in us. There is one, at least, of those old hearers, so many of whom are now in the fruition of that intellectual beauty of which Emerson gave them both the desire and the foretaste, who will always love to repeat:—

“Che in la mente m’è fitta, ed or m’accuoraLa cara e buona immagine paternaDi voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad oraM’insegnavaste come l’uom s’eterna.”

I am unconsciously thinking, as I write, of the third lecture of the present course, in which Mr. Emerson gave some delightful reminiscences of the intellectual influences in whose movement he had shared. It was like hearing Goethe read some passages of the “ Wahrheit aus seinem Leben.” Not that there was not a littleDichtung, too, here and there, as the lecturer built up so lofty a pedestal under certain figures as to lift theminto a prominence of obscurity, and seem to masthead them there. Everybody was asking his neighbor who this or that recondite great man was, in the faint hope that somebody might once have heard of him. There are those who call Mr. Emerson cold. Let them revise their judgment in presence of this loyalty of his that can keep warm for half a century, that never forgets a friendship, or fails to pay even a fancied obligation to the uttermost farthing. This substantiation of shadows was but incidental, and pleasantly characteristic of the man to those who know and love him. The greater part of the lecture was devoted to reminiscences of things substantial in themselves. He spoke of Everett, fresh from Greece and Germany; of Channing; of the translations of Margaret Fuller, Ripley, and Dwight; of the Dial and Brook Farm. To what he said of the latter an undertone of good-humored irony gave special zest. But what every one of his hearers felt was that the protagonist in the drama was left out. The lecturer was no Æneas to babble thequorum magna pars fui, and, as one of his listeners, I cannot help wishing to say how each of them was commenting the story as it went along, and filling up the necessary gaps in it from his own private store of memories. His younger hearers could not know how much they owed to the benign impersonality, the quiet scorn of everything ignoble, the never-sated hunger of self-culture, that were personified in the man before them. But the older knew how much the country’s intellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus of his teaching and example, how constantly he had kept burning the beacon of an ideal life above our lower region of turmoil. To him more than to all other causes together did the young martyrs of our civil war owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism that is so touching in every record of their lives. Those who aregrateful to Mr. Emerson, as many of us are, for what they feel to be most valuable in their culture, or perhaps I should say their impulse, are grateful not so much for any direct teachings of his as for that inspiring lift which only genius can give, and without which all doctrine is chaff.

This was something like thecaretwhich some of us older boys wished to fill up on the margin of the master’s lecture. Few men have been so much to so many, and through so large a range of aptitudes and temperaments, and this simply because all of us value manhood beyond any or all other qualities of character. We may suspect in him, here and there, a certain thinness and vagueness of quality, but let the waters go over him as they list, this masculine fibre of his will keep its lively color and its toughness of texture. I have heard some great speakers and some accomplished orators, but never any that so moved and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of undertow in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our minds from their foothold into deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is a long-studied artist in these things) does the deliberate utterance, that seems waiting for the fit word, appear to admit us partners in the labor of thought and make us feel as if the glance of humor were a sudden suggestion, as if the perfect phrase lying written there on the desk were as unexpected to him as to us! In that closely-filed speech of his at the Burns centenary dinner every word seemed to have just dropped down to him from the clouds. He looked far away over the heads of his hearers, with a vague kind of expectation, as into some private heaven of invention; and the winged period came at last obedient to his spell. “My dainty Ariel!” he seemed murmuring to himself as he cast down his eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy ofapproval and caught another sentence from the Sibylline leaves that lay before him ambushed behind a dish of fruit and seen only by nearest neighbors. Every sentence brought down the house, as I never saw one brought down before,—and it is not so easy to hit Scotsmen with a sentiment that has no hint of native brogue in it. I watched, for it was an interesting study, how the quick sympathy ran flashing from face to face down the long tables, like an electric spark thrilling as it went, and then exploded in a thunder of plaudits. I watched till tables and faces vanished, for I, too, found myself caught up in the common enthusiasm, and my excited fancy set me under thebemalistening to him who fulmined over Greece. I can never help applying to him what Ben Jonson said of Bacon: “There happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke.” Those who heard him while their natures were yet plastic, and their mental nerves trembled under the slightest breath of divine air, will never cease to feel and say:—

“Was never eye did see that face,Was never ear did hear that tongue,Was never mind did mind his grace,That ever thought the travail long;But eyes, and ears, and every thought,Were with his sweet perfections caught.”

IN 1675 Edward Phillips, the elder of Milton’s nephews, published hisTheatrum Poetarum. In his Preface and elsewhere there can be little doubt that he reflected the æsthetic principles and literary judgments of his now illustrious uncle, who had died in obscurity the year before.[34]The great poet who gave to English blank verse the grandeur and compass of organ-music, and who in his minor poems kept alive the traditions of Fletcher and Shakespeare, died with no foretaste, and yet we may believe as confident as ever, of that “immortality of fame” which he tells his friend Diodati he was “meditating with the help of Heaven” in his youth. He who may have seen Shakespeare, who doubtless had seen Fletcher, and who perhaps personally knew Jonson,[35]lived to see that false school of writers whom he qualified as “good rhymists, but no poets,” at once the idols and the victims of the taste they had corrupted. As he saw, not without scorn, how they found universal hearing, while he slowly won his audience fit though few, did he ever think of the hero of his own epic at the ear of Eve? It is not impossible; but however that may be, he sowed in his nephew’s book the dragon’s teeth of that long war which, after the lapse of a century and ahalf, was to end in the expulsion of the usurping dynasty and the restoration of the ancient and legitimate race whose claim rested on the grace of God. In the following passage surely the voice is Milton’s, though the hand be that of Phillips: “Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse, even elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing; true native poetry is another, in which there is a certain air and spirit, which, perhaps, the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly apprehend; much less is it attainable by any art or study.” The man who speaks of elegancy as coming nearest, certainly shared, if he was not repeating, the opinions of him who thirty years before had said that “decorum” (meaning a higher or organic unity) was “the grand masterpiece to observe” in poetry.[36]

It is upon this text of Phillips (as Chalmers has remarked) that Joseph Warton bases his classification of poets in the dedication to Young of the first volume of his essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, published in 1756. That was the earliest public and official declaration of war against the reigning mode, though private hostilities and reprisals had been going on for some time. Addison’s panegyric of Milton in the Spectator was a criticism, not the less damaging because indirect, of the superficial poetry then in vogue. His praise of the old ballads condemned by innuendo the artificial elaboration of the drawing-room pastoral by contrasting it with the simple sincerity of nature. Himself incapable of being natural except in prose, he had an instinct for the genuine virtues of poetry as sure as that of Gray. Thomson’s “Winter” (1726) was a direct protest against the literature of Good Society, going as it did to prove that the noblest society was that of one’s own mind heightened by the contemplation of outwardnature. What Thomson’s poetical creed was may be surely inferred from his having modelled his two principal poems on Milton and Spenser, ignoring rhyme altogether in the “Seasons,” and in the “Castle of Indolence” rejecting the stiff mould of the couplet. In 1744 came Akenside’s “Pleasures of Imagination,” whose very title, like a guide-post, points away from the level highway of commonplace to mountain-paths and less domestic prospects. The poem was stiff and unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births, and without it the “Lines written at Tintern Abbey” might never have been. Three years later Collins printed his little volume of Odes, advocating in theory and exemplifying in practice the natural supremacy of the imagination (though he called it by its older name of fancy) as a test to distinguish poetry from verse-making. The whole Romantic School, in its germ, no doubt, but yet unmistakably foreshadowed, lies already in the “Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands.” He was the first to bring back into poetry something of the antique fervor, and found again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant without being pedantically cold. A skilled lover of music,[37]he rose from the general sing-song of his generation to a harmony that had been silent since Milton, and in him, to use his own words,

“The force of energy is found,And the sense rises on the wings of sound.”

But beside his own direct services in the reformation of our poetry, we owe him a still greater debt as the inspirer of Gray, whose “Progress of Poesy,” in reach, variety, and loftiness of poise, overflies all other English lyrics like an eagle. In spite of the dulness of contemporary ears, preoccupied with the continuous humof the popular hurdy-gurdy, it was the prevailing blast of Gray’s trumpet that more than anything else called men back to the legitimate standard.[38]Another poet, Dyer, whose “Fleece” was published in 1753, both in the choice of his subject and his treatment of it gives further proof of the tendency among the younger generation to revert to simpler and purer models. Plainlyenough, Thomson had been his chief model, though there are also traces of a careful study of Milton.

Pope had died in 1744, at the height of his renown, the acknowledged monarch of letters, as supreme as Voltaire when the excitement and exposure of his coronation-ceremonies at Paris hastened his end a generation later. His fame, like Voltaire’s, was European, and the style which he had carried to perfection was paramount throughout the cultivated world. The new edition of the “Dunciad,” with the Fourth Book added, published the year before his death, though the substitution of Cibber for Theobald made the poem incoherent, had yet increased his reputation and confirmed the sway of the school whose recognized head he was, by the poignancy of its satire, the lucidity of its wit, and the resounding, if somewhat uniform march, of its numbers. He had been translated into other languages living and dead. Voltaire had long before pronounced him “the best poet of England, and at present of all the world.”[39]It was the apotheosis of clearness, point, and technical skill, of the ease that comes of practice, not of the fulness of original power. And yet, as we have seen, while he was in the very plenitude of his power, there was already a widespread discontent, a feeling that what “comes nearest,” as Phillips calls it, may yet be infinitely far from giving those profounder and incalculable satisfactions of which the soul is capable in poetry. A movement was gathering strength which prompted

“The age to quit their clogsBy the known rules of virtuous liberty.”

Nor was it wholly confined to England. Symptoms of a similar reaction began to show themselves on the Continent, notably in the translation of Milton (1732) and the publication of theNibelungen Lied(1757) by Bodmer, and the imitations of Thomson in France. Was it possible, then, that there was anything better than good sense, elegant diction, and the highest polish of style? Could there be an intellectual appetite which antithesis failed to satisfy? If the horse would only have faith enough in his green spectacles, surely the straw would acquire, not only the flavor, but the nutritious properties of fresh grass. The horse was foolish enough to starve, but the public is wiser. It is surprising how patiently it will go on, for generation after generation, transmuting dry stubble into verdure in this fashion.

The school which Boileau founded was critical and not creative. It was limited, not only in its essence, but by the capabilities of the French language and by the natural bent of the French mind, which finds a predominant satisfaction in phrases if elegantly turned, and can make a despotism, political or æsthetic, palatable with the pepper of epigram. The style of Louis XIV. did what his armies failed to do. It overran and subjugated Europe. It struck the literature of imagination with palsy, and it is droll enough to see Voltaire, after he had got some knowledge of Shakespeare, continually endeavoring to reassure himself about the poetry of thegrand siècle, and all the time asking himself, “Why, in the name of all the gods at once, is thisnotthe real thing?” He seems to have felt that there was a dreadful mistake somewhere, when poetry must be called upon to prove itself inspired, above all when it must demonstrate that it is interesting, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Difficulty, according to Voltaire, is the tenth Muse, but how if there were difficulty in reading as well as writing? it was something, at any rate, which an increasing number of persons were perverse enough to feel in attemptingthe productions of a pseudo-classicism, the classicism of red heels and periwigs. Even poor old Dennis himself had arrived at a kind of muddled notion that artifice was not precisely art, that there were depths in human nature which the most perfectly manufactured line of five feet could not sound, and passionate elations that could not be tuned to the lullaby seesaw of the couplet. The satisfactions of a conventional taste were very well in their own way, but were they, after all, the highest of which men were capable who had obscurely divined the Greeks, and who had seen Hamlet, Lear, and Othello upon the stage? Was not poetry, then, something which delivered us from the dungeon of actual life, instead of basely reconciling us with it?

A century earlier the school of thecultistshad established a dominion, ephemeral, as it soon appeared, but absolute while it lasted. Du Bartas, who may, perhaps, as fairly as any, lay claim to its paternity,[40]had been called divine, and similar honors had been paid in turn to Gongora, Lilly, and Marini, who were in the strictest sense contemporaneous. The infection of mere fashion will hardly account satisfactorily for a vogue so sudden and so widely extended. It may well be suspected that there was some latent cause, something at work more potent than the fascinating mannerism of any single author in the rapid and almost simultaneous diffusion of this purely cutaneous eruption. It is not improbable that, in the revival of letters, men whose native tongues had not yet attained the precision and grace only to be acquired by long literary usage, should have learned from a study of the Latin poets to value the form abovethe substance, and to seek in mere words a conjuring property which belongs to them only when they catch life and meaning from profound thought or powerful emotion. Yet this very devotion to expression at the expense of everything else, though its excesses were fatal to the innovators who preached and practised it, may not have been without good results in refining language and fitting it for the higher uses to which it was destined. Thecultistswent down before the implacable good sense of French criticism, but the defect of this criticism was that it ignored imagination altogether, and sent Nature about her business as an impertinent baggage whose household loom competed unlawfully with the machine-made fabrics, so exquisitely uniform in pattern, of the royal manufactories. There is more than a fanciful analogy between the style which Pope brought into vogue and that which for a time bewitched all ears in the latter half of the sixteenth century. As the master had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, so the disciples endeavored to escape from what was common. This they contrived by the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They called everything something else. A boot with them was

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