Footnotes:

A more influential writer than Whately was William Gilpin, an industrious clergyman and schoolmaster, who spent his holidays wandering and sketching in the most approved parts of England, Wales and Scotland. His books on the Picturesque were long held in esteem. The earliest of them was entitledObservations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales . . . relative chiefly to picturesque beauty(1782). Others, which followed in steady succession, rendered a like service to the Lake district, the Highlands of Scotland, the New Forest, and the Isle of Wight. Those books taught the aesthetic appreciation of wild nature to a whole generation. It is a testimony to their influence that for a time they enslaved the youth of Wordsworth. InThe Preludehe tells how, in early life, he misunderstood the teaching of Nature, not from insensibility, but from the presumption which applied to the impassioned life of Nature the “rules of mimic art.” He calls this habit “a strong infection of the age,” and tells how he too, for a time, was wont to compare scene with scene, and to pamper himself “with meagre novelties ofcolour and proportion.” In another passage he speaks of similar melodramatic errors, from conformity to book-notions, in his early study of poetry.

The dignities of plain occurrence thenWere tasteless, and truth’s golden mean, a point,Where no sufficient pleasure could be found.

But imaginative power, and the humility which had been his in childhood, returned to him—

I shook the habit offEntirely and for ever.

Yet in one curious respect Gilpin’s amateur teaching did leave its mark on the history of English poetry. When Wordsworth and Coleridge chose the Wye and Tintern Abbey for their walking tour, they were probably determined in that direction by the fame of the scenery; and when they and Southey settled in the Lake district, it may be surmised that they felt other and stronger attractions than those that came from Wordsworth’s early associations with the place. The Wye, Tintern Abbey, the English Lakes, the Scottish Highlands—these were the favored places of theapostles of the picturesque, and have now become memorial places in our poetic history.

All these gardeners and aesthetic critics who busied themselves with wild nature were aiming at an ideal which had been expressed in many painted landscapes, and had been held up as the top of admiration by one of the greatest English poets. The influence of Milton on the new landscape interest must be held to be not less than the influence of his contemporaries, Salvator Rosa and Claude. His descriptions of Paradise did more than any painting to alter the whole practice of gardening. They are often appealed to, even by the technical gardeners. In garden-lore Milton was a convinced Romantic. He has two descriptions of the Garden of Eden; the slighter of the two occurs on the occasion of Raphael’s entry, and merely resumes the earlier and fuller account:

Their glittering tents they passed, and now is comeInto the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrhe,And flowering Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balme;A Wilderness of Sweets; for Nature hereWantoned as in her prime and plaid at willHer Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet,Wilde above rule or art; enormous bliss.

Coleridge has some remarks, in hisTable Talk, on Milton’s disregard of painting. There are only two pictures, he says, in Milton; Adam bending over the sleeping Eve, and the entrance of Dalilah, like a ship under full sail. Certainly the above lines are no picture; but they are more exciting than any clear delineation could be; they are full of scent, and air, and the emotions of ease and bliss. The other passage has more of architectural quality in it, and describes what first met Satan’s gaze, when he entered the Garden and sat, perched like a cormorant, upon the Tree of Life.

The crisped BrooksWith mazie error under pendant shadesRan Nectar, visiting each plant, and fedFlours worthy of Paradise which not nice ArtIn Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boonPoured forth profuse on Hill and Dale and PlaineBoth where the morning sun first warmly smoteThe open field, and where the unpierc’t shadeImbround the noontide Bowers: Thus was this place,A happy rural seat of various view:Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden RindeHung amiable,HesperianFables true,If true, here onely, and of delicious taste:Betwixt the Lawns, or level Downs, and FlocksGrasing the tender herb, were interpos’d,Or palmie hilloc, or the flourie lapOf some irriguous Valley spread her store,Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose:Another side, umbrageous Grots and CavesOf coole recess, o’er which the mantling VineLayes forth her purple Grape, and gently creepsLuxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fallDown the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake,That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crown’d,Her chrystall mirror holds, unite their streams.The Birds their quire apply; aires, vernal aires,Breathing the smell of field and grove, attuneThe trembling leaves, while UniversalPanKnit with theGracesand theHoursin danceLed on th’ Eternal Spring.

Here is all the variety of hill and valley, wood and lawn, rock and meadow, waterfall and lake, rose and vine, which the landscape artists also loved to depict, and which, together with ruined temples and castles, unknown in Paradise, became the cherished ideal of landscape gardening. By the influence ofParadise Lostupon the gardeners, no less than by the influence ofL’AllegroandIl Penserosoupon the poets, Milton may claim to be regarded asone of the forefathers of the Romantic Revival. There is no need to distinguish carefully between poetry and painting in discussing their contributions to Romance. A great outcry was raised, in the last age, against literary criticism of pictures. But in this question we are concerned with this effect of pictures on the normal imagination, which is literary, which cares for story, and suggested action, and the whole chain of memories and desires that a picture may set in motion. Do not most of those who look at a romantic landscape imagine themselves wandering among the scenes that are portrayed? And are not men prone to admire in Nature what they have been taught by Art to notice? The landscape art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries taught them to imagine themselves in lonely scenes, among old ruins or frowning rocks, by the light of sunrise or sunset, cast on gleaming lakes. These were the theatre of Romance; and the emotions awakened by scenes like these played an enormous part in the Revival. It was thus that poets were educated to find that exaltation in the terrors of mountainous regions whichGray expressed when he said: “Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry.”

The weaker side of modern Romance, the play-acting and pretence that has always accompanied it, may be seen in the gardening mania. It was not enough to be a country gentleman; the position must be improved by the added elegances of a hermit’s cell and an Egyptian pyramid. It is like children’s play; the day is long, the affairs of our elders are tedious, we are tired of a life in which there is no danger and no hunger; let us pretend that we are monks, or ancient Romans. The mature imagination interprets the facts; this kind of imagination escapes from the facts into a world of make-believe, where the tyranny and cause and effect is no longer felt. It is not a hard word to call it childish; the imagination of these early Romantics had a child’s weakness and a child’s delightful confidence and zest.

The same play activity expressed itself in literature, where an orgy of imitation ushered in the real movement. The antiquarian beginnings of Romantic poetry may be well illustratedby the life and works of Thomas Warton. He passed his life as a resident Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and devoted his leisure, which was considerable, to the study of English poetry and Gothic architecture. He was not yet thirty when, in 1757, he was elected Professor of Poetry, a post which he held for ten years. During this time he planned a complete History of English Poetry, a task which Pope and Gray in turn had contemplated and abandoned. The historical interest which is so conspicuous in early Romanticism owed not a little, it may be remarked in passing, to the initiative of Pope, who must therefore be given a place in any full genealogy of the Romantic family. Warton’sHistory, so far as it was completed, was published between 1774 and 1781, when he relaxed his efforts, and took up lesser tasks. In 1785 he was made Poet Laureate on the strength of his early poems and later scholarship. He died in 1790.

Warton’s poems are a curious study. Spenser and Milton are his masters, and he is a docile pupil. His poetry is all derivative, and might be best described as imitation poetry. ChristopherNorth said of him that “the gods had made him poetical, but not a poet,” a saying which contains the whole truth. He puts together a mosaic of phrases borrowed from his teachers, and frames them in a sentimental setting of his own. Here are some passages fromThe Pleasures of Melancholy, which, though he wrote it at the age of seventeen, does not differ in method or inspiration from the rest of his poetical work:

Beneath yon ruin’d abbey’s moss-grown pilesOft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve,Where thro’ some western window the pale moonPours her long-levell’d rule of streaming light;While sullen sacred silence reigns around,Save the lone screech-owl’s note, who builds his bow’rAmid the mould’ring caverns dark and damp,Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leavesOf flaunting ivy, that with mantle greenInvests some wasted tow’r. . . .Then, when the sullen shades of ev’ning close,Where thro’ the room a blindly-glimm’ring gleamThe dying embers scatter, far remoteFrom Mirth’s mad shouts, that thro’ th’ illumin’d roofResound with festive echo, let me sit,Blest with the lowly cricket’s drowsy dirge. . . .O come then, Melancholy, queen of thought!O come with saintly look, and steadfast step,From forth thy cave embower’d with mournful yew,Where ever to the curfeu’s solemn soundList’ning thou sitt’st, and with thy cypress bindThy votary’s hair, and seal him for thy son.

Melancholy seems not to have answered these advances. In later life Warton was a short, squat, red-faced man, fond of ale, and a cheerful talker, with a thick utterance, so that he gobbled like a turkey-cock. Some of his verses are cheerful. This is from theOde on the Approach of Summer:

Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in handWith thee lead a buxom band;Bring fantastic-footed Joy,With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy:Leisure, that through the balmy skyChases a crimson butterfly.Bring Health, that loves in early dawnTo meet the milk-maid on the lawn;Bring Pleasure, rural nymph, and Peace,Meek, cottage-loving shepherdess!

It is all like this, fluent and unnecessary. Perhaps no verses in English were ever made so exactly in the approved fashion of modern Latin verses. Warton writes pleasantly, hiscento of reminiscences is skilful, and his own epithets are sometimes happy, yet nothing comes of it. His work suggests the doubt whether any modern Latin verse, even the best, would deceive an intelligent citizen of ancient Rome.

The strange thing about the Romantic Revival is that an epidemic of this sort of imitation at last produced real poetry and real romance. The industrious simulation of the emotions begot the emotions simulated. Is there not a story told of a young officer who, having dressed himself in a sheet to frighten his fellows, was embarrassed by the company of a real ghost, bent on the same errand; and retired from the enterprise, leaving it wholly to the professional? That, at any rate, is very much what happened to the Romantic impersonators.

Another parallel may perhaps be found in the power of vulgarity to advance civilization. Take, for instance, the question of manners. Politeness is a codification of the impulses of a heart that is moved by good will and consideration for others. If the impulses are notthere, the politeness is so far unreal and insincere—a cheap varnish. Yet it is insisted on by society, and enforced by fear and fashion. If the forms are taught, the soul of them may be, and sometimes is, breathed in later. So this imitative and timid artifice, this conformity to opinions the ground and meaning of which is not fully understood, becomes a great engine of social progress. Imitation and forgery, which are a kind of literary vulgarity, were the school of Romanticism in its nonage. Some of the greater poets who passed this way went on to express things subtler and more profound than had found a voice in the poetry that they imitated.

The long debate on the so-called poems of Ossian is now ended. They are known to be a not very skilful forgery by James Macpherson. Yet their importance in literary history remains undiminished, and the life of Macpherson has a curious kind of pathos. He was the creature and victim of the Romantic movement, and was led, by almost insensible degrees, into supplying fraudulent evidence for the favorite Romantic theory that a truer and deepervein of poetry is to be found among primitive peoples. Collins’sOde on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotlandand Gray’sBardshow the literary world prepared to put itself to school to Celtic tradition. Macpherson supplied it with a body of poetry which exactly fulfilled its expectations. The crucial date in his history is his meeting in 1759 with John Home, the author of the once famous tragedy ofDouglas. In the summer of that year Home was drinking the waters at Moffat, and among the visitors assembled there found Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, then a boy of ten, and his tutor, James Macpherson, a young Highlander, shy and ambitious, who had been educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and had dabbled in verse. Home, full of the literary gossip of the hour, seized upon the opportunity to question Macpherson concerning the poems that were rumored to have survived among the Gaelic-speaking population of Scotland. In the light of what we now know it is not difficult to understand the genesis of this great European fraud. Macpherson was proud of his race, which he hadcelebrated in an heroic poem calledThe Highlander. He had interested himself in Gaelic poetry, though his knowledge of the tongue was not good, and he had by him some fragments of genuine Gaelic poems. He was flattered by Home’s appeal to him, and, feeling perhaps that the few and slight genuine poems which he could produce would hardly warrant the magnificence of his allusions to Gaelic literature, he forged a tale in poetic prose, calledThe Death of Oscar, and presented it to Home as a translation from the Gaelic. The poem was much admired, and Macpherson, unable now to retrace his steps without declaring himself a cheat, soon produced others from the same source. These were submitted to the literary society of Edinburgh, with the great Dr. Blair at its head, and were pronounced to be the wonder of the world. From this point onward, during a long and melancholy life, poor Macpherson was enslaved to the fraud which had its beginning in the shyness and vanity of his own character. He was bound now to forge or to fail; and no doubt the consciousness that it was his own work whichcalled forth such rapturous applause supported him in his labors and justified him to his own conscience. A subscription was easily raised in Edinburgh to enable him to travel and collect the remains of Celtic poetry. For a few months he perambulated the western highlands and islands, and returned to Edinburgh bringing with himFingal, a complete epic poem in six books. This was followed byTemora, in eight books, also attributed to the great Gaelic bard Ossian; and the new Celtic fashion was established.

These poems had an immense success. Everyone knows how they influenced the youth of Goethe, and captured the imagination of Napoleon. It is less surprising that they enraptured the poet Gray, and were approved by the professor Blair, for they were exactly modelled on the practice and theory of these two critics. All the fashionable doctrine of that age concerning the history of poetry was borne out by these works. Poetry, so it was held, is to be found in its perfection only in primitive society, before it is overlaid by the complexities of modern civilization. Itsmost perfect, and therefore its earliest, form, is the epic; and Dr. Blair must have been delighted to find that the laws of the epic, which he so often explained to his class in Edinburgh University, were minutely observed by the oldest of Scottish bards. He died without suspecting that the inspiration of the Ossianic poems had come partly from himself.

The belief that Celtic literature is essentially and eternally melancholy,—a belief which persisted down to the time of Matthew Arnold, also drew its strength from the poems of Ossian. Here again theory showed the way to practice. The melancholy of the Ossianic poems is not the melancholy of the Celt, but a melancholy compounded of many simples, and extracted from works that were held in high esteem in the eighteenth century—Young’sNight Thoughts, Blair’sGrave, Gray’sBard, and the soliloquies of Milton’s Satan.

Macpherson was soon challenged, and his whole life was passed in a brawl of controversy. Two famous men dismissed him contemptuously. Dr. Johnson, who knew what honesty means among scholars, treated him as an impudentimpostor. Wordsworth, who knew what simplicity means in poetry, declared that all the imagery of the poems is false and spurious. But the whole question early became a national quarrel, and the honor of Scotland was involved in it. There are signs that Macpherson would gladly have escaped from the storm he had raised. Aided by his early literary success, he became a prosperous man, held a well-paid post at court, entered Parliament, and was pensioned by the government. Still the controversy persisted. He had found it easy to take up a haughty attitude towards those hostile critics who had doubted his good faith and had asked him to produce his Gaelic originals. But now the demand for the originals came from his champions and friends, who desired to place the fame of Scotland’s oldest and greatest poet on a sure foundation. He wriggled on the hook, and more than once timidly hinted that the poems owed not a little to the poetic genius of the translator. But this half-hearted attempt to rob the great Ossian of a part of his fame stirred the Caledonian enthusiasts to a frenzy of indignation. At last,when he was no longer able to restrain his supporters, the wretched Macpherson found no escape but one. In middle age, some twenty years after his first appearance on the poetic horizon, he sat down, with a heavy heart and an imperfect knowledge of the Gaelic tongue, to forge the originals. In 1807, eleven years after his death, these were at last published. The progress of genuine Celtic scholarship during the succeeding century did the rest; and the old blind bard rejoined the mists and vapors which were the inspiration of his Muse.[78]The poems of Ossian are only one, though perhaps the most signal, instance of the forgeries which prevailed like an epidemic at the time of the Romantic Revival. Some of these, like Ireland’s Shakespeare forgeries, were little better than cold-blooded mercenary frauds. Others, like Chatterton’s Rowley Poems and Horace Walpole’sCastle of Otranto, are full of the zest and delight of play-acting. Even Coleridge’sAncient Mariner, though it is free from the reproach of forgery, is touched by thesame spirit. The severe morality of scholarship had not yet been applied to mediaeval or modern matter. Scholars are the trustees of poets; but where this trust is undertaken by men who are poets themselves, there is usually a good deal of gaiety and exuberance in its performance.

I have now traced some of the neglected sources of revived Romance, and have shown how in this movement, more notably, perhaps, than in any other great movement in literature, it was not the supply which created the demand, but the demand which created the supply. The Romantic change was wrought, not by the energy of lonely pioneers, but by a shift in public taste. Readers of poetry knew what it was they wanted, even before they knew whether it existed. Writers were soon at hand to prove that it had existed in the past, and could still be made. The weakness of vague desire is felt everywhere in the origins of the change. Out of the weakness came strength; the tinsel Gothic castle of Walpole was enlarged to house the magnanimous soul of Scott; the Sorrows of Werther gave birth toFaust.

The weakness of the Romantic movement, its love of mere sensation and sentiment, is well exhibited in its effect upon the sane and strong mind of Keats. He was a pupil of the Romantics; and poetry, as he first conceived of it, seemed to open to him boundless fields of passive enjoyment. His early work shows the struggle between the delicious swoon of reverie and the growing pains of thought. His verse, in its beginnings, was crowded with “luxuries, bright, milky, soft, and rosy.” He was a boy at the time of England’s greatest naval glory, but he thinks more of Robin Hood than of Nelson. If Robin Hood could revisit the forest, says Keats,

He would swear, for all his oaksFallen beneath the dockyard strokes,Have rotted on the briny seas.

His use of a word like “rich,” as Mr. Robert Bridges has remarked, is almost inhuman in its luxurious detachment from the human situation.

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,To cease upon the midnight with no pain.Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave.

By his work in this kind Keats became the parent and founder of the Aesthetic School of poetry, which is more than half in love with easeful death, and seeks nothing so ardently as rest and escape from the world. The epilogue to the Aesthetic movement was written by William Morris before ever he broke out from those enchanted bowers:

So with this earthly paradise it is,If ye will read aright, and pardon meWho strive to build a shadowy isle of blissMidmost the beating of the steely sea,Where tossed about all hearts of men must be,Whose ravening monsters mighty men must slay,Not the poor singer of an empty day.

Yet there is another side to the work of Keats, more wonderful in its broken promise than all the soft perfections of his tender Muse. He grew tired of imitation and ease. Weakness may exclude the world by forgetting it; only strength can conquer the world. What if this law be also the law of beauty? The thought inspires his last great attempt,the fragment ofHyperion. Men have their dynasties and revolutions; but the immortals also, whom men worship, must change to live.

So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,A power more strong in beauty.

And this power cannot be won by those who shirk the challenge of ugly facts.

O folly! for to bear all naked truths,And to envisage circumstance, all calm,That is the top of sovereignty.

As if to enforce his thought by repetition, Keats made an allegorical framework for his revised version of the poem. There he exhibits himself as wandering among the delights of the garden of this life, and indulging himself to the point of drunkenness. Awaked from his swoon, he finds himself at the steps of the temple of fame. He is told he must climb or die. After an agony of struggle he mounts to the top, and has speech there with a veiled figure, who tells him that this temple is all that has been spared in the war between the rival houses of the Gods. When he asks why hehas been saved from death, the veiled figure makes reply:

“None can usurp this height,” return’d that shade,“But those to whom the miseries of the worldAre misery, and will not let them rest.”* * * * *“Are there not thousands in the world,” said I,Encourag’d by the sooth voice of the shade,“Who love their fellows even to the death,Who feel the giant agony of the world,And more, like slaves to poor humanity,Labour for mortal good? I sure should seeOther men here, but I am here alone.”“Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries,”Rejoined that voice; “they are no dreamers weak;They seek no wonder but the human face,No music but a happy-noted voice:They come not here, they have no thought to come;And thou art here, for thou art less than they.What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe,To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing,A fever of thyself: think of the earth;What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee?What haven? every creature hath its home,Every sole man hath days of joy and pain,Whether his labours be sublime or low—The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct:Only the dreamer venoms all his days,Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve.”

In this, which is almost his last deliberate utterance, Keats expresses his sense of the futility of romance, and seems to condemn poetry itself. A condemnation of the expression of profound thought in beautiful forms would come very ill from Keats, but this much he surely had learned, that poetry, the real high poetry, cannot be made out of dreams. The worst of dreams is that you cannot discipline them. Their tragedy is night-mare; their comedy is nonsense. Only what can stand severe discipline, and emerge the purer and stronger for it, is fit to endure. For all its sins of flatness and prosiness the Classical School has always taught discipline. No doubt it has sometimes trusted too absolutely to discipline, and has given us too much of the foot-rule and the tuning-fork. But one discipline, at least, poetry cannot afford to neglect—the discipline of facts and life. The poetry that can face this ordeal and survive it is rare. Some poets are tempted to avoid the experience and save the dream. Others, who were poets in their youth, undergo the experience and are beaten by it. But the poetry which can bear all naked truth and still keep its singing voice is the only immortal poetry.

[78]For some of the facts in this account of Ossian I am indebted to Mr. J. S. Smart’s fascinating book,James Macpherson,an Episode in Literature(David Nutt, 1905).

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