No More Learning

During the time when he was loyally endeavouring to repay
his uncle's -kindness by adopting some profession, he partly
suspended his 'long-poem’ writing. But, in the last years of
the century, he produced many smaller pieces, generally good,
sometimes all but consummate and really important to history.
There is still rubbish : many of those poems on the slave trade
which have gone some way towards avenging the poor African by
the boredom if not anguish which they have inflicted on the white
brethren of his oppressors; Botany Bay Eclogues (but, indeed,
these were earlier and contemporary with Wat Tyler), the much
ridiculed, and, no doubt, wrongly constructed, sapphics and dac-
tylics, which reflect the same temper. But, especially during his
sojourn at Westbury, near Bristol, he also wrote lyrics and ballads
of very much greater value. Here, in 1798, was composed that
admirable Holly-Tree which softened even Hazlitt, and which,
with My days among the Dead are passed, twenty years later,
shows Southey at his very best both as a poet and as a man.
But the most important productions of this time, if not the
best, were the Ballads. Most of the best of these were written
· Letters, vol. II, p. 354.


## p. 160 (#182) ############################################

160
Southey
[CH.
between 1796 and 1798; and, although none of them possesses
anything like the poetical power of The Ancient Mariner, it is
nearly certain that Southey preceded Coleridge in his appreciation
and practice of the ballad principle of anapaestic equivalence in
mainly iambic measures, though he may have followed others,
from Anstey down to Lewis, in adopting the pure anapaest. From
another point of view, he deserves the credit of blending the spirit
of the then popular terror-novel with touches of humour, so as to
produce the effect for which there is, perhaps, no single word ex-
cept the French macabre. This, which was afterwards pushed still
further by Hood, Praed and Barham, has provided English with a
sort of hybrid style, capable of easy degeneration in various ways,
but, at its best, almost peculiar and quite delectable. Southey
himself was sometimes content with the mere singsong of the
eighteenth century ballad, and sometimes overstepped the
treacherous line which keeps ghastly humour from bad taste.
But, in divers instances, such as The Cross Roads, Bishop Hatto
and the famous Old Woman of Berkeley, he has hit the white;
while, in less mixed modes, The Well of St Keyne, The Inchcape
Rock, the almost famous Battle of Blenheim and, perhaps, Queen
Orraca should be added to his tale of complete successes. From
the point of view of form, they had a most powerful influence in
loosening the bonds of eighteenth century metre; and, from that
of combined form and matter, they exercised the same influence
more widely. It ought never to be forgotten, though it too often
is, that Southey was particularly influential in the days when better
poets of his own age were still forming themselves and when other
better poets, younger as well as better, had not produced anything.
Yet, all this was itself the work of a very young man; in the
earlier cases,
of a mere boy; and, when Southey returned to the
long poem with Thalaba (1801, but very long in hand), he was only
six- or seven-and-twenty. But this was not only by far the most
ambitious, it was, also, though less important and much less well in-
spired than the Ballads, the most audaciously experimental of the
work he had yet tried. Rimeless metres outside the regular blank
verse were, of course, not absolutely novel in English. Campion
had tried them and gone near to beauty two centuries earlier ;
Collins had tried them in the last generation and gone nearer ;
just before Southey himself and Frank Sayers (v. inf. ) had used
them on a larger scale. But nobody had adventured a really
long poem in them. Southey did, and with the same remarkable
appreciation of metrical theory as well as practice which he had
1


## p. 161 (#183) ############################################

VIII]
Thalaba
161
a
shown in the ballad case. The great danger of unrimed verse in
English is that (from that natural tendency of the language which
showed itself as early as Chaucer's prose) it will fall into more or
less complete and continuous iambic decasyllables, unless it is
arranged, either into somewhat un-English line-moulds as it had
been by Campion, or into very definitely marked and identical
stanzas, as it had been by Collins—with the result, in both cases,
of a monotony which would be intolerable in a long poem. Sayers
had notoriously fallen into the trap, as have, since, Matthew Arnold
and W. E. Henley. Southey, with his eyes open to it, determined
that he would avoid it, and he did. Thalaba, though not quickly
admired, was much liked by good wits of his own generation, and
not without reason. The story is by no means uninteresting and,
if not exactly the characters, the situations are good. There are
far finer passages in it than in Joan of Arc; indeed, some of the
incidents, and more of the descriptions, are really poetical. But
the unfamiliarity and aloofness of the whole thing are not carried
off by the diable au corps of Vathek or the sheer story interest of
The Arabian Nights themselves; and the unrimed versification
perpetually harasses and hampers the reader as something, per-
haps, admirable, but, somehow, not enjoyable—in other words, as
a disappointment and a mistake.
Besides Joan of Arc and the Minor Poems written before and
during the Westbury sojourn, Southey, in 1794, had collaborated
with Coleridge in the worthless Fall of Robespierre, and with his
other brother-in-law, Lovell, in a small collection of lesser verse.
He had also issued the first of his many volumes of prose as
Letters from Spain and Portugal (1797). This, without Wat
Tyler, then unpublished, but with Thalaba, made more than half-
a-dozen volumes in hardly more than as many years. But a longer
gap occurred-one, indeed, of four years—till, though he did not
quite know it, he had settled down at Keswick, and started on the
career which was only to close with his death, and to leave plentiful
matter for posthumous publication. In 1805, however, he re-
appeared with two volumes of verse-Metrical Tales and Madoc.
The former contained not a little of the nondescript, but acceptable,
work above described ; the latter, which had been many years on
the stocks, was introduced with a flourish ('Come, for ye know me!
I am he who sung'), warranted by classical precedents rather
than in accordance with the modesty expected from English poets.
Although, like Thalaba, it sold very slowly and disappointed the
hopes which the reception of the far inferior Joan of Arc had
11
a
a
E, L, XL.
CH. VIII.


## p. 162 (#184) ############################################

162
[ch.
Southey
و ن ): نه
raised in its author, it was very much admired by no common
judges; and there are, I believe, one or two among the now in-
frequent readers of Southey who rank it highly. To others, the
peculiar curse referred to above seems to rest on it. The adven-
tures of the son of Owen Gwyneth in his own land and in Mexico
are neither uninteresting nor ill-told. But some rebellious minds
cannot away with the vehicle of telling-
This is the day when in a foreign grave
King Owen’s relics shall be laid to rest-
and are wholly unable to perceive anything in it to be desired
above ‘This is the day when King Owen’s relics shall be laid to
rest in a foreign grave. '
There can, however, be no doubt that Madoc greatly raised
Southey's position as a poet; for Scott was only beginning, the
world would not have anything of Wordsworth's, Coleridge was
silent and the greater, younger poets had not begun. In the next
seven or eight years before his appointment to the laureateship in
1813, he produced his very best works, in verse and prose re-
spectively, The Curse of Kehama and The Life of Nelson; he
joined (1809) The Quarterly Review, which was almost his main
source of income for the rest of his life (though, for a very few
years, he drew considerable sums from Ballantyne's Annual
Register); he began the mightiest of all his works, The History of
Brazil (1810–19), originally planned as merely a part of a still
huger History of Portugal, and (besides revising the old transla-
tions of Amadis and Palmerin and executing the charming one
of The Chronicle of the Cid) he wrote two popular miscellanies, as
they may be termed, The Letters of Espriella (1807) and Omniana
(1812).
As a historian and reviewer, Southey may be considered here
generally; some remarks on the two lighter books may follow; but
Kehama and the Nelson cannot be left without separate notice.
If almost the widest possible reading, a keen curiosity and interest
in the things both of life and literature, common sense tempered by
humour, unwearying application, a disposition, if with some foibles
and prejudices, on the whole singularly equable and amiable and
an altogether admirable style, could make a good historian and a
good reviewer, Southey ought to have been one of the very best of
both classes. It would, perhaps, be too much to say that he actually
1 His observed knowledge of human nature was extraordinary. The wonderful and
should-be famous letter about Hartley Coleridge as a child is the master document of
this; but there are hundreds of others.
!


## p. 163 (#185) ############################################

VIII]
As Historian and Reviewer
163
was.
6
In history, he was apt to attack too large subjects, and to
exhibit, in dealing with them, a certain absence of that indefinable
grasp of his subject which the historian requires in order to grasp his
reader. Episodes, as in the later Expedition of Orsua (1821), or
short statements, as in Nelson itself, he could manage admirably;
and, for this reason, his reviews are much better than his histories,
though it is not easy to judge the former exhaustively, since they
have never been collected and are believed to be, in some cases,
impossible of identification. But the magisterial style which the
early Reviews affected (though he himself sometimes protested
against it) was rather a snare to Southey, and it cannot be said
that his best work is there.
The two productions of a lighter character mentioned above
deserve a place on that shelf or in that case of books for occasional
reading with which the wise man should always provide himself.
Southey's earlier Letters from Spain and Portugal were written
before he had thoroughly mastered his own inimitable style: but
those, two years later, ‘from England,' assigned to an imaginary
young Spaniard Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, are much better.
They belong to a wellknown class, and, no doubt, cannot compete with
the work of such masters in that class as Montesquieu or Goldsmith.
But they contain, perhaps, a more accurate picture of English ways
in the very beginning of the nineteenth century than exists anywhere
else, as well as some curiosities, such as the accounts of Brothers
and Joanna Southcott. Omniana has interest of a different kind
or kinds. It is not (as it has been sometimes pronounced to
be) a mere commonplace-book : it is a commonplace-book made
original. The enormous store of reading which supplied the post-
humous Commonplace Books of the author, and which was more
substantively utilised in The Doctor, does, indeed, supply the
texts; but, for the most part, if not always, these are retold or, at
least, commented on in that author's own words. An additional
piquancy undoubtedly lies in the fact that Coleridge undertook to
be, and, to a small extent, was, a contributor; though, as usual, he
defaulted save to that small extent. To anyone who reads the
book for a first time, or even for a second or a third, at an interval
long enough to allow him to forget the exact whereabouts or subjects
of Coleridge's contributions, it is no small amusement to stumble on
the Estesian 'proofs. ' No prose can be pleasanter to read or more
suitable to its wide range of subjects than Southey's; but, when
you come to such a sentence as ‘A bull consists in a mental juxta-
position of incongruous ideas with the sensation but without the
a
>
11–2


## p. 164 (#186) ############################################

164
Southey
[CH.
sense of connection' you know that another than Southey has been
there.
It might not be a bad question from the point of view of the
arrest of hasty criticism: 'What rank would you have accorded to
Southey as a poet, if he had left no long poem but the best parts
of Thalaba and The Curse of Kehama, and no short ones but the
half-dozen ballads and lyrics noticed above? ' It is difficult to see how
even the positive verdict could have been anything but a very high
estimate indeed; while nine critics out of ten would probably have
added that “If Southey had been permitted or had cared to pursue
poetry further, there is no knowing, etc. ' In almost all respects but
one, Kehama is invulnerable. The verse stanzas of the Thalaba
kind, but longer, more varied and rimed, are extremely effective.
The story, in itself, is interesting and well managed; the conclusion
is positively dramatic; the characters have at least epic, if not
dramatic, sufficiency. As for pure poetry of execution, anybody who
denies this to the curse itself, to Landor's favourite picture of the
'gem-lighted city' and to a dozen other passages, is either blind by
nature or has made himself so by prejudice. But the one excepted
point remains—the injudicious choice of subject and the attempt
to make it more acceptable by a mass of quasi-learned notes. It
is said by Englishmen who have taught orientals that, to them, if
you can elicit their genuine feeling, western romance, especially of
the supernatural kind, appears simply absurd—the most passionate
passages evoking shouts of laughter. It is certain that, except in
the rarest cases and under the most skilful treatment, Hindu
romance, especially of the supernatural kind, has, to western
readers, an element not so much of absurdity as of extravagance
and boredom which it is possible for very few to get over. That,
and that only, is the weak point of The Curse of Kehama.
It is not easy to say anything new about The Life of Nelson;
in fact, it would be impossible to do so without availing oneself of
mere rhetoric or mere paradox epigram, both of which are absolutely
foreign to the book itself. The Life established itself, if not im-
mediately, very soon, as, perhaps, the best short biography of a plain
and straightforward kind in the English language; it has held that
position almost unchallenged till a very recent period; and it may
be said, without offence, that the charges since brought against it
have certainly not weakened, if they have not even positively
strengthened, its position. For, all that anyone has been able to
make good against Southey is that he was not in possession of all
the documents on the subject; that he was not a professional


## p. 165 (#187) ############################################

VIII]
The Life of Nelson
165
seaman or strategist; and that, on some disputed points of fact or
opinion, it is possible to hold views different from his. What has
not been shown and, it may be said without fear, cannot be shown,
is that the most abundant technical knowledge of naval, or the
most recondite study of military, affairs could have bettered such
a book as this; that the points of disputed opinion cannot possibly be
accepted as Southey accepts them; or that material advantage
could have been obtained for such a book as this from the docu-
ments that could not be consulted. The specification of it might
be put, after Aristotelian fashion, thus : 'A short, clear, well
written narrative displaying Nelson's acts and showing forth his
character, with all necessary accuracy of fact, with sympathy not
too partial or indiscriminate, in such a manner as to make the
thing for ever a record of heroism and patriotism in the past,
and a stimulus to them in the future. ' The great majority
of competent judges, some of them by no means inclining to
Southey's way of thought in political or other senses, has
unhesitatingly declared the material part of this specification
to be amply achieved. As for the formal or literary part, there
never has been even one such judgment which has failed to pro-
nounce The Life of Nelson such a model of the more modern
'middle style,' with capacities of rising to something grander, as
hardly exists elsewhere. The scale saved the writer from his own
fatal fancy for quartos, and from the opportunities of prolixity and
divagation which quartos bring with them ; his own patriotism, in
which he was the equal of Chatham or of Nelson himself, gave the
necessary inspiration ; his unwearied industry made him master of
details even to the extent of avoiding any serious technical blunders;
and those quaint flashes of the old Jacobinism which have been
noticed occur just often enough to prevent the book from having
the air of a mere partisan pamphlet. These things, with Southey’s
own sauce of style, were enough to give us a somewhat larger and
more important Agricola ; and we have it here.
From the time of the publication of Nelson, which was also
that of Southey's laureation, he had thirty years of life allowed
him, and at least five-and-twenty of life in full possession of his
faculties. During the whole of this last-named period, he worked
in the portentous fashion more than once described in his letters,
practically taking up the whole of his time from waking to sleep-
ing, except that allotted to meals (but often encroached upon)
and to a little exercise. This work was by no means, as it has been
absurdly described, 'compiling and translating from the Spanish,'


## p. 166 (#188) ############################################

166
[CH.
Southey
but its results cannot be very fully commented on here. His
Quarterly reviewing was, fortunately (for it provided his main
income), continuous: and, after a time, was very well paid, the
regular 'ten guineas a sheet' passing into comfortable lump sums
of fifties and hundreds. But he never fully reconciled himself to
it; and there were unpleasant misunderstandings about the editor-
ship in the interregnum between Gifford's and Lockhart's. The
taskwork of the laureateship (of which, in accepting it, he had
thought himself relieved, but which continued for, at any rate,
some years) he hated still more, but discharged with almost too great
conscientiousness, the chief results being the unluckily named Lay
of the Laureate on princess Charlotte's wedding, and the unluckily
composed Vision of Judgment on George III's death. As to the
latter, it is enough to caution the unwary against concluding from
the undoubted cleverness of Byron's parody-attack, that Southey's
original is worthless. The English hexameters may be a mistake,
but they are about the best of their special pattern of that
probably hopeless form; and the substance, though displaying,
occasionally, the want of tact which now and then beset the author,
is, sometimes, very far from contemptible. But the occasions
when Pegasus has shown his true form in official harness are, as is
too well known, of the rarest; and Southey's work does not furnish
one of the exceptions.
To complete the notice of his poetry: in 1814, he had published
another long poem which, as was usual with him, had been on
the stocks for a great while, had been much altered and more than
once renamed. It appeared, finally, as Roderick the last of the Goths
and is probably the best of his blank verse epics, but does not quite
escape the curse above mentioned. The Poet's Pilgrimage to
Waterloo is not in blank verse; but here, also, especially after read-
ing his pleasant letters on the journey and the home-coming, the
old question may be asked. He was, even at this time, beginning
two other pieces of some length—A tale of Paraguay, which ap-
peared ten years later, in 1825, and which is of good quality, and
Oliver Newman, which was only posthumously published, and adds
little to his fame. Had he, in fact, produced much great poetry
in the hardly existing intervals of his task-work in prose, he would
have been unlike any poet of whom time leaves record. But
a few of his smaller pieces, especially that admirable one noticed
above and written (1818) in his library, are poetry still. The last
independent volume of verse which he issued was Al for Love
(1829); but he collected the whole of his poems published earlier,


## p. 167 (#189) ############################################

VIII]
Miscellaneous Prose
167
in ten volumes (1837–8), almost at the close of his working
life.
The prose itself gave frequent nourishing and invigorating crops,
if nothing of the rarest fruit. The Life of John Wesley (1821)
is not much inferior to that of Nelson: the differences are chiefly
that it has a less interesting subject and is longer. The History
of the Peninsular War (1823–32)—second of the big histories on
which he spent and, indeed, wasted much time—failed of success,
as was common with him, partly by his own fault, but much more
by his ill-luck. It was his fault that he set himself against
the duke of Wellington's wishes with that supererogatory con-
scientiousness which was one of his main failings, and thus lost an
almost indispensable support; it was his misfortune that, owing
to the pressure of bread-winning work, it was not finished till
after the appearance of Napier's much more brilliant and pro-
fessional, though, perhaps, not altogether trustworthy, book. But
it is much to be regretted that, in place of this, we have not a
Life of George Fox and one of Warren Hastings, on which,
according to his wont, he wasted much time in preparation,
and which would almost certainly have been very good.
The same mixture of fault and fate from the first beset some
more original productions of the same period—The Book of
the Church (1822), Vindiciae Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1826), Col-
loquies (1828), rather unfairly described in Macaulay's essay, and
Essays Moral and Political (1834), part of which was Rickman's
work. All were quite admirably written, as, indeed, Macaulay
himself confesses, Colloquies especially containing passages of
almost consummate execution; and the caution above given as to
Byron may be repeated in reference to their matter. But Southey's
defects as a political writer have been frankly acknowledged
already, and he suffered from the same defects, or others like
them, in matters ecclesiastical. He had entirely got over his early
unorthodoxy, here, also, on important points ; but, even in his ortho-
doxy, there was a good deal of private misjudgment; and he carried
the disapproval of Roman catholicism, and of all forms of protestant
dissent, which, when held and expressed moderately, is logically
incumbent on an Anglican, to fantastic and extravagant lengths.
Fortunately, these things were succeeded in his last decade, while
it was yet time—not merely by an edition of Cowper, which, though
prevented by insuperable obstacles from being quite complete,
is, in the circumstances, a most remarkable example of combined
industry and judgment, but, also, by two original works: one, The
Lives of the Admirals, which has been almost universally admitted


## p. 168 (#190) ############################################

168
[ch.
Southey
mous.
to contain delightful matter, admirably told, and another, almost
an opus maximum, which has not been so fortunate.
Few books, indeed, have been the subjects of more different
judgments than Southey's last, unfinished and, indeed, unfinishable
work The Doctor, in seven volumes (1837—47), part being posthu-
It has been pronounced by some to be actually delightful
and by others to be intolerably dull. An impartial, experienced and
acute thirdsman, even without knowing the book, would, in such a
case, perceive easily enough that there must be something in it
which appeals strongly to one taste or set of tastes and does not
appeal to, or actually revolts, another. Yet, inasmuch as the tastes
and appreciations to which The Doctor appeals are positive, and those
to which it does not appeal are negative, it seems that the admirers
have the most to say for themselves. The book has been called 'a
novel,' which it certainly is not; "a commonplace-book' pure and
simple, which it, as certainly, is not; and 'a miscellany,' which it,
as certainly, is. But the last description is, perhaps, as inadequate
as the two former are incorrect. To speak with critical accuracy,
materials of the most apparently heterogeneous sort, derived from
the author's vast reading, are in it digested into a series, as it were,
of articles, the succession of which is not without a certain con-
tiguity of subject between each pair or batch, while the whole
is loosely strung on a thread, now thicker now thinner, of personal
narrative. This last history, of Dr Daniel Dove of Doncaster
and his horse Nobs, seems, originally, to have been a sprout of
Coleridge's brain; but, if it ever had, as such, any beginning, middle
or end, they are certainly not recorded or retained in any regular
fashion here. The extraction, early and later homes, marriage,
horse-ownership and other circumstances of the titular hero serve
as starting-points for enormous, though often very ingeniously
connected, divagations which display the author's varied interests,
his quaint humour and his unparalleled reading. To a person
who wants a recognisable specimen of a recognised department of
literature; to one, who, if not averse from humour, altogether
abhors that nonsense-humour which Southey loved, and which his
enemy Hazlitt valiantly championed as specially English; to any-
one who does not take any interest in literary quodlibeta, The
Doctor must be a dull book, and may be a disgusting one. To
readers differently disposed and equipped, it cannot but be de-
lightful. Attempts have sometimes been made at compromise, by
excepting from condemnation, not merely the famous Story of the
Three Bears, but the beautiful descriptions of the Yorkshire dales,
the history of the cats of Greta hall and other things. But the


## p. 169 (#191) ############################################

VIII]
His Letters
169
fact is that, to anybody really qualified to appreciate it, there is
hardly a page of The Doctor which is not delightful.
To understand, not merely this his last book, but Southey
himself, it is expedient and almost necessary that the immense
mass of his letters (even as it is, but partially published) should
be perused; and any reader who is not daunted by mere bulk may
be assured of agreeable, as well as profitable, reading. Neither
his son's collection, in six volumes, nor his son-in-law's, in four,
(somewhat more fully and freely given) is very judiciously edited,
and there is, in the latter especially, considerable duplication; but
those to his second wife were more fortunate, and, from the three
collections, with very little trouble, the man, and a very different
man from some conceptions of him, becomes clear? Coleridge's
ingeniously epigrammatic and rather illnaturedly humble remark
'I think too much to be a poet: he [Southey] too little to be a
great poet' has a certain truth, though one might retort that think-
ing too much neither prevented The Ancient Mariner and Kubla
Khan or Christabel from being great poetry nor, indeed, makes
any particular appearance in them? Except in the moral line,
Southey was not a philosopher: but neither was he the common-
place Philistine that he is often thought to have been. Like
some other men, he obtained the desires of his heart-family life
and a life of letters-only to find that the gods seldom fail to
condition their gifts, if not exactly with curses, with taxes and
fees like those over which he groaned in reference to his earthly
pensions. There are evidences in his letters not merely of deep
sentiment but even of a tendency to imaginative speculation; but
neither was 'in the day's work,' and so he choked the former down
with stoicism, the second with common sense. In such an un-
broken debauch of labour as that to which he subjected himself,
it is marvellous that he should have done such things as he did.
And most marvellous of all is his style, which—not, as has been
said, quite attained at first—was very soon reached, and which,
in all but fifty years of incessant and exorbitant practice, never
became slipshod or tbreadbare or wanting in vitality.
Therefore, whatever may be his shortcomings, or, to put it more
exactly, his want of supremacy, it must be a strangely limited
history of English literature in which a high position is not
1 It is unfortunate that only scraps, though very amusing and acute scraps, from
the letters of his principal correspondent, Grosvenor Bedford, have been published.
Those of another remarkable friend, Rickman, have been very recently drawn upon for
publication.
? It is fair to Coleridge to say that his acknowledgment of Southey's superiority as
a prose-writer was unqualified.


## p. 170 (#192) ############################################

170
Southey
[CH.
allowed to Southey. For, in the first place,'as/ must be once more
repeated, he has actual supremacy in one particular department
and period of English prose style. It is difficult to imagine any
future time, at which his best and most characteristic, though least
mannered, achievements in this way can ever become obsolete-
precisely because of their lack of mannerism. And this must be
credited to him as a pure gift of individual genius, though he
stands in the race and lineage of a perhaps still greater writer of
his own class, as to whom more presently. For this extraordinary
combination of clearness and ease will not come by observation, or
even by reading the fourteen thousand books which constituted
Southey's library. Such a polyhistor, for variety, for excellence of
matter and for excellence of form, it may be doubted whether any
other language possesses.
If not quite such high praise can be given to his verse, it is
not in regard to form that he fails. On the contrary, there are
strong reasons for assigning to him the first clear perception of
the secret of that prosodic language which almost everybody was
to practise in Southey's own time and ever since. Whether, in actual
date, his early ballads preceded The Ancient Mariner and the first
part of Christabel in the use of substitution, it may be difficult to
decide absolutely; though, even here, the precedence seems to be
his. But, what is absolutely certain is that his formulation of the
principle in a letter to Wynn is twenty years earlier in time
than Coleridge's in the preface to the published Christabel and
very much more accurate in statement. There are many other
references to res metrica in his work, and it is a curious addition
to the losses which the subject suffered by the non-completion
of Jonson's and Dryden's promised treatises, that Guest's English
Rhythms, which was actually sent to him for review, reached him
too late for the treatment which he, also, designed. And, in general
criticism, though his estimate of individual work was sometimes
(not often) coloured by prejudice, he was very often extraordinarily
original and sound. For a special instance, his singling out of
Blake's 'Mad Song' may serve; for a general, the fact that, as
early as 1801, he called attention to the fact that
there exists no tale of romance that does not betray gross and unpardonable
ignorance of the habits of feeling and thought prevalent at the time and in
the scene,
thereby hitting the very blot which spoils nearly all the novel-
writing of the time, and which was first avoided by Scott, much later.
To those who have been able to acquire something of what has
· Letters, vol. I, p. 173.
>


## p. 171 (#193) ############################################

VIII] Southey and Dryden 171
been called 'a horizontal view of literature-a thing even better,
perhaps, than the more famous 'Pisgah sight,' inasmuch as the
slightly deceptive perspective of distance is removed, and the
things pass in procession or panorama before the eye-there are,
with, of course, some striking differences, more striking resem-
blances in the literary character and the literary fates of Southey
and Dryden. The comparison may, at first sight, be exclaimed
against, and some of its most obvious features—such as the charges
of tergiversation brought against both—are not worth dwelling on.
But there are others which will come out and remain out, all the
more clearly the longer they are studied. The polyhistoric or
professional man-of-letters character of both, though equally
obvious, is not equally trivial. Both had a singularly interchange-
able command of the two harmonies of verse and prose; and, in
the case of no third writer is it so difficult to attach any 'ticket'
to the peculiar qualities which have placed the prose style of each
among the most perfect in the plain kind that is known to English.
Their verse, when compared with that of the greater poets of their
own time—Milton in the one case, half a dozen from Coleridge to
Keats in the other has been accused, and can hardly be cleared,
of a certain want of poetical quintessence. Dryden, indeed, was as
much Southey's superior intellectually as, perhaps, he was morally
his inferior: and, neither as poet nor as prose writer, has the later
of the pair any single productions to put forward as rivals to An
Essay of Dramatick Poesie, All for Love, the great satires, the
best parts of the Prefaces, and the best Fables. He will, therefore,
perhaps, never recover, as Dryden, to a great extent, has re-
covered, from the neglect which lay upon him from about 1830
to about 1880. In regard to Southey, this attitude was begun,
not by Byron or Hazlitt or his other contemporary detractors
—who really held him very high as a writer, though they might
dislike him in other ways—but by the more extreme romantics
of a younger generation, and by persons like Emerson. That it
will be wholly removed, or removed to the same extent as the
neglect of Dryden has been, would, perhaps, be too much to expect.
But there is still much that should and can be done in the way
of altering or lessening it; and a sign or two of willingness to
help in the work, has, perhaps, recently been noticeable.
i It is, however, a rather unfortunate revenge of the whirligig of time that, while
Southey's detractors, in his own day, usually made him out to be a very bad man of
genins, some of his rehabilitators seem to see in him a very good man of no genius
at all.


## p. 172 (#194) ############################################

172
[CH.
Lesser Poets
LESSER POETS OF THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
It has been thought proper to group, round or under Southey,
like gunboats under the wings of a 'mother' frigate, certain lesser
poets of the mid- and later eighteenth century, notice of whom may
continue that given to others of their kidney in previous volumes.
It would, indeed, be possible, without very extravagant fanciful-
ness, or wiredrawing, to make out more than an accidental or
arbitrary connection between him and at least some of them.
For, beyond all doubt, he was much indebted to Anstey for patterns
of light anapaestic verse, and more so to Sayers for an example
of rimelessness. Long before he knew Coleridge, he, also, felt that
curious influence of Bowles's Sonnets which supplies one main
historical vindication and reason for existence to minor poetry.
Hayley was his friend and Merry his acquaintance. His connection
with Hanbury Williams is, indeed, a sort of ‘back-handed' one;
for he tells us that he had refused, twenty years before its actual
appearance, to edit the existing collection of Williams's Poems,
disapproving of their contents; and this disapproval would cer-
tainly have extended, perhaps in a stronger form, to Hall Stevenson.
But these are points which need no labouring. Moreover, which
is strictly to the purpose, he was himself all his life distinguished
by a catholic and kindly taste which he showed not only to
minorities of his own time from Kirke White downwards, but in
collecting three agreeable volumes", of seventeenth and eighteenth
century writers to follow Ellis's Specimens. These volumes may
still, in no unpleasant fashion, revive half-forgotten memories of
Amherst and Boyse and Croxall, of Fawkes and Woty and William
Thompson, while they may suggest once more, if, perhaps, in vain,
the removal of more absolute forgetfulness if not original ignorance,
in the cases of Constantia Grierson and Mary Leapor, of Moses
Mendez and Samuel Bellamy.
For such as these last, however, only a chronicle planned on
the scale of L'Histoire Littéraire de la France and destined to
be finished, if ever, in a millennium, could well find room. We may
notice here Anstey, Hanbury Williams and Hall Stevenson among
writers distinctly earlier than Southey; Darwin, Hayley, the Della
Cruscans, Bowles, Sayers and one or two more among his actual
contemporaries, older and younger.
1 To himself, they gave a good deal of trouble—as usual, because he had thought
to spare himself some by devolving part of the work on Grosvenor Bedford. He never
did it again.
ef
a


## p.
173 (#195) ############################################

vin]
Anstey
173
The three lighter members of the group, Anstey, Stevenson and
Hanbury Williams, were by far the eldest: if Williams had not died
prematurely, he would have been a man of over sixty at Southey's
birth, and, though Anstey lived to the year of Madoc, he was fifty
when Southey was born. All three, in a manner, were survivals of
the school of sarcastic and social verse which had been founded by
Prior and Swift, and taken up by Gay. Nor did Anstey, though
his verse is somewhat ‘freer' than taste has permitted for nearly
a century, exceed limits quite ordinary in his own day. He is
remarkable as being, in poetry, a 'single-speech' writer, that is to
say as having, like Hamilton himself, by no means confined himself
to a single utterance, but as having never achieved any other that
was of even the slightest value. An Etonian and a Cambridge man
of some scholarship; a squire, a sportsman and a member of
parliament, Anstey, in 1766, produced the famous New Bath
Guide, a series of verse letters, mainly in anapaests of the Prior
type, which at once became popular, and which still stands
preeminent, not merely among the abundant literature which
Bath has produced or instigated, for good humour, vivid painting
of manners, facile and welladapted versification, and fun which
need not be too broad for any but a very narrow mind. Anstey
lived, chiefly in the city of which he had made himself the laureate,
for forty years, and wrote much, but, as has been said, produced
nothing of worth after this history of 'The Bl[u]nd[e]rh[ea]d
Family' and their adventures.
A charitable epigrammatist has divided 'loose’ writers of any
merit at all into those who sometimes follow the amusing across
the border of the indecent and those who, in the quest of the
indecent, sometimes hit upon the amusing. If Anstey deserves
the indulgence of the former class, Hanbury Williams and Hall
Stevenson must, it is feared, be condemned to, and by, the latter.
It is true that, in Williams's case, some doubt has been thrown on
the authorship of the grossest pieces attributed to him, and that
most other things recorded of him-except a suspected showing of
the white feather-are rather favourable. He appears, both in
Horace Walpole's letters and in Chesterfield's, as a man extremely
goodnatured and unwearied in serving his friends. It is certain,
however, that the suicide which terminated his life was preceded,
and probably caused, by a succession of attacks of mental disease;
and, in some of the coarsest work assigned to him in the singularly
uncritical hodgepodge of his Works, a little critical kindness may
a


## p. 174 (#196) ############################################

174
[CH.
Hanbury Williams
trace that purely morbid fondness for foulness which mental
disease often, if not always, brings with it. On the whole,
however, Williams's asperity and his indecency have both been
exaggerated. He took part ardently on the side of Sir Robert in
the 'great Walpolian battle' and was never weary of lampooning
Pulteney. But his most famous 'skits'—those on Isabella, duchess
of Manchester, and her way of spending her morning and her
subsequent marriage to the Irishman Hussey—are neither very
virulent nor very 'improper. ' The fault of Williams's political
and social verse is a want of concentration and finish. In these
points, the notes which his editor (Lord Holland? ) gathered
from Horace Walpole in prose are frequently far superior to
the verse they illustrate. But the verse itself is full of flashes
and phrases, some of which have slipped into general use, and
many of which are far superior to their context. Compared with
the brilliant political verse, first on the whig, then on the tory,
side, of the last twenty years of the century, Sir Charles is pointless
and dull; but, in himself, to anyone with a fair knowledge of the
politics and persons of the time, he is far from unamusing. Some-
times, also, he could (if the Ballad in Imitation of Martial,
'Dear Betty come give me sweet kisses,' written on Lord and Lady
Ilchester, be his) be quite goodnatured, quite clean and almost as
graceful as Prior or Martial himself.
The notorious John Hall Stevenson, Sterne's Eugenius, master
of 'Crazy Castle' and author of Crazy Tales, had, beyond all
doubt, greater intellectual ability than Williams; and, though
eccentric in some ways, was neither open to the charge, nor
entitled to plead the excuse, of insanity. He wrote a good deal of
verse-much of it extremely slovenly in form, though, every now
and then as in the lines on Zachary Moore, the description of
the Cleveland deserts at the back of his house and of the house
itself and some others—showing a definite poetical power, which
was far above Sir Charles. But the bulk of his work consists
either of political squibs largely devoted to abuse of Bute (Fables
for Grown Gentlemen, Makarony Tales, etc. ) or of the ‘Crazy'
compositions above referred to. The former, for a man of such
wellauthenticated wit as Stevenson, are singularly verbose, de-
sultory and dull. If anyone has derived his ideas of what political
satire ought to be, say, from Dryden in an earlier, and Canning in a
later, age, he will be woefully disappointed with A Pastoral Cordial
and A Pastoral Puke, which, between them, fill eighty or ninety


## p. 175 (#197) ############################################

3.
ਦੇ!
VIII] Hall Stevenson, Darwin 175
mortal pages, and contain hardly a line that could cheer a friend
or gall an enemy. A very few purely miscellaneous pieces like the
lines to 'the Pumproom Naiad,' Polly Lawrence of Bath, show,
once more, that, if Stevenson had chosen to be goodnatured and
clean, he might have been a very pleasant poet. As for Crazy
Tales, some of them are actual French fabliaux of the coarser
kind translated or adapted, and the rest are imitations of the
same style. It would be unfair to bring up La Fontaine against
them; but anyone who knows, say, the nearly contemporary
gauloiseries of Chamfort—himself neither the most amiable, nor
the cleanest minded, nor the most poetical of men-will find
English at a painful disadvantage in the prosaic brutality of too
much of Stevenson's work. He, sometimes, succeeds even here in
being amusing; but, much more often, he only succeeds in proving
that, if the use of proper words will not by itself produce wisdom,
the use of improper ones will still less by itself produce wit.
માં
to
th
+
2
1
1
Who now reads Erasmus Darwin? Yet he pleased both Horace
Walpole and William Cowper, his verses were called by the latter
'strong, learned and sweet,' and by the former 'sublime,''charm-
ing,' 'enchanting,' 'gorgeous,''beautiful and ‘most poetic. It
is idle to assign Darwin's poetic extinction to Canning's parody,
admirable as that is, for, if there is one critical axiom univer-
sally endorsed by good critics of all ages, schools and principles,
it is that parody cannot kill—that it cannot even harm-any-
thing that has not the seeds of death and decay in itself. The
fact is that Darwin, with a fatal, and, as if metaphysically aided,
certainty, evolved from the eighteenth century couplet poetry all
its worst features, and set them in so glaring a light that only
those still under the actual spell could fail to perceive their
deformity. Unsuitableness of subject; rhetorical extravagance
and, at the same time, convention of phrase; otiose and pad-
ding epithet; monotonously cadenced verse; every fault of the
mere imitators of Pope in poetry, Darwin mustered in The
Botanic Garden, and especially in its constituent The Loves of
the Plants. It is true, but it is also vain, to say that the subject,
in itself, is interesting and positively valuable; that the rhetoric,
the phraseology, the effort, are all very craftsmanlike examples of
crafts bad in themselves. The very merits of the effort are faults
as and where they are; and it has none of the faults which, in
true poetry, are not seldom merits. Although one would not lose
The Loves of the Triangles for anything, it is superfluous as a
3
]


## p. 176 (#198) ############################################

176
Darwin, Hayley
[CH.
mere parody. The Loves of the Plants is a parody in itself and of
itself, as well as of the whole school of verse which it crowned and
crushed. Time is not likely to destroy, and may rather increase,
the credit due to Darwin's scientific pioneership: its whirligig is
never likely to restore the faintest genuine taste for his pseudo-
poetry.
For Darwin's opus, however, one cannot, though it may, at
first sight, seem inconsistent to say so, feel actual contempt. It is
simply a huge, and, from one point of view, a ludicrous, but still a
respectable, and, from another point of view, almost lamentable,
mistake. The works of Hayley, the other great idol of the decadence
of eighteenth century poetry, are contemptible. The Loves of the
Plants is not exactly silly. The Triumph of Temper is. That
puerility and anility which were presently to find, for the time, final
expression in the Della Cruscan school, displayed themselves in
Hayley with less extravagance, with less sentimentality and with
less hopelessly bad taste than the revolutionary school were to
impart, but still unmistakably. Hayley himself, as his conduct to
Cowper and to Blake shows, was a man of kindly feelings; indeed,
everybody seems to have liked him. He was something of a
scholar, or, at the worst, a fairly wellread man. His interests
were various and respectable. But, as a poet, he is impossible.
Southey, in deprecating one of Coleridge's innumerable projects-
a general criticism of contemporaries (which would certainly, if
we may judge from the wellknown review of Maturin's Bertram
in Biographia, have been a field of garments rolled in blood)
specified Hayley as a certain, but halfinnocent, victim, urging
that there is nothing bad about the man except his poetry. '
Unfortunately, on the present occasion, nothing about the man
concerns us except his poetry; and the badness, or, at least, the
nullity, of that it is impossible to exaggerate. A fair line may be
found here and there; a fair stanza or passage hardly ever; a good,
or even a fair poem, never.
>
For the nadir of the art, however-which, as if to justify
divers sayings, was reached just before the close of the eighteenth
century, and just before those ascents to the zenith which illus-
trated its actual end, and the early nineteenth-one must go beyond
Darwin, beyond even Hayley, to Robert Merry and those about
him to the school commonly called the Della Cruscans, from the
famous Florentine academy to which Merry actually belonged, and


## p. 177 (#199) ############################################

VIII]
The Della Cruscans
177
the title of which he took as signature. Darwin, as has been said,
is a pattern of mistaken elaborateness, and Hayley one of well-
intentioned nullity. But Darwin was not imbecile; and Hayley
was not, or not very, pretentious. The school just referred to was
preceded in its characteristics by some earlier work, such as that
of Helen Maria Williams and Sir James Bland Burgess (later
(om
Sir James Lamb). But, in itself, it united pretentiousness and
imbecility after a fashion not easy to parallel elsewhere; and was,
inadequately, rather than excessively, chastised in the satires of
Gifford and Mathias. It does not appear that all its members
were, personally, absolute fools. Merry himself is credited by
Soutbey and others with a sort of irregular touch of genius: and
‘Anna Matilda'—Mrs Cowley, the author of The Belle's Stratagem
-certainly had wits. But they, and still more their followers,
‘Laura,''Arley,' 'Benedict,” “Cesario,' 'The Bard,' etc. (some of whom
can be identified, while others, fortunately for themselves, cannot)
drank themselves drunk at the heady tap of German Sturm-und-
Drang romanticism, blending it with French sentimentality and
Italian trifling, so as to produce almost inconceivable balderdash.
Even the widest reading of English verse could hardly enable
anyone to collect from the accumulated poetry of the last three
centuries an anthology of folly and bad taste surpassing the two
volumes of The British Album, the crop of a very few years and
the labour of some half-a-dozen or half-a-score pens.
Of the last constituents of the group under present review,
it is, fortunately, possible to treat Bowles and Sayers, both of them
possessing, as has been said, some special connection with Southey,
in a different fashion. Neither, so far as poetic inspiration goes, was
even a secondclass poet; but both exercised very great influence
over poets greater than themselves, and, therefore, have made good
their place in literary history. William Lisle Bowles, slightly the
elder, and very much the more longlived, of the two, has left (as in
that life of many years he might easily do without neglecting his
duties as a country clergyman) a very considerable amount of
verse, which it is not necessary for anyone save the conscientious
historian or the unwearied explorer of English poetry to read, but
which can be read without any extraordinary difficulty or disgust.
Bowles, indeed, never deserves the severer epithets of condemnation
which have been applied in the last page or two. His theories of
poetry (of which more presently) were sound and his practice was
never offensively foolish, or in bad taste, or even dull. He lacks
12
E, L, XI.
CH. VIII.


## p. 178 (#200) ############################################

178
[ch.
Bowles
distinction and intensity. But he lives, in varying degrees of
vitality, by two things only that he did, one at the very outset of
his career, the other at a later stage of it. His first claim, and by
far his highest, is to be found in Fourteen Sonnets (afterwards
reinforced in number), which originally appeared in 1789, and
which passed through nearly half-a-score of editions in hardly
more than as many years. Grudging critics have observed that
they were lucky in coming before the great outburst of 1798—
1824, and in being contrasted with such rubbish as that which
we have been reviewing. It would be uncritical as well as un-
generous not to add that, actually, they did much to start the
movement that eclipsed them; and that, whatever their faults
may be, these are merely negative—are, in fact, almost positive
virtues—when compared with the defects of Darwin and Hayley
and the Della Cruscans. Although Bowles was not the first
Exerat. poena to revive the sonnet, he was the first
, for more than a century,
a
to perceive its double fitness for introspection and for outlook ;
Pantylic
to combine description with sentiment in the new poetical way.
It is no wonder that schoolboys like Coleridge and Southey,
gluttons alike of general reading and of poetry, should have
fastened on the book at once; no wonder that Coleridge, unable
to afford more printed examples, should have copied his own
again and again in manuscript for his friends. And it is one of the
feathers in the cap of that historic estimate which has been some-
times decried that nothing else could enable the reader to see the
real beauty of Bowles's humble attempts, undazzled and un-
blinded by the splendour of his followers' success. Tynemouth
and Bamborough Castle, Hope and The Influence of Time on
Grief are not very strong meat, not very 'mantling wine'; but
they are the first course, or the hors d'ouvre, of the abounding
banquet which followed.
Bowles's second appearance of importance was rather critical
than poetical, or, perhaps, let us say, had more to do with the
theory, than with the practice, of poetry. Editing Pope, he, not
unnaturally, revived the old question of the value of Pope's poetry:
and a mildly furious controversy followed, in which classically-
minded poets of the calibre of Byron and Campbell took part,
which produced numerous pamphlets, rather fluttered Bowles's
Wiltshire dovecote, but developed in him the fighting power of
birds much more formidable than doves. As usual, it was rather
a case of the gold and silver shield; but Bowles's general con-
tention that, in poetry, the source of subject and decoration alike
I
1


## p. 179 (#201) ############################################

VIII]
Sayers
179
should be rather nature than art, and Byron's incidental insist-
ence (very inconsistently maintained) that execution is the great
secret, were somewhat valuable by-products of a generally un-
profitable dispute.
Frank Sayers, a member of the almost famous Norwich literary
group of which William Taylor was a sort of coryphaeus, con-
tributed less to the actual body of English verse than Bowles.
His life was much shorter; he was, at any rate for a time, a
practising physician, and had a considerable number of other
avocations and interests besides poetry. But he touches the
subject, in theory and practice both, at one point, in a fashion
which was to prove decidedly important, if not in actual pro-
duction, yet influentially and historically. Whether Sayers was
originally attracted to unrimed verse, not blank in the ordinary
restricted sense, by the Germans, or by his own fancy, or by the
reading which, after his own practice, he showed to a rather re-
markable extent in a dissertation-defence on the subject—does not
seem to be quite clear. The dissertation itself, which was published
,
poetry, which was doing much to prepare the great romantic out-
burst that followed. Collins's Evening, and the now deservedly
forgotten choruses of Glover's Medea, would have been known to
anyone at the time, and, perhaps, Watts’s Sapphics (Cowper's were
not published). Most men must have known, though, perhaps,
few would have brought into the argument, Milton’s ‘Pyrrha’
version. But Sidney's practice in Arcadia, The Mourning Muse
of Thestylis, which was still thought Spenser's, and Peele's
Complaint of Oenone would have been present to the minds of
1
in 1793, shows the temarkable extension of knowledge of English persistent
very few.
But whether he had known all these before he wrote, as
Southey almost certainly did, or whether it was learning got
up to support practice, Sayers's own earlier Dramatic Sketches had
supplied the most ambitious and abundant experiments in un-
rimed verse since Sidney himself, or, at least, since Campion. He
does not entirely abjure rime; but, in Moina, Starno and his
version of the Euripidean Cyclops, he tried the unrimed Pindaric;
and (in a rather naïve, or more than rather unwisely ambitious,
manner) he actually supplemented Collins's ode with one To
Night, on the same model. Elsewhere, it is perfectly plain, not
merely from his rimelessness but from his titles and his diction,
that the influence of Ossian had a great deal to do with the
12-2


## p. 180 (#202) ############################################

180
[CH. VIII
Sayers
id
matter. He adopts, however, in all cases, regular verse-stanzas
instead of rimed prose. Sayers's poetical powers—wildly exalted
by some in that day of smallest poetical things and of darkness
before dawn-are very feeble: but he intends greatly, and does
not sin in either of the three directions of evil which, as we have
seen, Darwin and Hayley and the Della Cruscans respectively
represent. But the most interesting thing about him is the way in
which, like nearly everybody who has made similar attempts except
Southey (v. sup. ), he succumbs, despite almost demonstrable efforts
to prevent it, to the danger of chopped decasyllables, which unite
themselves in the reading and so upset the intended rhythm.
Such things as the parallel openings of Thalaba and of Queen
Mab he was incapable of reaching; but, if he had reached them,
their inherent poetry might have carried off the almost inevitable
defect of the scheme. As it is, that effect is patent and glaring.
Sir William Jones, who, in a life which did not reach the half
century, accumulated a singular amount of learning and of well-
deserved distinction, was more of an orientalist and of a jurist
than of a poet. But he managed to write two pieces—the Ode in
imitation of Alcaeus, 'What constitutes a state? ' and the beautiful
epigram From the Persian, 'On parent knees a naked new-born
child,' which have fixed themselves in literary history, and, what is
better, in memories really literary. If there is in these at least as
much of the scholar as of the poet, it can only be wished that we
had more examples of the combination of such scholarship with
such poetry.


## p. 181 (#203) ############################################

CHAPTER IX
1
BLAKE
6
WILLIAM BLAKE, born 28 November 1757, was the son of
a London hosier, who is said to have had leanings towards Sweden-
borgianism. This may explain Blake's acquaintance with writings
that exercised a marked influence upon his later doctrines and
symbolism, though he always held that the Swedish mystic failed
'by endeavouring to explain to the reason what it could not
understand. ' The boy never went to school, on account, it is said,
of a difficult temper. He 'picked up his education as well as he
could. ' According to one authority ? , Shakespeare's Venus and
Adonis, Lucrece and Sonnets, with Jonson's Underwoods and
Miscellanies were the favourite studies of his early days. To
these must be added Shakespeare's plays, Milton, Chatterton
and the Bible, "a work ever at his hand, and which he often
assiduously consulted in several languages'; for he acquired, at
different times, some knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Italian
and Hebrew. Ossian and Gesnerian prose were less fortunate
influences.
At the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to James Basire, the
engraver, who sent him to make drawings of monuments in West-
minster abbey and other ancient churches in and about London.
Thus, he came under the direct influence of Gothic art, which
increased its hold upon his imagination, till it finally appeared to
him the supreme expression of all truth, while classicism was the
embodiment of all error. After leaving Basire, he studied for a
time in the antique school of the Royal Academy, and then began
work as an engraver on his own account. Shortly after his marriage
in 1782, Flaxman introduced him to Mrs Mathew, a famous blue-
stocking. The outcome of this was the printing of Poetical Sketches
(1783) at the expense of these two friends. In the Advertisement,
1 Benjamin Heath Malkin, author of A Father's Memoir of his Child (1806), the
dedicatory epistle to which contains a valuable note on Blake.
a


## p. 182 (#204) ############################################

182
[CH.
Blake
6
by another hand than Blake's, the contents of this slight volume are
said to have been written between the ages of twelve and twenty ;
while Malkin, apparently quoting Blake, asserts that the song
'How sweet I roam'd from field to field' was composed before his
fourteenth year. But his earliest writings seem to have been in
the distinctly rhythmical prose of the fragment known as The
Passions, which, like similar pieces included in Poetical Sketches,
is a juvenile essay in the inflated style and overstrained pathos
that gave popularity to Gesner's Death of Abel.
But Blake's early verse stands in quite another class. Much
of it, indeed, is more directly imitative than his later work; yet
this is due less to slavish copying than to an unconscious
recognition of the community between his own romantic spirit and
that of our older poetry. Spenserian stanza, early Shakespearean
and Miltonic blank verse, ballad form, octosyllabics and lyric
metres, all are tried, with least success in the blank verse, but
often with consummate mastery in the lighter measures. One who
met Blake in these years says that he occasionally sang his poems
to melodies of his own composing, and that 'these were sometimes
most singularly beautiful' It is, therefore, not improbable that
.
these lyrics were composed to music, like the songs of Burns or of
the Elizabethans.
His genuine delight in the older verse preserved him from the
complacency with which his age regarded its own versification.
Like Keats, but with more justice, he laments, in his lines To the
Muses, the feeble, artificial and meagre achievement of the time.
His notes are neither languid nor forced, but remarkably varied
and spontaneous. Even in his less perfect work, there is not any
abatement of fresh enthusiasm, but, rather, an overtasking of
powers not yet fully equipped for high flights. So, in the midst of
Fair Elenor, a tale of terror and wonder, and sorry stuff in the
main, occur passages like the stanza beginning
My lord was like a flower upon the brows
Of lusty May! Ah life as frail as flower!
while there is something more than promise in the youth who could
capture the sense of twilight and evening star so completely as
Blake in the lines
Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake: speak silence with thy glimmering eyes
And wash the dusk with silver.
The six songs, which include almost all Blake's love-poetry,
illustrate the versatility of his early genius. 'How sweet I roam'd'


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IX]
Poetical Sketches
183
a
6
anticipates, in a remarkable way, the spirit and imagery of La
Belle Dame, though, perhaps, it has less of romantic strangeness
and the glamour of faerie than of sheer joy, the Elizabethan
wantonness of love, so wonderfully reembodied in My silks and
fine array. The remaining four pieces are in a homelier vein, and
more closely personal in tone. Like his poems on the seasons, they
reveal, in spite of a slight conventionality in expression, a sincere
delight in nature, quickening rural sights and sounds into sympathy
with his own mood. Yet, he was so far of his age that he shrank
from the idea of solitude in nature; knowing only the closely
cultivated districts of Middlesex and Surrey, he held that 'where
man is not, Nature is barren. ' But, apart from their freer, if still
limited, appreciation of natural beauty, these songs are noteworthy
by reason of their revelation of a new spirit in love. Burns was to
sing on this theme out of pure exuberance of physical vitality; in
Blake, love awes passion to adoration in the simple soul.
The wide range of poetic power in Blake is proved by the
distance between the gentleness of these pieces and the tense emo-
tion of Mad Song. Saintsbury has dealt at length with its prosodic
excellence : particularly, in the first stanza, the sudden change in
metre carries a vivid suggestion of frenzy breaking down, at its
height, into dull despair. Stricken passion seems bared to the
nerves; each beat of the verse is like a sharp cry, rising to the
haunted terror of the closing lines.
The incomplete chronicle-play King Edward the Third is
chiefly of interest as indicating Blake's juvenile sympathies and
the limitations of his genius. He had little of the dramatic
instinct, as his 'prophetic' writings prove, while his vehement
denial of the validity of temporal existence cut him off from
the ordinary themes of tragedy and comedy. And, even in this
early work, he is chiefly occupied, not with any development of the
plot, but with the consideration of abstract moral questions. His
characters are all projections of his own personality, and the action
halts while they discourse on points of private and civic virtue.
Yet, the spirit behind the work is generous, and occasional passages
come nearer to Shakespeare than most of the more pretentious
efforts of the time. So, too, A War Song to Englishmen, though
over-rhetorical in parts, is a stirring thing in an age that produced
little patriotic verse.
The incomplete manuscript known as An Island in the Moon
has been described as 'a somewhat incoherent and pointless pre-
cursor of the Headlong Hall type of novel. ' Intended to satirise


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184
[CH.
Blake
the members of Mrs Mathew's learned coterie, its offence against
decency would be inexpiable were it not almost certain that no
eye but Blake's ever saw it in his lifetime. As literature, the work
has little value, except that it contains drafts of three of the Songs
of Innocence, as well as the quaint little Song of Phebe and
Jellicoe. The satirical verse is generally coarse and noisy, and but
rarely effectual, though the piece When old corruption first begun
is powerful in an unpleasant way. The prose has the faults of the
verse, being too highpitched and too uncontrolled to give penetra-
tive power to the caricature of a learned circle such as Blake had
known at Mrs Mathew's. It contains, however, an interesting,
though, unfortunately, incomplete, account of the process adopted
later for producing the engraved books. There are also indi-
cations of antipathies which were afterwards developed in the
prophetic' books, notably a contempt for experimental science
and 'rational philosophy. '
A comparison of Songs of Innocence (1789) with Poetical
Sketches shows that the promise of Blake's earlier poetry has,
indeed, been fulfilled, but in a somewhat unexpected way.
Naturally, the naturer work is free from the juvenile habit of
imitation ; it is, however, of interest to note in passing the
suggestion that the hint of the composition of these Songs
may have come from a passage in Dr Watts's preface to his
Divine and Moral Songs for Children? Moreover, the baneful
Ossianic influence is suspended for a space. But the vital
difference is that here, for the first time, Blake gives clear
indication of the mystical habit of thought, which, though at
first an integral part of his peculiar lyrical greatness, ultimately
turned to his undoing. In Poetical Sketches, his vision of life is
direct and naïve: he delights in the physical attributes of nature,
its breadth and its wonders of light and motion, of form and
melody. But, in Songs of Innocence, his interest is primarily
ethical. The essence of all being, as set forth in the piece called
The Divine Image, is the spirit of • Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love';
and, as, later, he uses the terms 'poetic genius' and 'imagination
to express his conception of this fundamental principle, so, here,
the 'Divine Image' is his vision of that spirit which is at once
1 John Sampson makes the conjecture in the general preface to his edition of
Blake's Poetical Works : 'In the preface to that popular work Watts modestly refers
to his songs as "a slight specimen, such as I could wish some happy and condescending
genius would undertake for the use of children, and perform much better"; and it is
likely enough that Blake may have rightly felt himself to be this destined genius. '


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IX
]
Songs of Innocence
185
universal and particular, God and Man. Under the inspiration of
this belief, the world of experience fades away: there is nothing of
death, pain or cruelty, except in the opening couplet of The
Chimney Sweeper, and, even then, the idea of suffering is almost
lost in the clear sense of a sustaining presence of love in the rest of
the poem. Every other instance shows sorrow and difficulty to be
but occasions for the immediate manifestation of sympathy. God,
as the tender Father, the angels, the shepherd, the mother, the
nurse, or even the humbler forms of insect and flower, as in The
Blossom, or A Dream,-all are expressions of the same universal
ethic of love. But, perhaps, the most remarkable illustration of
this belief, particularly when contrasted with Blake's later criti-
cism of public charity, is Holy Thursday. Clearly, in the world of
these Songs there is not any suspicion of motives, no envy or
jealousy. To use a later phrase by Blake, it is a ‘lower Paradise,'
very near to the perfect time wherein the lion shall lie down with
the lamb: as in the poem Night, the angels of love are always by,
to restrain violence or to bring solace to its victims.
The theological reference in this simple ethic is slight. God
and Jesus are but visions of the love that animates all forms of
being. Hence, at this period, Blake's position is distinct from that
of mystical poets like Henry Vaughan, in whom a more dogmatic
faith tends to overshadow the appeal of the natural universe. So,
too, Blake's poetry has more of the instinct of human joy. Mercy,
pity, peace and love, the elements of the Divine Image, are ‘virtues
of delight,' and nothing is clearer in these Songs than his quick
intuition and unerring expression of the light and gladness in
common things. In this, he returns to poems in Poetical Sketches
like I love the jocund dance, rather than to the more formal
pieces of nature-poetry. His delight in the sun, the hills, the
streams, the flowers and buds, in the innocence of the child and
of the lamb, comes not from sustained contemplation but as an
immediate impulse. There is not as yet any sign of his later atti-
tude towards the physical world as a 'shadow of the world of
eternity. His pleasure in the consciousness of this unifying spirit
in the universe was still too fresh to give pause for theorising ;
and, perhaps for this reason, such pieces as Laughing Song, Spring,
The Echoing Green, The Blossom and Night, sung in pure joy of
heart, convey more perfectly than all his later attempts at exposi-
tion the nature of his visionary faith. In Blake's later writings,
there is a wide gulf between the symbol and the reality it
conveys; so, the reader must first grapple with a stubborn mass


## p.