LIVES

IT has been the lot of the poet Wordsworth, to receive as much abuse on the one hand, and praise on the other, as could very well be given to a man of letters, or, indeed, to any man; and it must be confessed that he wore both these honours, through a long life, with a beautiful and modest bravery. It mattered little to him, in fact, what the generality of men said of him in any way, for he knew they could neither mend nor make him as a poet, and that he must depend upon his own genius, and the inspiration of high Heaven-and upon these alone-if he would really achieve a name and a place in the literature of his country. He had no hankering after vulgar fame, that terrible disease which is fast eating up the manhood of the nation. He saw early enough in life, that fame was not the thing for which a human soul should spend its wealth and energies, and that he who built his life upon that foundation, built upon sand, and would perish in the rage of the whirlwind. He was animated by far higher motives than any mere love of fame could inspire, motives which sprang from the very depths of his moral nature, and gave weight, dignity, and solemnity to his character. He had a work to do in the world, and it was this conviction, so strongly rooted in him, which gave impulse to his efforts and armed him against his adversaries.

It is impossible, however, to form a just estimate of the value of Wordsworth's labours, without taking into the account his historic position. Appearing at a time when poetry was no longer the vocation of inspired men, but the trade of base poetasters and dry, dead formalists-unloved by the muse, and abandoned by the gods--he felt himself called upon to revive her sacred functions, and bring back to her temple the old worship and melody. This was his work, the thing he believed to be his mission; and he devoted all his powers to accomplish it.

From the death of Milton downwards, there had been born in England very few poets, deserving of the name. That grand old monarch of song closed the Augustan era of our literature, and the harp of the bards seemed to be buried with him in the tomb, never more to be unurned. He was the last of the Titans, and no man was found worthy to become the father of a new race of heroes in the domain of song, until Wordsworth appeared. It is true that the reign of Queen Anne had not been altogether barren of singers and literateurs, but they were of the filius nullius sort, and produced no lasting results. The "little man of Twickenham" certainly cannot be considered as the legitimate successor of Milton, although he is the only prominent figure standing out in that dusk twilight of time which intervenes between Milton's death and the French Revolution. For Pope was not in any high sense a poet, although he has given us one or two poems. He was not kindled at the altar of God, his soul overflowing with beauty and truth, and rejoicing in the poet's love for ali created things; neither had he any lofty aspirations, teachings, or prophetic warnings. He never went out of himself, as Milton did, falling broad and vast upon the universe, and brooding there, until he had created new worlds out of those old materiais. We find no abandonment of this sort in Pope; no loosening of the fiery wings for stellar flights up to the city of God, or for descents into the massy and magnificent "Fire Palaces of Pandemonium;" no genius, in short, of any creative kind whatever. He was a mechanical rhymster-for the most part; one who ground his thoughts into verse by the cold process of wheels and barrel handles. He was a perfect versewright. No such wares as his, so admirably dovetailed, so polished, decorous, and complete, had ever before been vended on the stalls of Par

rhymes! how regular the flow of his verse! A musical snuff-box, mathematically adjusted to its work, could not do the business more handsomely, more faultlessly! and yet, strange to say, there is no melody in Pope. His thoughts never sing, but only try to make us believe that they sing. There are so few notes in his gamut, that we are palled, in spite of ourselves, and in spite of all his clever efforts, to tempt us to enjoyment. Elliott used to say that reading Pope always gave him the headache, and no wonder; for who can bear the everlasting reiteration of the same sounds without weariness? I do not mean, however, to be unjust to Pope, who loved artifice so well that he became thoroughly artificial, and never gave his faculties fair play. The Rape of the Lock,” and “Abelard and Heloise," show that he was more than | a mechanician, when he dared trust his heart to speak, which was a rare thing with him. His spirit was nearly always in bonds; the slave and not the master of his art. His dry, precise method was a mirror also, not only of his own nature, but of the stiff and corpse-like manners and customs of his time. The very costumes of Queen Anne's reign were Popish; and the gentlefolks cut down all natural exuberances in the trees and hedges of their gardens, to make them fit their own ideas of what nature ought to be, viz., a prim, sedate, cut and dried old maid!

Pope's aim was to build himself a niche in the classics of his country; hence his extreme accuracy of expression, and the care and labour which he bestowed upon this matter. "Finished to the nails," a phrase which, once applied exclusively to the perfect execution of Greek sculpture-applies equally to Pope, in the structure of his verse. Every word was carefully selected, chiselled, smoothed, and finally hammered into the masonry. His grotto, which again was artificial, and concealed as much as possible from the light and the genial influences of heaven-his grotto, I say, where he studied was no Delphos, but a mechanic's workshop. He believed that neatness could compensate for eloquence; art for genius. Not that he was without either the one or the other; but he thought so much of the form of his poetry, that the subject matter lost its

lustre whilst it was taking shape, and radiated but a forced, artificial glitter, which would do well enough for Vauxhall, but not for the Adytum of Apollo,' or the eyes and ears of the Muses.

Nevertheless, Pope was a strong man, of a rare intellect and fancy, possessing, likewise, great power of condensation. Masculine good sense runs through all his poems, and he often precipitates, as it were, the wisdom of ages in a couplet. Had he written more prose and less verse, he would have endured longer, and found more admirers in posterity. Smart, witty, epigrammatic, sententious, and learned, he was well qualified to have made a brilliant, and, to some extent, a solid writer. His Letters, first wrongfully published by Curl, and subsequently by himself (1737); his Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis; his Preface to his edition of Shakespere; and his Treatise of the Bathos, aimed at good old Burnet's History of his own Time; show that he might have been a successful prose writer, had he devoted his talents that way. As it was, the influence he exercised over the times in which he lived, and long afterwards, was not salutary-not, at least, in a literary

sense.

His poetry, as Emerson says of Swedenborg's System of the World, "wants central spontaneity; it is dynanic, not vital; and lacks power to generate life." This is the grand fault of Pope-the fault of his nature. Even the great theme of the "Messiah" could not lift him from his stilts. He stalks for ever on the earth, proudly enough, conscious enough; but the eagle's wings are not given to him. And yet all that he does is admirable in its way, and will never be excelled or equalled. Take, for example, the "Essay on Criticism," or the "Essay on Man." There is nothing in our language to compare with them for faultless expression and sparkling beauty. Dryden-whom Pope professedly studied and followed as his master-does not furnish us with any thing half so artistic. He was naturally careless, sometimes reckless in his utterance; but he had more rough grandeur and power in him than Pope, and we can afford to pardon, on this account, the form of his poetry. Pope never sins against form, but studies it as an art. He is what the Germans call an "objective" writer, and loves

outward effect; but he never loses sight of his argument, or drops the golden chain of good sense. His sound is mostly the expression of his sense, and this is the reason why so many of his lines have become phrases in the common mouth. Nevertheless, he is dynamical, not vital. In his Preface to his "Essay on Man," he says the poem is to be considered as a "general map of man ;" and this is the true judgment of it; for it treats of any thing but man proper, and touches but the shell of the problem of man's nature, ignoring all its spirituality and the grandeur of its destiny. To quote again from Emerson, in his Criticism upon Swedenborg: "The universe is [to him] a gigantic crystal, all whose atoms and laminæ lie in uninterrupted order, and with unbroken unity, but cold and still." The publication of this poem, however, won for Pope, not admirers only, but worshippers, and made a new epoch in the poetry of the period. It took its place instantly as a classic production, and soon engendered scores of imitators by its strong individuality and influence. It was easy enough to fall into that style, but to support it by a solid underweight of metal was not so easy. Imitation, indeed, is always bad, and can do nothing. To imitate another's performance, is suicide. Each man should be himself, and ape nobody. Literary hodmen would then be less numerous. These latter persons swarmed in Pope's time, and became what is called his school. Dryden, who had far more real genius than Pope, although he frequently put it to vile purposes, to suit the vile court of his day, was neglected, and ceased to rule in the literary world. Pope had put his seal upon the contemporary minds, and was fast growing into a literary institution. He was, as I said, the founder of a school.

And surely the little bilious man was, on the whole, frank and worthy, and, for his age, may be called great, for he was the representative mind of his age. And it must not be forgotten that whilst Dryden and Swift represented a great deal of the mud and filth of that age, Pope took higher ground, and sent his arrows of satire, and withering shafts of scorn, straight to the heart of this filth, sparing neither high nor low, and making the very court, that feared not God, fear him and tremble. The Dunciad may be

called his protest againt the rascals of the rascaldom, within whose rule he so unhappily found himself. There are personalities anew in it, it is true, and pettinesses, and revelations of wounded vanity; and we may thank Pope for much of the obloquy which has been thrown around the name and profession of poetry poetry, poverty, and garrets-these are of his coinage. But it is a just satire, on the whole, and not unworthy of Juvenal. The poet in his grotto had become the scourge of the vices of his time, and found that his lash of fire could rule, where the laws, both of God and man, were powerless. Of course he had many enemies-for think how many knaves he had castigated! But he cared nothing about them. And when it was rumoured that some of the more reckless and daring amongst them, smarting under the whip of his scorn, had resolved to take satisfaction upon the poet's person, he hired a brawny Irishman to act as his servitor and protector; and whenever he appeared in public-that is, after the publication of the Dunciad-the said Irishman also appeared with him, armed with a cudgel of no mean proportions, and instructed to use it as occasion might justify.

Such was the prominent figure which Pope made in his age, that I could scarcely have said less about him than I have now done, if we are to understand his influence upon literature during a subsequent period of nearly seventy years. His imitators were so numerous, that poetry became an offence and a mockery. The lack of enthusiasm in Pope, and the severe laws which he imposed upon his art--severe, as I said, even to mechanism---served to crush every thing in the shape of high and noble feeling, every generous impulse, every natural utterance, in his followers. Add to this that morality, public virtue, religion, and whatever is holy and venerable in human nature, were blotted clean out of the high places of England, and, as a necessary consequence, had polluted the very heart of the English people, and we shall get at the secret of the decay and death of poetry during the Pope era. From the "glorious restoration," as it is called, of that Stuart, sorrowfully known to us all under the style of Charles II., down to the time of George II., this immorality reigned,

more or less, in England. It was the black, Egyptian night of our history; and we need wonder no more that poetry refused to be uttered under such circumstances. Charles II. did the work of the devil so well; piled up such mountains of vice; scattered such deadly and accursed seed broadcast over the land, that it took seventy years, as we shall see, to root it out.

Nevertheless, the muse did not quite forsake England during that time. Besides Dryden, Pope, and Swift, Young, Gay, and Arbuthnot wrote. But how petty are they all-what Lilliputs! compared with the sublime | Milton, and the meditative and spiritual Wordsworth! Between these two suns millions of such could find room, not only without diminishing their light, but really increasing their lustre by the contrast. For none of these men were poets. Given the genius for its utterance, and poetry comes by inspiration; not, however, to the impure man; that is to say, not in its highest form, fashioning itself in holy cathedral architecture, based upon the everlasting granite, pinnacled amid the golden glory that surrounds the throne of God. Lyrics and love songs, amorous tales, sung in melodious numbers, taking the heart captive by their sorceries, you may have; but not poetry appealing to the divine nature of man, ennobling his being, and thrilling him with the consciousness of his immortality. It is true, that during the period I am now speaking of, Young had written his "Night Thoughts," and that passages of startling beauty had escaped with them through the morbid gloom of his mind; but Young was no poet, although he was full of the mirage of poetry. He was neither large nor genial enough for a poet; and the general tone of his writings is thoroughly uuhealthy. A man, always brooding upon death and immortality-starting vague questions respecting the hereafter condition - riddling Infidels, Deists, Atheists-uncertain about his own salvation—a misanthrope, at least in his writings-miserablefilling all earth and heaven with alternate rejoicings and wailings of despair to whom life was a broken cistern, and man good for nothing except to be damned, if he did not believe

such a man, I say, could have little claim upon human suffrage or human

sympathy, and had no message to the world. He shines, it is true, but it is in the dark, like stars over a graveyard. No healthy shocks of life-no communications of hope, come from him. He is crushed beneath the weight of his own consciousness; he knows too much, or not enough; the latter, I should say. The inculcation of bravery, self-reliance, and the virtues which make life beautiful and holy, would have been more worthy of a poet, and have served humanity better in the long run. The Night Thoughts," however, touched a chord in the popu lar heart, which was just beginning to vibrate with a new life. It appealed, in its forced, and often forcible and even sublime way, to the religious feelings of man-feelings long since dead, and only now becoming re-animate. It was, as I said, morbid enough, and sometimes galvanic; but it was, on the whole, earnest and impassioned, containing passages, also, of real pathos; and hence the hold it took, and the popularity it acquired. Blair's “Grave" is another poem belonging to the same era, and of the same genius as the "Night Thoughts," although it is not pitched in so high a key. It is a strange mixture of health and disease; now vigorous and idiomatic; now straining painfully after effect, as if the writer were conscious of the Spirit's absence, and desired to conceal the fact by an excess of verbiage and colouring. There is a good deal of rant, too, in the

poem

very strong and earnest rant, certainly; but rant is not inspiration, and the "Grave" is no poem. It is nevertheless solemn and impressive, and invests familiar things with a religious spirit. The general acceptance of these two poems, the "Night Thoughts" and the "Grave," shows that England was returning to its old vitality.

Gay was healthier than either of these poets, and of a genial sunny nature. He did not rise so high as Young, it is true, but he was more human, dealt more with good moralities, and less with unanswerable questions. Fate and free will, dogmas and things of that breed, were not in his way. Few stars shine in his poetry, and very seldom the name of God. But he was, nevertheless, a servant of God, as all men are who hold by the ten commandments, and that other commandment, which is nearly forgotten