Chapter 23

We have been gradually growing national overmuch, and are about to grow even more so, therefore ask you to what era, pray, did Thomson belong? To none. Thomson had no precursor--and till Cowper no follower. He effulged all at once sunlike--like Scotland's storm-loving, mist-enamoured sun, which till you have seen on a day of thunder, you cannot be said ever to have seen the sun. Cowper followed Thomson merely in time. We should have had "The Task," even had we never had "The Seasons." These two were "heralds of a mighty train ensuing;" add them, then, to the worthies of our own age, and they belong to it--and all the rest of the poetry of the modern world--to which add that of the ancient--if multiplied by ten in quantity--and by twenty in quality--would not so variously, so vigorously, and so truly image the form and pressure, the life and spirit of the mother of us all--Nature. Are then "The Seasons" and "The Task" Great Poems? Yes.--Why? What! Do you need to be told that that Poem must be great, which was the first to paint the rolling mystery of the year, and to show that all its Seasons are but the varied God? The idea was original and sublime; and the fulfilment thereof so complete, that some six thousand years having elapsed between the creation of the world and of that poem, some sixty thousand, we prophesy, will elapse between the appearance of that poem and the publication of another equally great, on a subject external to the mind, equally magnificent. We further presume, that you hold sacred the "hearth." Now, in "The Task," the "hearth" is the heart of the poem, just as it is of a happy house. No other poem is so full of domestic happiness--humble and high; none is so breathed over by the spirit of the Christian religion.

Poetry, which, though not dead, had long been sleeping in Scotland, was restored to waking life by THOMSON. His genius was national; and so, too, was the subject of his first and greatest song. By saying that his genius was national, we mean that its temperament was enthusiastic and passionate, and that, though highly imaginative, the sources of its power lay in the heart. "The Castle of Indolence" is distinguished by purer taste and finer fancy; but with all its exquisite beauties, that poem is but the vision of a dream. "The Seasons" are glorious realities; and the charm of the strain that sings the "rolling year" is its truth. But what mean we by saying that "The Seasons" are a national subject?--do we assert that they are solely Scottish? That would be too bold, even for us; but we scruple not to assert, that Thomson has made them so, as far as might be without insult, injury, or injustice, to the rest of the globe. His suns rise and set in Scottish heavens; his "deep-fermenting tempests are brewed in grim evening" Scottish skies; Scottish is his thunder of cloud and cataract; his "vapours, and snows, and storms" are Scottish; and, strange as the assertion would have sounded in the ears of Samuel Johnson, Scottish are his woods, their sugh, and their roar; nor less their stillness, more awful amidst the vast multitude of steady stems, than when all the sullen pine-tops are swinging to the hurricane. A dread love of his native land was in his heart when he cried in the solitude--

"Hail, kindred glooms! congenial horrors, hail!"

The genius of HOME was national--and so, too, was the subject of his justly famous Tragedy of "Douglas." He had studied the old Ballads; their simplicities were sweet to him as wallflowers on ruins. On the story of Gill Morice, who was an Earl's son, he founded the Tragedy, which surely no Scottish eyes ever witnessed without tears. Are not these most Scottish lines?--

"Ye woods and wilds, whose melancholy gloom Accords with my soul's sadness!"

And these even more so,--

"Red came the river down, and loud and oft The angry Spirit of the water shriek'd!"

The Scottish Tragedian in an evil hour crossed the Tweed, riding on horseback all the way to London. His genius got Anglified, took a consumption, and perished in the prime of life. But nearly half a century afterwards, on seeing the Siddons in _Lady Randolph_, and hearing her low, deep, wild, woe-begone voice exclaim, "My beautiful! my brave!" "the aged harper's soul awoke," and his dim eyes were again lighted up for a moment with the fires of genius--say rather for a moment bedewed with the tears of sensibility re-awakened from decay and dotage.

The genius of Beattie was national, and so was the subject of his charming song--"The Minstrel." For what is its design? He tells us, to trace the progress of a poetical genius born in a rude age, from the first dawning of reason and fancy, till that period at which he may be supposed capable of appearing in the world as a Scottish Minstrel; that is, as an itinerant poet and musician--a character which, according to the notions of our forefathers, was not only respectable, but sacred.

"There lived in Gothic days, as legends tell, A shepherd swain, a man of low degree; Whose sires perchance in Fairyland might dwell, Sicilian groves and vales of Arcady; But he, I ween, was of the North Countrie; A nation famed for song and beauty's charms; Zealous, yet modest; innocent, though free; Patient of toil, serene amid alarms; Inflexible in faith, invincible in arms.

The shepherd swain, of whom I mention made, On Scotia's mountains fed his little flock; The sickle, scythe, or plough he never sway'd: An honest heart was almost all his stock; His drink the living waters from the rock; The milky dams supplied his board, and lent Their kindly fleece to baffle winter's shock; And he, though oft with dust and sweat besprent, Did guide and guard their wanderings, wheresoe'er they went."

Did patriotism ever inspire genius with sentiment more Scottish than _that_? Did imagination ever create scenery more Scottish, Manners, Morals, Life?

"Lo! where the stripling rapt in wonder roves Beneath the precipice o'erhung with pine; And sees, on high, amidst th' encircling groves From cliff to cliff the foaming torrents shine: While waters, woods, and winds, in concert join, And echo swells the chorus to the skies!"

Beattie chants there like a man who had been at the Linn of Dee. He wore a wig, it is true; but at times, when the fit was on him, he wrote like the unshorn Apollo.

The genius of Grahame was national, and so too was the subject of his first and best poem--"The Sabbath."

"How still the morning of the hallow'd day!"

is a line that could have been uttered only by a holy Scottish heart. For we alone know what is indeed Sabbath silence--an earnest of everlasting rest. To our hearts, the very birds of Scotland sing holily on that day. A sacred smile is on the dewy flowers. The lilies look whiter in their loveliness; the blush-rose reddens in the sun with a diviner dye; and with a more celestial scent the hoary hawthorn sweetens the wilderness. Sorely disturbed of yore, over the glens and hills of Scotland, was the Day of Peace!

"O, the great goodness of the _Saints of Old_!"

the Covenanters. Listen to the Sabbath bard,--

"With them each day was holy; but that morn On which the angel said, 'See where the Lord Was laid,' joyous arose; to die that day Was bliss. Long ere the dawn by devious ways, O'er hills, through woods, o'er dreary wastes, they sought The upland muirs, where rivers, there but brooks, Dispart to different seas. Fast by such brooks A little glen is sometimes scoop'd, a plat With greensward gay, and flowers that strangers seem Amid the heathery wild, that all around Fatigues the eye: in solitudes like these, Thy persecuted children, Scotia, foil'd A tyrant's and a bigot's bloody laws. There, leaning on his spear (one of the array Whose gleam, in former days, had scathed the rose On England's banner, and had powerless struck The infatuate monarch, and his wavering host!) The lyart veteran heard the word of God By Cameron thunder'd, or by Renwick pour'd In gentle stream; then rose the song, the loud Acclaim of praise. The wheeling plover ceased Her plaint; the solitary place was glad; And on the distant cairn the watcher's ear Caught doubtfully at times the breeze-borne note. But years more gloomy follow'd; and no more The assembled people dared, in face of day, To worship God, or even at the dead Of night, save when the wintry storm raved fierce, And thunder-peals compell'd the men of blood To couch within their dens; then dauntlessly The scatter'd few would meet, in some deep dell By rocks o'ercanopied, to hear the voice, Their faithful pastor's voice. He by the gleam Of sheeted lightning oped the sacred book, And words of comfort spake; over their souls His accents soothing came, as to her young The heathfowl's plumes, when, at the close of eve, She gathers in, mournful, her brood dispersed By murderous sport, and o'er the remnant spreads Fondly her wings; close nestling 'neath her breast They cherish'd cower amid the purple bloom."

Not a few other sweet singers or strong, native to this nook of our isle, might we now in these humble pages lovingly commemorate; and "four shall we mention, dearer than the rest," for sake of that virtue, among many virtues, which we have been lauding all along, their nationality;--These are AIRD and MOTHERWELL (of whom another hour), MOIR and POLLOK.

Of Moir, our own "delightful Delta," as we love to call him--and the epithet now by right appertains to his name--we shall now say simply this, that he has produced many original pieces which will possess a permanent place in the poetry of Scotland. Delicacy and grace characterise his happiest compositions; some of them are beautiful in a cheerful spirit that has only to look on nature to be happy; and others breathe the simplest and purest pathos. His scenery, whether sea-coast or inland, is always truly Scottish; and at times his pen drops touches of light on minute objects, that till then had slumbered in the shade, but now "shine well where they stand" or lie, as component and characteristic parts of our lowland landscapes. Let others labour away at long poems, and for their pains get neglect or oblivion; Moir is seen as he is in many short ones, which the Scottish Muses may "not willingly let die." And that must be a pleasant thought when it touches the heart of the mildest and most modest of men, as he sits by his family-fire, beside those most dear to him, after a day past in smoothing, by his skill, the bed and the brow of pain, in restoring sickness to health, in alleviating sufferings that cannot be cured, or in mitigating the pangs of death.

Pollok had great original genius strong in a sacred sense of religion. Such of his short compositions as we have seen, written in early youth, were but mere copies of verses, and gave little or no promise of power. But his soul was working in the green moorland solitudes round about his father's house, in the wild and beautiful parishes of Eaglesham and Mearns, separated by thee, O Yearn! sweetest of pastoral streams that murmur through the west, asunder those broomy and birken banks and trees, where the grey-linties sing, is formed the clear junction of the rills, issuing, the one from the hill-spring above the Black-waterfall, and the other from the Brother-loch. The poet in prime of youth (he died in his twenty-seventh year) embarked on a high and adventurous emprise, and voyaged the illimitable Deep. His spirit expanded its wings, and in a holy pride felt them to be broad, as they hovered over the dark abyss. "The Course of Time," for so young a man, was a vast achievement. The book he loved best was the Bible, and his style is often Scriptural. Of our poets, he had studied, we believe, but Milton, Young, and Byron. He had much to learn in composition; and, had he lived, he would have looked almost with humiliation on much that is at present eulogised by his devoted admirers. But the soul of poetry is there, though often dimly developed, and many passages there are, and long ones too, that heave, and hurry, and glow along in a divine enthusiasm.

"His ears he closed, to listen to the strains That Sion's bards did consecrate of old, And fix'd his Pindus upon Lebanon."

Let us fly again to England, and leaving for another hour Shelley and Hunt and Keats, and Croly and Milman and Heber, and Sterling and Milnes and Tennyson, with some younger aspirants of our own day; and Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, and lesser stars of that constellation, let us alight on the verge of that famous era when the throne was occupied by Dryden, and then by Pope--searching still for a Great Poem. Did either of them ever write one? No--never. Sir Walter says finely of glorious John,

"And Dryden in immortal strain, Had raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald King and Court, Bade him play on to make them sport, The world defrauded of the high design, Profaned the God-given strength, and marr'd the lofty line."

But why, we ask, did Dryden suffer a ribald king and court to debase and degrade him, and strangle his immortal strain? Because he was poor! But could he not have died of cold, thirst, and hunger--of starvation? Have not millions of men and women done so, rather than sacrifice their conscience? And shall we grant to a great poet that indulgence which many a humble hind would have flung with scorn in our teeth, and rather than have availed himself of it, faced the fagot, or the halter, or the stake set within the sea-flood? But it is satisfactory to know that Dryden, though still glorious John, was not a Great Poet. He was seldom visited by the pathetic or the sublime--else had his genius held fast its integrity--been ribald to no ribald--and indignantly kicked to the devil both court and king. But what a master of reasoning in verse! And of verse what a volume of fire! "The long-resounding march and energy divine." Pope, again, with the common frailties of humanity, was an ethereal creature--and played on his own harp with finest taste, and wonderful execution. We doubt, indeed, if such a finished style has ever been heard since from any one of the King Apollo's musicians. His versification may be monotonous, but without a sweet and potent charm only to ears of leather. That his poetry has no passion is the creed of critics "of Cambyses' vein;" "Heloïse" and "The Unfortunate Lady" have made the world's heart to throb. As for Imagination, we shall continue till such time as that Faculty has been distinguished from Fancy, to see it shining in "The Rape of the Lock," with a lambent lustre; if high intellect be not dominant in his "Epistles" and his "Essay on Man," you will look for it in vain in the nineteenth century; all other Satires seem complimentary to their victims when read after "The Dunciad"--and could a man, whose heart was not heroic, have given us another Iliad, which, all unlike as it is to the Greek, may be read with transport, even after Homer's?

We have not yet, it would seem, found the object of our search--a Great Poem. Let us extend our quest into the Elizabethan age. We are at once sucked into the theatre. With the whole drama of that age we are conversant and familiar; but whether we understand it or not, is another question. It aspires to give representations of Human Life in all its infinite varieties, and inconsistencies, and conflicts, and turmoils produced by the Passions. Time and space are not suffered to interpose their unities between the Poet and his vast design, who, provided he can satisfy the spectators by the pageant of their own passions moving across the stage, may exhibit there whatever he wills from life, death, or the grave. 'Tis a sublime conception--and sometimes has given rise to sublime performance; but has been crowned with full success in no hands but those of Shakespeare. Great as was the genius of many of the dramatists of that age, not one of them has produced a Great Tragedy. A Great Tragedy indeed! What! without harmony or proportion in the plan--with all puzzling perplexities and inextricable entanglements in the plot--and with disgust and horror in the catastrophe? As for the characters, male and female--saw ye ever such a set of swaggerers and rantipoles as they often are in one act--Methodist preachers and demure young women at a love-feast in another--absolute heroes and heroines of high calibre in a third--and so on, changing and shifting name and nature, according to the laws of the Romantic Drama forsooth--but in hideous violation of the laws of nature--till the curtain falls over a heap of bodies huddled together, without regard to age or sex, as if they had been overtaken in liquor. We admit that there is gross exaggeration in the picture; but there is always truth in a tolerable caricature--and this is one of a tragedy of Webster, Ford, or Massinger.

It is satisfactory to know that the good sense, and good feeling, and good taste of the people of England, will not submit to be belaboured by editors and critics into unqualified admiration of such enormities. The Old English Drama lies buried in the dust with all its tragedies. Never more will they move across the stage. Scholars read them, and often with delight, admiration, and wonder; for genius is a strange spirit, and has begotten strange children on the body of the Tragic Muse. In the closet it is pleasant to peruse the countenances, at once divine, human, and brutal, of the incomprehensible monsters--to scan their forms, powerful though misshapen--to watch their movements, vigorous though distorted--and to hold up one's hands in amazement on hearing them not seldom discourse most excellent music. But we should shudder to see them on the stage enacting the parts of men and women--and call for the manager. All has been done for the least deformed of the tragedies of the Old English Drama that humanity could do, enlightened by the Christian religion; but nature has risen up to vindicate herself against such misrepresentations as they afford; and sometimes finds it all she can do to stomach Shakespeare.

But the monstrosities we have mentioned are not the worst to be found in the Old English Drama. Others there are that, till civilised Christendom fall back into barbarous Heathendom, must for ever be unendurable to human ears, whether long or short--we mean the obscenities. That sin is banished for ever from our literature. The poet who might dare to commit it, would be immediately hooted out of society, and sent to roost in barns among the owls. But the Old English Drama is stuffed with ineffable pollutions; and full of passages that the street-walker would be ashamed to read in the stews. We have not seen that volume of the Family Dramatists which contains Massinger. But if made fit for female reading, his plays must be mutilated and mangled out of all likeness to the original wholes. To free them even from the grossest impurities, without destroying their very life, is impossible; and it would be far better to make a selection of fine passages, after the manner of Lamb's Specimens--but with a severer eye--than to attempt in vain to preserve their character as plays, and at the same time to expunge all that is too disgusting, perhaps, to be dangerous to boys and virgins. Full-grown men may read what they choose--perhaps without suffering from it; but the modesty of the young clear eye must not be profaned--and we cannot, for our own part, imagine a _Family_ Old English Dramatist.

And here again bursts upon us the glory of the Greek Drama. The Athenians were as wicked, as licentious, as polluted, and much more so, we hope, than ever were the English; but they debased not with their gross vices their glorious tragedies. Nature in her higher moods alone, and most majestic aspects, trod their stage. Buffoons, and ribalds, and zanies, and "rude indecent clowns," were confined to comedies; and even there they too were idealised, and resembled not the obscene samples that so often sicken us in the midst of "the acting of a dreadful thing" in our old theatre. They knew that "with other ministrations, thou, O Nature!" teachest thy handmaid Art to soothe the souls of thy congregated children--congregated to behold her noble goings-on, and to rise up and depart elevated by the transcendent pageant. The Tragic muse was in those days a Priestess--tragedies were religious ceremonies; for all the ancestral stories they celebrated were under consecration--the spirit of the ages of heroes and demigods descended over the vast amphitheatre; and thus were Æschylus, and Sophocles, and Euripides, the guardians of the national character, which, we all know, was, in spite of all it suffered under, for ever passionately enamoured of all the forms of greatness.

Forgive us--spirit of Shakespeare! that seem'st to animate that high-brow'd bust--if indeed we have offered any show of irreverence to thy name and nature; for now, in the noiselessness of midnight, to our awed but loving hearts do both appear divine! Forgive us--we beseech thee--that on going to bed--which we are just about to do--we may be able to compose ourselves to sleep--and dream of Miranda and Imogen, and Desdemona and Cordelia. Father revered of that holy family! by the strong light in the eyes of Innocence we beseech thee to forgive us!--Ha! what old ghost art thou--clothed in the weeds of more than mortal misery--mad, mad, mad--come and gone--was it Lear?

We have found then, it seems--at last--the object of our search--a Great Poem--ay--four Great Poems--"Lear"--"Hamlet"--"Othello"--"Macbeth." And was the revealer of those high mysteries in his youth a deer-stealer in the parks of Warwickshire, a linkboy in London streets? And died he before his grand climacteric in a dimmish sort of a middle-sized tenement in Stratford-on-Avon, of a surfeit from an overdose of home-brewed humming ale? Such is the tradition.

Had we a daughter--an only daughter--we should wish her to be like

"Heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb."

In that one line has Wordsworth done an unappreciable service to Spenser. He has improved upon a picture in "The Fairy Queen"--making "the beauty still more beauteous," by a single touch of a pencil dipped in moonlight, or in sunlight tender as Luna's smiles. Through Spenser's many nine-lined stanzas the lovely lady glides along her own world--and our eyes follow in delight the sinless wanderer. In Wordsworth's one single celestial line we behold her neither in time nor space--an immortal omnipresent idea at one gaze occupying the soul.