Chapter 13

Crabbe meanwhile believed in Pope, and had a sturdy solid contempt for Methodism. Cowper's guide, Newton, would have passed with him for a nuisance and a fanatic. Crabbe is a thorough realist. In some ways he may be compared to his contemporary Malthus. Malthus started, as we know, by refuting the sentimentalism of Rousseau; Crabbe's _Village_ is a protest against the embodiment of the same spirit in Goldsmith. He is determined to see things as they are, with no rose-coloured mist. Crabbe replies to critics that if his realism was unpoetical, the criterion suggested would condemn much of Dryden and Pope as equally unpoetical. He was not renouncing but carrying on the tradition, and was admired by Byron in his rather wayward mood of Pope-worship as the last representative of the legitimate school. The position is significant. Crabbe condemns Goldsmith's 'Nature' because it is 'unnatural.' It means the Utopian ideal of Rousseau which never did and never can exist. It belongs to the world of old-fashioned pastoral poetry, in which Corydon and Thyrsis had their being. He will paint British squires and farmers and labourers as he has seen them with his own eyes. The wit has become for him the mere fop, whose poetry is an arbitrary convention, a mere plaything for the fine ladies and gentlemen detached from the living interests of mankind. The Pope tradition is still maintained, but is to be revised by being brought down again to contact with solid earth. Therefore on the one hand he is thoroughly in harmony with Johnson, the embodiment of common sense, and on the other, excited the enthusiasm of Wordsworth and Scott, who, though leaders of a new movement, heartily sympathised with his realism and rejection of the old conventionalism. Though Crabbe regards Cowper's religion as fanaticism, they are so far agreed that both consider that poetry has become divorced from reality and reflects the ugly side of actual human nature. They do not propose a revolution in its methods, but to put fresh life into it by seeing things as they are. And both of them, living in the country, apply the principle to 'Nature' in the sense of scenery. Cowper gives interest to the flat meadows of the Ouse; and Crabbe, a botanist and lover of natural history, paints with unrivalled fidelity and force the flat shores and tideways of his native East Anglia. They are both therefore prophets of a love of Nature, in one of the senses of the Protean word. Cowper, who prophesied the fall of the Bastille and denounced luxury, was to some extent an unconscious ally of Rousseau, though he regarded the religious aspects of Rousseau's doctrine as shallow and unsatisfactory. Crabbe shows the attitude of which Johnson is the most characteristic example. Johnson was thoroughly content with the old school in so far as it meant that poetry must be thoroughly rational and sensible. His hatred of cant and foppery was so far congenial to the tradition; but it implied a difference. To him Pope's metaphysical system was mere foppery, and the denunciation of luxury mere cant. He felt mere contempt for Goldsmith's flirtation with that vein of sentiment. His dogged conservatism prevented him from recognising the strength of the philosophical movements which were beginning to clothe themselves in Rousseauism. Burke, if he condemned the revolutionary doctrine as wicked, saw distinctly how potent a lesson it was becoming. Johnson, showing the true British indifference, could treat the movement with contempt--Hume's scepticism was a mere 'milking the bull'--a love of paradox for its own sake--and Wilkes and the Whigs, though wicked in intention, were simple and superficial dealers in big words. In the literary application the same sturdy common sense was opposed to the Pope tradition so far as that tradition opposed common sense. Conventional diction, pastorals, and twaddle about Nature belonged to the nonsensical side. He entirely sympathised with Crabbe's substitution of the real living brutish clown for the unreal swain of Arcadia; that is, for developing poetry by making it thoroughly realistic even at the cost of being prosaic.

So far the tendency to realism was thoroughly congenial to the matter-of-fact utilitarian spirit of the time, and was in some sense in harmony with a 'return to Nature.' But it was unconsciously becoming divorced from some of the great movements of thought, of which it failed to perceive the significance. A new inspiration was showing itself, to which critics have done at least ample justice. The growth of history had led to renewed interest in much that had been despised as mere curiosities or ridiculed as implying the barbarism of our ancestors. I have already noticed the dilettantism of the previous generation, and the interest of Gray and Collins and Warton and Walpole in antiquarian researches. Gothic had ceased to be a simple term of reproach. The old English literature is beginning to be studied seriously. Pope and Warburton and Johnson had all edited Shakespeare; Garrick had given him fresh popularity, and the first edition of _Old Plays_ by Dodsley appeared in 1744. Similar studies were extending in many directions. Mallet in his work upon Denmark (1755) gave a translation of the _Eddas_ which called attention to Scandinavian mythology. Bodmer soon afterwards published for the first time the _Nibelungen Lied_. Macpherson startled the literary world in 1762 by what professed to be an epic poem from the Gaelic. Chatterton's career (1752-1770) was a proof not only of unique poetical precocity, but of a singular facility in divining the tastes of the literary world at the time. Percy's _Reliques_ appeared in 1765. Percy, I may note, had begun oddly enough by publishing a Chinese novel (1761), and a translation of Icelandic poetry (1763). Not long afterwards Sir William Jones published translations of Oriental poetry. Briefly, as historical, philological, and antiquarian research extended, the man of letters was also beginning to seek for new 'motives,' and to discover merits in old forms of literature. The importance of this new impulse cannot be over-estimated, but it may be partly misinterpreted. It is generally described as a foretaste of what is called the Romantic movement. The word is no doubt very useful--though exceedingly vague. The historian of literature is sometimes given to speak as though it meant the revelation of a new and definite creed. He speaks, that is, like the historian of science, who accepts Darwinism as the revelation of a new principle transfusing the old conceptions, and traces the various anticipations, the seminal idea; or like the Protestant theologian who used to regard Luther as having announced the full truth dimly foreseen by Wicliff or the Albigenses. Romanticism, that is, is treated as a single movement; while the men who share traces of the taste are supposed to have not only foreseen the new doctrine but to have been the actual originators. Yet I think that all competent writers will also agree that Romanticism is a name which has been applied to a number of divergent or inconsistent schools. It seems to mean every impulse which tended to find the old clothing inadequate for the new thoughts, which caused dissatisfaction with the old philosophical and religious or political systems and aspirations, and took a corresponding variety of literary forms. It is far too complex a phenomenon to be summed up in any particular formula. The mischief is that to take the literary evolution as an isolated phenomenon is to miss an essential clue to such continuity and unity as it really possesses. When we omit the social factor, the solidarity which exists between contemporaries occupied with the same problem and sharing certain common beliefs, each school appears as an independent unit, implying a discontinuity or a simple relation of contrariety, and we explain the succession by such a verbal phrase as 'reaction.' The real problem is, what does the reaction mean? and that requires us to take into account the complex and variously composed currents of thought and reason which are seeking for literary expression. The popularity of _Ossian_ for example, is a curious phenomenon. At the first sight we are disposed to agree with Johnson that any man could write such stuff if he would abandon his mind to it, and to add that if any one would write it no one could read it. Yet we know that _Ossian_ appealed to the gigantic intellects of Goethe and Napoleon. That is a symptom of deep significance; _Ossian_ suited Goethe in the _Werther_ period and Napoleon took it with him when he was dreaming of rivalling Alexander's conquests in the East. We may perhaps understand why the gigantesque pictures in _Ossian_ of the northern mountains and scenery--with all its vagueness, incoherence, and bombast, was somehow congenial to minds dissatisfied, for different reasons, with the old ideals. To explain the charm more precisely is a very pretty problem for the acute critic. _Ossian_, it is clear, fell in with the mood characteristic of the time. But when we ask what effect it produced in English literature, the answer must surely be, 'next to none.' Gray was enthusiastic and tried to believe in its authenticity. Scots, like Blair and even the sceptical Hume--though Hume soon revolted--defended _Ossian_ out of patriotic prejudice, and Burns professed to admire. But nobody in Great Britain took to writing Ossianesque. Wordsworth was simply disgusted by the unreality, and nothing could be less in the _Ossian_ vein than Burns. The _Ossian_ craze illustrates the extension of historical interest, of which I have spoken, and the vague discontent of Wertherism. But I do not see how the publication can be taken as the cause of a new departure, although it was an indication of the state of mind which led to a new departure. Percy's _Reliques_, again, is often mentioned as an 'epoch-making' book. Undoubtedly it was a favourite with Scott and many other readers of his generation. But how far did it create any change of taste? The old ballad was on one side congenial to the classical school, as Addison showed by his criticism of _Chevy Chase_ for its simple version of a heroic theme. Goldsmith tried his hand at a ballad about the same time with Percy, and both showed that they were a little too much afraid that simplicity might degenerate into childishness, and gain Johnson's contempt. But there was nothing in the old school incompatible with a rather patronising appreciation of the popular poetry. It gained fresh interest when the historical tendency gave a newer meaning to the old society in which ballad poetry had flourished.

This suggests the last remark which I have room to make. One characteristic of the period is a growth of provincial centres of some intellectual culture. As manufactures extended, and manufacturers began to read, circles of some literary pretensions sprang up in Norwich, Birmingham, Bristol, and Manchester; and most conspicuously in Edinburgh. Though the Scot was coming south in numbers which alarmed Johnson, there were so many eminent Scots at home during this time that Edinburgh seems at least to have rivalled London as an intellectual centre. The list of great men includes Hume and Adam Smith, Robertson and Hailes and Adam Ferguson, Kames, Monboddo, and Dugald Stewart among philosophers and historians; John Home, Blair, G. Campbell, Beattie, and Henry Mackenzie among men of letters; Hutton, Black, Cullen, and Gregory among scientific leaders. Scottish patriotism then, as at other periods, was vigorous, and happily ceasing to be antagonistic to unionist sentiment. The Scot admitted that he was touched by provincialism; but he retained a national pride, and only made the modest and most justifiable claim that he was intrinsically superior to the Southron. He still preserved intellectual and social traditions, and cherished them the more warmly, which marked him as a distinct member of the United Kingdom. In Scotland the rapid industrial development had given fresh life to the whole society without obliterating its distinctive peculiarities. Song and ballad and local legends were still alive, and not merely objects of literary curiosity. It was under such conditions that Burns appeared, the greatest beyond compare of all the self-taught poets. Now there can be no explanation whatever of the occurrence of a man of genius at a given time and place. For anything we can say, Burns was an accident; but given the genius, his relation was clear, and the genius enabled him to recognise it with unequalled clearness. Burns became, as he has continued, the embodiment of the Scottish genius. Scottish patriotic feeling animates some of his noblest poems, and whether as an original writer--and no one could be more original--or as adapting and revising the existing poetry, he represents the essential spirit of the Scottish peasant. I need not point out that this implies certain limitations, and some failings worse than limitation. But it implies also the spontaneous and masculine vigour which we may call poetic inspiration of the highest kind. He had of course read the English authors such as Addison and Pope. So far as he tried to imitate the accepted form he was apt to lose his fire. He is inspired when he has a nation behind him and is the mouthpiece of sentiments, traditional, but also living and vigorous. He represents, therefore, a new period. The lyrical poetry seemed to have died out in England. It suddenly comes to life in Scotland and reaches unsurpassable excellence within certain limits, because a man of true genius rises to utter the emotions of a people in their most natural form without bothering about canons of literary criticism. The society and the individual are in thorough harmony, and that, I take it, is the condition of really great literature at all times.

This must suggest my concluding moral. The watchword of every literary school may be brought under the formula 'Return to Nature': though 'Nature' receives different interpretations. To be natural, on the one hand, is to be sincere and spontaneous; to utter the emotions natural to you in the forms which are also natural, so far as the accepted canons are not rules imposed by authority but have been so thoroughly assimilated as to express your own instinctive impulses. On the other side, it means that the literature must be produced by the class which embodies the really vital and powerful currents of thought which are moulding society. The great author must have a people behind him; utter both what he really thinks and feels and what is thought and felt most profoundly by his contemporaries. As the literature ceases to be truly representative, and adheres to the conventionalism of the former period, it becomes 'unnatural' and the literary forms become a survival instead of a genuine creation. The history of eighteenth century literature illustrates this by showing how as the social changes give new influence to the middle classes and then to the democracy, the aristocratic class which represented the culture of the opening stage is gradually pushed aside; its methods become antiquated and its conventions cease to represent the ideals of the most vigorous part of the population. The return to Nature with Pope and Addison and Swift meant, get rid of pedantry, be thoroughly rational, and take for your guide the bright common sense of the Wit and the scholar. During Pope's supremacy the Wit who represents the aristocracy produces some admirably polished work; but the development of journalism and Grub Street shows that he is writing to satisfy the popular interests so keenly watched by Defoe in Grub Street. In the period of Richardson and Fielding Nature has become the Nature of the middle-class John Bull. The old romances have become hopelessly unnatural, and they will give us portraits of living human beings, whether Clarissa or Tom Jones. The rationalism of the higher class strikes them as cynical, and the generation which listens to Wesley must have also a secular literature, which, whether sentimental as with Richardson or representing common sense with Fielding, must at any rate correspond to solid substantial matter-of-fact motives, intelligible to the ordinary Briton of the time. In the last period, the old literary conventions, though retaining their old literary prestige, are becoming threadbare while preserving the old forms. Even the Johnsonian conservatism implies hatred for cant, for mere foppery and sham sentimentalism; and though it uses them, insists with Crabbe upon keeping in contact with fact. We must be 'realistic,' though we can retain the old literary forms. The appeal to Nature, meanwhile, has come with Rousseau and the revolutionists to mean something different--the demand, briefly, for a thorough-going reconstruction of the whole philosophical and social fabric. To the good old Briton, Whig or Tory, that seemed to be either diabolical or mere Utopian folly. To him the British constitution is still thoroughly congenial and 'natural.' Meanwhile intellectual movement has introduced a new element. The historical sense is being developed, as a settled society with a complex organisation becomes conscious at once of its continuity and of the slow processes of growth by which it has been elaborated. The fusion of English and Scottish nations stimulates the patriotism of the smaller though better race, and generates a passionate enthusiasm for the old literature which represents the characteristic genius of the smaller community. Burns embodies the sentiment, though without any conscious reference to theories philosophical or historical. The significance was to be illustrated by Scott--an equally fervid patriot. He tells Crabbe how oddly a passage in the _Village_ was associated in his memory with border-riding ballads and scraps of old plays. 'Nature' for Scott meant 'his honest grey hills' speaking in every fold of old traditional lore. That meant, in one sense, that Scott was not only romantic but reactionary. That was his weakness. But if he was the first to make the past alive, he was also the first to make the present historical. His masterpieces are not his descriptions of mediæval knights so much as the stories in which he illuminates the present by his vivid presentation of the present order as the outgrowth from the old, and makes the Scottish peasant or lawyer or laird interesting as a product and a type of social conditions. Nature therefore to him includes the natural processes by which society has been developed under the stress of circumstances. Nothing could be more unnatural for him than the revolutionary principle which despises tradition and regards the patriotic sentiment as superfluous and irrational. Wordsworth represents again another sense of Nature. He announced as his special principle that poetry should speak the language of Nature, and therefore, as he inferred, of the ordinary peasant and uneducated man. The hills did not speak to him of legend or history but of the sentiment of the unsophisticated yeoman or 'statesman.' He sympathised enthusiastically with the French Revolution so long as he took it to utter the simple republican sentiment congenial to a small society of farmers and shepherds. He abandoned it when he came to think that it really meant the dissolution of the religious and social sentiments which correspond to the deepest instincts which bound such men together. Coleridge represents a variation. He was the first Englishman to be affected by the philosophical movement of Germany. He had been an ardent revolutionist in the days when he adopted the metaphysics of Hartley and Priestley, which fell in with the main eighteenth-century current of scepticism. He came to think that the movement represented a perversion of the intellect. It meant materialism and scepticism, or interpreted Nature as a mere dead mechanism. It omitted, therefore, the essential element which is expressed by what we may roughly call the mystical tendency in philosophy. Nature must be taken as the embodiment of a divine idea. Nature, therefore, in his poetry, is regarded not from Scott's point of view as subordinate to human history, or from Wordsworth's as teaching the wisdom of unsophisticated mankind, but rather as a symbolism legible to the higher imagination. Though his fine critical sense made him keep his philosophy and his poetry distinct, that is the common tendency which gives unity to his work and which made his utterances so stimulating to congenial intellects. His criticism of the 'Nature' of Pope and Bolingbroke would be substantially, that in their hands the reason which professed to interpret Nature became cold and materialistic, because its logic left out of account the mysterious but essential touches revealed only to the heart, or, in his language, to the reason but not to the understanding. Meanwhile, though the French revolutionary doctrines were preached in England, they only attracted the literary leaders for a time, and it was not till the days of Byron and Shelley that they found thorough-going representatives in English poetry. On that, however, I must not speak. I have tried to indicate briefly how Scott and Wordsworth and Coleridge, the most eminent leaders of the new school, partly represented movements already obscurely working in England, and how they were affected by the new ideas which had sprung to life elsewhere. They, like their predecessors, are essentially trying to cast aside the literary 'survivals' of effete conditions, and succeed so far as they could find adequate expression for the great ideas of their time.

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