Dyer went to Rome to pursue his art studies and, on his return in 1740, published his "Ruins of Rome" in blank verse. He was not very successful as a painter, and finally took orders, married, and settled down as a country parson. In 1757 he published his most ambitious work "The Fleece," a poem in blank verse and in four books, descriptive of English wool-growing, "The subject of 'The Fleece,' sir," pronounced Johnson, "cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and druggets?" Didactic poetry, in truth, leads too often to ludicrous descents. Such precepts as "beware the rot," "enclose, enclose, ye swains," and "-the utility of salt Teach thy slow swains"; with prescriptions for the scab, and advice as to divers kinds of wool combs, are fatal. A poem of this class has to be made poetical, by dragging in episodes and digressions which do not inhere in the subject itself but are artificially associated with it. Of such a nature is the loving mention-quoted in Wordsworth's sonnet-of the poet's native Carmarthenshire "-that soft tract Of Cambria, deep embayed, Dimetian land, By green hills fenced, by Ocean's murmur lulled." Lowell admired the line about the Siberian exiles, met "On the dark level of adversity." Sabrina Miltonic reminiscences are frequent in Dyer. is borrowed from "Comus"; "bosky bourn" and "soothest shepherd" from the same; "the light fantastic toe" from "L'Allegro"; "level brine" and "nor taint-worm shall infect the yeaning herds," from "Lycidas"; "audience pure be thy delight, though few," from "Paradise Lost." "Mr. Dyer," wrote Gray to Horace Walpole in 1751, "has more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number; but rough and injudicious.' Akenside, who helped Dyer polish the manuscript of "The Fleece," said that "he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer's 'Fleece'; for if that were ill received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence." The romantic element in Dyer's imagi-\ nation appears principally in his love of the mountains and of ancient ruins. Johnson cites with approval a sentence in "The Ruins of Rome": "At dead of night, The hermit oft, midst his orisons, hears Aghast the voice of Time disparting towers." * These were classic ruins. Perhaps the doctor's sympathy would not have been so quickly extended to the picture of the moldering Gothic tower in "Grongar Hill," or of "solitary Stonehenge gray with moss," in "The Fleece." *Cf. Wordsworth's "Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of time." -Mutability: Ecclesiastical Sonnets, XXXIV. CHAPTER V. The Miltonic Group. THAT the influence of Milton, in the romantic revival of the eighteenth century, should have been hardly second in importance to Spenser's is a confirmation of our remark that Augustan literature was "classical" in a way of its own. It is another example of that curiously topsy-turvy condition of things in which rhyme was a mark of the classic, and blank verse of the romantic. For Milton is the most truly classical of English poets; and yet, from the angle of observation at which the eighteenth century viewed him, he appeared a romantic. It was upon his romantic side, at all events, that the new school of poets apprehended and appropriated him. This side was present in Milton in a fuller measure than his completed works would show. It is well known that he, at one time, had projected an Arthuriad, a design which, if carried out, might have anticipated Tennyson and so deprived us of "The Idyls of the King." "I betook me," he writes, "among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood."* And in the "Epitaphium Damonis" he thus apprises the reader of his purpose: Ipse ego Dardanias Rutupina per æquora puppes, Dicam, et Pandrasidos regnum vetus Inogeniæ, "An Apology for Smectymnuus." Brennumque Arviragumque duces, priscumque Belinum, The "matter of Britain" never quite lost the fascination which it had exercised over his youthful imagination, as appears from passages in "Paradise Lost" and even in "Paradise Regained." But with his increasing austerity, both religious and literary, Milton gravitated finally to Hebraic themes and Hellenic art forms. He wrote Homeric epics and Æschylean tragedies, instead of masques and sonnets, of rhymed pieces on the Italian model, like "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," and of stanzaic poems, like the "Nativity Ode," touched with Elizabethan conceits. He relied more and more upon sheer construction and weight of thought and less upon decorative richness of detail. His diction became naked and severe, and he employed rhyme but sparingly, even in the choral * Lines 162–168. See also "Mansus," 80-84. +"What resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son, -Book I. 579-587. "Faery damsels met in forest wide By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, -Book II. 359-361. parts of "Samson Agonistes." In short, like Goethe, he grew classical as he grew old. It has been mentioned that "Paradise Lost" did much to keep alive the tradition of English blank verse through a period remarkable for its bigoted devotion to rhyme, and especially to the heroic couplet, Yet it was, after all, Milton's early poetry, in which rhyme is used-though used so differently from the way in which Pope used it-that counted for most in the history of the romantic movement. Professor Masson contradicts the common assertion, that "Paradise Lost" was first written into popularity by Addison's Saturday papers. While that series was running, Tonson brought out (1711-13) an edition of Milton's poetical works which was "the ninth of 'Paradise Lost,' the eighth of Paradise Regained,' the seventh of 'Samson Agonistes' and the sixth of the minor poems." The previous issues of the minor poems had been in 1645, 1673, 1695, 1705, and 1707. Six editions in sixtyeight years is certainly no very great showing. After 1713 editions of Milton multiplied rapidly; by 1763 "Paradise Lost" was in its forty-sixth, and the minor poems in their thirtieth.* Addison selected an occasional passage from Milton's juvenile poems, in the Spectator; but from all obtainable evidence, it seems not doubtful that they had been comparatively neglected, and that, although reissued from time to time in complete editions of Milton's poetry, they were regarded merely as pendents to "Paradise Lost" and floated by its reputation. "Whatever causes," says Dryden, "Milton alleges for the abolishing of rime . . . his own par"Masson's Life of Milton," Vol. VI. p. 789. |