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A History of English Literature

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OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Next in order among the romantic poets after Gray, and
more thoroughly romantic than Gray, was Oliver Goldsmith, though, with
characteristic lack of the power of self-criticism, he supposed himself to
be a loyal follower of Johnson and therefore a member of the opposite camp.
Goldsmith, as every one knows, is one of the most attractive and lovable
figures in English literature. Like Burke, of mixed English and Irish
ancestry, the son of a poor country curate of the English Church in
Ireland, he was born in 1728. Awkward, sensitive, and tender-hearted, he
suffered greatly in childhood from the unkindness of his fellows. As a poor
student at the University of Dublin he was not more happy, and his lack of
application delayed the gaining of his degree until two years after the
regular time. The same Celtic desultoriness characterized all the rest of
his life, though it could not thwart his genius. Rejected as a candidate
for the ministry, he devoted three years to the nominal study of medicine
at the Universities of Edinburgh and Leyden (in Holland). Next he spent a
year on a tramping trip through Europe, making his way by playing the flute
and begging. Then, gravitating naturally to London, he earned his living by
working successively for a druggist, for the novelist-printer Samuel
Richardson, as a teacher in a boys' school, and as a hack writer. At last
at the age of thirty-two he achieved success with a series of periodical
essays later entitled 'The Citizen of the World,' in which he criticized
European politics and society with skill and insight. Bishop Percy now
introduced him to Johnson, who from this time watched over him and saved
him from the worst results of his irresponsibility. He was one of the
original members of 'The Club.' In 1764 occurred the well-known and
characteristic incident of the sale of 'The Vicar of Wakefield.' Arrested
for debt at his landlady's instance, Goldsmith sent for Johnson and showed
him the manuscript of the book. Johnson took it to a publisher, and though
without much expectation of success asked and received £60 for it. It was
published two years later. Meanwhile in 1764 appeared Goldsmith's
descriptive poem, 'The Traveler,' based on his own experiences in Europe.
Six years later it was followed by 'The Deserted Village,' which was
received with the great enthusiasm that it merited.

Such high achievement in two of the main divisions of literature was in
itself remarkable, especially as Goldsmith was obliged to the end of his
life to spend much of his time in hack writing, but in the later years of
his short life he turned also with almost as good results to the drama
(comedy). We must stop here for the few words of general summary which are
all that the eighteenth century drama need receive in a brief survey like
the present one. During the first half of the century, as we have seen, an
occasional pseudo-classical tragedy was written, none of them of any
greater excellence than Addison's 'Cato' and Johnson's 'Irene' (above,
pages 205 and 217). The second quarter of the century was largely given
over to farces and burlesques, which absorbed the early literary activity
of the novelist Henry Fielding, until their attacks on Walpole's government
led to a severe licensing act, which suppressed them. But the most
distinctive and predominant forms of the middle and latter half of the
century were, first, the Sentimental Comedy, whose origin may be roughly
assigned to Steele, and, second, the domestic melodrama, which grew out of
it. In the Sentimental Comedy the elements of mirth and romance which are
the legitimate bases of comedy were largely subordinated to exaggerated
pathos, and in the domestic melodrama the experiences of insignificant
persons of the middle class were presented for sympathetic consideration in
the same falsetto fashion. Both forms (indeed, they were one in spirit)
were extreme products of the romantic return to sentiment and democratic
feeling. Both were enormously popular and, crossing the Channel, like
Thomson's poetic innovation, exerted a great influence on the drama of
France and Germany (especially in the work of Lessing), and in general on
the German Romantic Movement. Goldsmith was inferior to no one in genuine
sentiment, but he was disgusted at the sentimental excesses of these plays.
His 'Good Natured Man,' written with the express purpose of opposing them,
and brought out in 1768, was reasonably successful, and in 1771 his far
superior 'She Stoops to Conquer' virtually put an end to Sentimental
Comedy. This is one of the very few English comedies of a former generation
which are still occasionally revived on the stage to-day. Goldsmith's
comedies, we may add here for completeness, were shortly followed by the
more brilliant ones of another Irish-Englishman, Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
who displayed Congreve's wit without his cynicism. These were 'The Rivals,'
produced in 1775, when Sheridan was only twenty-four, and 'The School for
Scandal,' 1777. Sheridan, a reckless man of fashion, continued most of his
life to be owner of Drury Lane Theater, but he soon abandoned playwriting
to become one of the leaders of the Whig party. With Burke and Fox, as we
have seen, he conducted the impeachment of Hastings.

'She Stoops to Conquer' was Goldsmith's last triumph. A few months later,
in 1774, he died at the age of only forty-five, half submerged, as usual,
in foolish debts, but passionately mourned not only by his acquaintances in
the literary and social worlds, but by a great army of the poor and needy
to whom he had been a benefactor. In the face of this testimony to his
human worth his childish vanities and other weaknesses may well be
pardoned. All Goldsmith's literary work is characterized by one main
quality, a charming atmosphere of optimistic happiness which is the
expression of the best side of his own nature. The scene of all his most
important productions, very appropriately, is the country--the idealized
English country. Very much, to be sure, in all his works has to be conceded
to the spirit of romance. Both in 'The Vicar of Wakefield' and in 'She
Stoops to Conquer' characterization is mostly conventional, and events are
very arbitrarily manipulated for the sake of the effects in rather
free-and-easy disregard of all principles of motivation. But the kindly
knowledge of the main forces in human nature, the unfailing sympathy, and
the irrepressible conviction that happiness depends in the last analysis on
the individual will and character make Goldsmith's writings, especially
'The Vicar,' delightful and refreshing. All in all, however, 'The Deserted
Village' is his masterpiece, with its romantic regret, verging on tragedy
but softened away from it, and its charming type characterizations, as
incisive as those of Chaucer and Dryden, but without any of Dryden's biting
satire. In the choice of the rimed couplet for 'The Traveler' and 'The
Deserted Village' the influence of pseudo-classicism and of Johnson
appears; but Goldsmith's treatment of the form, with his variety in pauses
and his simple but fervid eloquence, make it a very different thing from
the rimed couplet of either Johnson or Pope. 'The Deserted Village,' it
should be added, is not a description of any actual village, but a
generalized picture of existing conditions. Men of wealth in England and
Ireland were enlarging their sheep pastures and their hunting grounds by
buying up land and removing villages, and Goldsmith, like Sir Thomas More,
two hundred years earlier, and likewise patriots of all times, deeply
regretted the tendency.

PERCY, MACPHERSON, AND CHATTERTON. The appearance of Thomson's 'Winter' in
1726 is commonly taken as conveniently marking the beginning of the
Romantic Movement. Another of its conspicuous dates is 1765, the year of
the publication of the 'Reliques [pronounced Relics] of Ancient English
Poetry' of the enthusiastic antiquarian Thomas (later Bishop) Percy. Percy
drew from many sources, of which the most important was a manuscript
volume, in which an anonymous seventeenth century collector had copied a
large number of old poems and which Percy rescued just in the nick of time,
as the maids in the house of one of his friends were beginning to use it as
kindling for the fires. His own book consisted of something less than two
hundred very miscellaneous poems, ranging in date from the fourteenth
century to his own day. Its real importance, however, lies in the fact that
it contained a number of the old popular ballads (above, pp. 74 ff).
Neither Percy himself nor any one else in his time understood the real
nature of these ballads and their essential difference from other poetry,
and Percy sometimes tampered with the text and even filled out gaps with
stanzas of his own, whose sentimental style is ludicrously inconsistent
with the primitive vigor of the originals. But his book, which attained
great popularity, marks the beginning of the special study of the ballads
and played an important part in the revival of interest in medieval life.

Still greater interest was aroused at the time by the Ossianic poems of
James Macpherson. From 1760 to 1763 Macpherson, then a young Highland Scots
schoolmaster, published in rapid succession certain fragments of Gaelic
verse and certain more extended works in poetical English prose which, he
asserted, were part of the originals, discovered by himself, and
translations, of the poems of the legendary Scottish bard Ossian, of the
third Christian century. These productions won him substantial material
rewards in the shape of high political offices throughout the rest of his
long life. About the genuineness of the compositions, however, a violent
controversy at once arose, and Dr. Johnson was one of the skeptics who
vigorously denounced Macpherson as a shameless impostor. The general
conviction of scholars of the present day is that while Macpherson may have
found some fragments of very ancient Gaelic verse in circulation among the
Highlanders, he fabricated most of what he published. These works, however,
'Fingal' and the rest, certainly contributed to the Romantic Movement; and
they are not only unique productions, but, in small quantities, still
interesting. They can best be described as reflections of the misty scenes
of Macpherson's native Highlands--vague impressionistic glimpses,
succeeding one another in purposeless repetition, of bands of marching
warriors whose weapons intermittently flash and clang through the fog, and
of heroic women, white-armed and with flowing hair, exhorting the heroes to
the combat or lamenting their fall.

A very minor figure, but one of the most pathetic in the history of English
literature, is that of Thomas Chatterton. While he was a boy in Bristol,
Chatterton's imagination was possessed by the medieval buildings of the
city, and when some old documents fell into his hands he formed the idea of
composing similar works in both verse and prose and passing them off as
medieval productions which he had discovered. To his imaginary author he
gave the name of Thomas Rowley. Entirely successful in deceiving his
fellow-townsmen, and filled with a great ambition, Chatterton went to
London, where, failing to secure patronage, he committed suicide as the
only resource against the begging to which his proud spirit could not
submit. This was in 1770, and he was still only eighteen years old.
Chatterton's work must be viewed under several aspects. His imitation of
the medieval language was necessarily very imperfect and could mislead no
one to-day; from this point of view the poems have no permanent
significance. The moral side of his action need not be seriously weighed,
as Chatterton never reached the age of responsibility and if he had lived
would soon have passed from forgery to genuine work. That he might have
achieved much is suggested by the evidences of real genius in his boyish
output, which probably justify Wordsworth's description, of him as 'the
marvelous boy.' That he would have become one of the great English poets,
however, is much more open to question.

WILLIAM COWPER. Equally pathetic is the figure of William Cowper
(pronounced either Cowper or Cooper), whose much longer life (1731-1800)
and far larger literary production give him a more important actual place
than can be claimed for Chatterton, though his natural ability was far less
and his significance to-day is chiefly historical. Cowper's career, also,
was largely frustrated by the same physical weaknesses which had ruined
Collins, present in the later poet in still more distressing degree. Cowper
is clearly a transition poet, sharing largely, in a very mild fashion, in
some of the main romantic impulses, but largely pseudo-classical in his
manner of thought and expression. His life may be briefly summarized.
Morbid timidity and equally morbid religious introspection, aggravated by
disappointments in love, prevented him as a young man from accepting a very
comfortable clerkship in the House of Lords and drove him into intermittent
insanity, which closed more darkly about him in his later years. He lived
the greater part of his mature life in the household of a Mrs. Unwin, a
widow for whom he had a deep affection and whom only his mental affliction
prevented him from marrying. A long residence in the wretched village of
Olney, where he forced himself to cooperate in all phases of religious work
with the village clergyman, the stern enthusiast John Newton, produced
their joint collection of 'Olney Hymns,' many of which deservedly remain
among the most popular in our church song-books; but it inevitably
increased Cowper's disorder. After this he resigned himself to a perfectly
simple life, occupied with the writing of poetry, the care of pets,
gardening, and carpentry. The bulk of his work consists of long moralizing
poems, prosy, prolix, often trivial, and to-day largely unreadable. Same of
them are in the rimed couplet and others in blank verse. His blank-verse
translation of Homer, published in 1791, is more notable, and 'Alexander
Selkirk' and the humorous doggerel 'John Gilpin' are famous; but his most
significant poems are a few lyrics and descriptive pieces in which he
speaks out his deepest feelings with the utmost pathetic or tragic power.
In the expression of different moods of almost intolerable sadness 'On the
Receipt of My Mother's Picture' and 'To Mary' (Mrs. Unwin) can scarcely be
surpassed, and 'The Castaway' is final as the restrained utterance of
morbid religious despair. Even in his long poems, in his minutely loving
treatment of Nature he is the most direct precursor of Wordsworth, and he
is one of the earliest outspoken opponents of slavery and cruelty to
animals. How unsuited in all respects his delicate and sensitive nature was
to the harsh experiences of actual life is suggested by Mrs. Browning with
vehement sympathy in her poem, 'Cowper's Grave.'

WILLIAM BLAKE. Still another utterly unworldly and frankly abnormal poet,
though of a still different temperament, was William Blake (1757-1827), who
in many respects is one of the most extreme of all romanticists. Blake, the
son of a London retail shopkeeper, received scarcely any book education,
but at fourteen he was apprenticed to an engraver, who stimulated his
imagination by setting him to work at making drawings in Westminster Abbey
and other old churches. His training was completed by study at the Royal
Academy of Arts, and for the rest of his life he supported himself, in
poverty, with the aid of a devoted wife, by keeping a print-and-engraving
shop. Among his own engravings the best known is the famous picture of
Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, which is not altogether free from the weird
strangeness that distinguished most of his work in all lines. For in spite
of his commonplace exterior life Blake was a thorough mystic to whom the
angels and spirits that he beheld in trances were at least as real as the
material world. When his younger brother died he declared that he saw the
released soul mount through the ceiling, clapping its hands in joy. The
bulk of his writing consists of a series of 'prophetic books' in verse and
prose, works, in part, of genius, but of unbalanced genius, and virtually
unintelligible. His lyric poems, some of them composed when he was no more
than thirteen years old, are unlike anything else anywhere, and some of
them are of the highest quality. Their controlling trait is childlikeness;
for Blake remained all his life one of those children of whom is the
Kingdom of Heaven. One of their commonest notes is that of childlike
delight in the mysterious joy and beauty of the world, a delight sometimes
touched, it is true, as in 'The Tiger,' with a maturer consciousness of the
wonderful and terrible power behind all the beauty. Blake has intense
indignation also for all cruelty and everything which he takes for cruelty,
including the shutting up of children in school away from the happy life of
out-of-doors. These are the chief sentiments of 'Songs of Innocence.' In
'Songs of Experience' the shadow of relentless fact falls somewhat more
perceptibly across the page, though the prevailing ideas are the same.
Blake's significant product is very small, but it deserves much greater
reputation than it has actually attained. One characteristic external fact
should be added. Since Blake's poverty rendered him unable to pay for
having his books printed, he himself performed the enormous labor of
_engraving_ them, page by page, often with an ornamental margin about
the text.

ROBERT BURNS. Blake, deeply romantic as he is by nature, virtually stands
by himself, apart from any movement or group, and the same is equally true
of the somewhat earlier lyrist in whom eighteenth century poetry
culminates, namely Robert Burns. Burns, the oldest of the seven children of
two sturdy Scotch peasants of the best type, was born in 1759 in Ayrshire,
just beyond the northwest border of England. In spite of extreme poverty,
the father joined with some of his neighbors in securing the services of a
teacher for their children, and the household possessed a few good books,
including Shakspere and Pope, whose influence on the future poet was great.
But the lot of the family was unusually hard. The father's health failed
early and from childhood the boys were obliged to do men's work in the
field. Robert later declared, probably with some bitter exaggeration, that
his life had combined 'the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing
moil of a galley slave.' His genius, however, like his exuberant spirit,
could not be crushed out. His mother had familiarized him from the
beginning with the songs and ballads of which the country was full, and
though he is said at first to have had so little ear for music that he
could scarcely distinguish one tune from another, he soon began to compose
songs (words) of his own as he followed the plough. In the greatness of his
later success his debt to the current body of song and music should not be
overlooked. He is only the last of a long succession of rural Scottish
song-writers; he composed his own songs to accompany popular airs; and many
of them are directly based on fragments of earlier songs. None the less his
work rises immeasurably above all that had gone before it.

The story of Burns' mature life is the pathetic one of a very vigorous
nature in which genius, essential manliness, and good impulses struggled
against and were finally overcome by violent passions, aggravated by the
bitterness of poverty and repeated disappointments. His first effort, at
eighteen, to better his condition, by the study of surveying at a
neighboring town, resulted chiefly in throwing him into contact with bad
companions; a venture in the business of flax-dressing ended in disaster;
and the same ill-fortune attended the several successive attempts which he
made at general farming. He became unfortunately embroiled also with the
Church, which (the Presbyterian denomination) exercised a very strict
control in Scotland. Compelled to do public penance for some of his
offenses, his keen wit could not fail to be struck by the inconsistency
between the rigid doctrines and the lives of some of the men who were
proceeding against him; and he commemorated the feud in his series of
overwhelming but painfully flippant satires.

His brief period of dazzling public success dawned suddenly out of the
darkest moment of his fortunes. At the age of twenty-seven, abandoning the
hope which he had already begun to cherish of becoming the national poet of
Scotland, he had determined in despair to emigrate to Jamaica to become an
overseer on a plantation. (That this chief poet of democracy, the author of
'A Man's a Man for a' That,' could have planned to become a slave-driver
suggests how closely the most genuine human sympathies are limited by habit
and circumstances.) To secure the money for his voyage Burns had published
his poems in a little volume. This won instantaneous and universal
popularity, and Burns, turning back at the last moment, responded to the
suggestion of some of the great people of Edinburgh that he should come to
that city and see what could be done for him. At first the experiment
seemed fortunate, for the natural good breeding with which this untrained
countryman bore himself for a winter as the petted lion of the society of
fashion and learning (the University) was remarkable. None the less the
situation was unnatural and necessarily temporary, and unluckily Burns
formed associations also with such boon companions of the lower sort as had
hitherto been his undoing. After a year Edinburgh dropped him, thus
supplying substantial fuel for his ingrained poor man's jealousy and rancor
at the privileged classes. Too near his goal to resume the idea of
emigrating, he returned to his native moors, rented another farm, and
married Jean Armour, one of the several heroines of his love-poems. The
only material outcome of his period of public favor was an appointment as
internal revenue collector, an unpopular and uncongenial office which he
accepted with reluctance and exercised with leniency. It required him to
occupy much of his time in riding about the country, and contributed to his
final failure as a farmer. After the latter event he removed to the
neighboring market-town of Dumfries, where he again renewed his
companionship with unworthy associates. At last prospects for promotion in
the revenue service began to open to him, but it was too late; his
naturally robust constitution had given way to over-work and dissipation,
and he died in 1796 at the age of thirty-seven.

Burns' place among poets is perfectly clear. It is chiefly that of a
song-writer, perhaps the greatest songwriter of the world. At work in the
fields or in his garret or kitchen after the long day's work was done, he
composed songs because he could not help it, because his emotion was
irresistibly stirred by the beauty and life of the birds and flowers, the
snatch of a melody which kept running through his mind, or the memory of
the girl with whom he had last talked. And his feelings expressed
themselves with spontaneous simplicity, genuineness, and ease. He is a
thoroughly romantic poet, though wholly by the grace of nature, not at all
from any conscious intention--he wrote as the inspiration moved him, not in
accordance with any theory of art. The range of his subjects and emotions
is nearly or quite complete--love; comradeship; married affection, as in
'John Anderson, My Jo'; reflective sentiment; feeling for nature; sympathy
with animals; vigorous patriotism, as in 'Scots Wha Hae' (and Burns did
much to revive the feeling of Scots for Scotland); deep tragedy and pathos;
instinctive happiness; delightful humor; and the others. It should be
clearly recognized, however, that this achievement, supreme as it is in its
own way, does not suffice to place Burns among the greatest poets. The
brief lyrical outbreaks of the song-writer are no more to be compared with
the sustained creative power and knowledge of life and character which make
the great dramatist or narrative poet than the bird's song is to be
compared with an opera of Wagner. But such comparisons need not be pressed;
and the song of bird or poet appeals instantly to every normal hearer,
while the drama or narrative poem requires at least some special
accessories and training. Burns' significant production, also, is not
altogether limited to songs. 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' (in Spenser's
stanza) is one of the perfect descriptive poems of lyrical sentiment; and
some of Burns' meditative poems and poetical epistles to acquaintances are
delightful in a free-and-easy fashion. The exuberant power in the religious
satires and the narrative 'Tam o' Shanter' is undeniable, but they belong
to a lower order of work.

Many of Burns' poems are in the Lowland Scots dialect; a few are wholly in
ordinary English; and some combine the two idioms. It is an interesting
question whether Burns wins distinctly greater success in one than in the
other. In spite of his prevailing literary honesty, it may be observed, his
English shows some slight traces of the effort to imitate Pope and the
feeling that the pseudo-classical style with its elegance was really the
highest--a feeling which renders some of his letters painfully affected.
[Footnote: For the sake of brevity the sternly realistic poet George Crabbe
is here omitted.]

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