And, though by Heaven's severe decree From slaves employed for daily hire Best pattern of true friends, beware! This may be followed by some specimens of Swift's detached aphorisms; but it must be borne in mind that these present indeed his intellectual force and penetration, his wit and his ingenuity, but give no idea of his art in marshalling argument, in the convincing narration of impossibilities (a bishop said there were some things in Gulliver that he found it hard to believe), and above all of his amazing irony: We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. I am apt to think that, in the day of judgment, there will be small allowance given to the wise for their want of morals, and to the ignorant for their want of faith, because both are without excuse. This renders the advantages equal of ignorance and knowledge. But some scruples in the wise and some vices in the ignorant will perhaps be forgiven upon the strength of temptation to each. Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudices, eradicate virtue, honesty, and religion. What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not we are told expressly, that they neither marry nor are given in marriage. The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages. Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives, and the sincerest part of our devotion. Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason, their long beards and pretences to foretell events. CHAPTER XI YOUNG, THOMSON, COLLINS, AND GRAY THE reign of Queen Anne is rightly described as the Augustan age of English literature; for at that period, as under Augustus and Maecenas, intimate relationship existed between the men who governed and the men who wrote well. The literary type thus established maintained itself through the two first Hanoverian reigns, though, under the auspices of the Germans and Walpole, literature found itself in no demand at court. The elder men whose mind was formed before the change continued to write as they had written before; their work retained the stamp of that brilliant coterie. But among the younger generation a change rapidly makes itself felt. Prose addresses itself now to a wider audience -the audience which Defoe was really the first to strike with his Robinson: while poetry, on the other hand, which had grown so social as to be scarcely distinguishable (in the work of Pope, Swift, Prior, and Gay) from glorified vers de Société, returns somewhat to its proper seclusion. Pope died in 1744; Swift, who had been dead for five years already, was taken to the grave in 1745. Within that period of the eighteenth century, two poets had earned great reputations by work of the second class, which was nevertheless nearer of kin to what most of us understand by poetry than anything in Pope or Swift; and two others, though with scanty recognition in one case, had brought back into verse the true lyrical note. Edward Young, who was born in 1684 and died in 1765, may be commended to those who would study an unattractive type of the eighteenth century cleric. He devoted his remarkable talent first to compositions in the school of Pope; but the work by which his own day knew him, and by which he remained truly famous for a full century after his death, is the Night Thoughts, a series of moralising poems composed in blank verse. brief extract may be cited from the long passage which is really no more than an expansion of the famous line with which it opens-"Procrastination is the thief of time": At thirty man suspects himself a fool, Resolves, and re-resolves, and dies the same. A Even here one feels, what is glaringly obvious in less skilful passages, that the verse cries out for rhyme. Promised blank verse, we are fobbed off with unrhymed couplets in which the tick-tack beat of Pope's iambic haunts us still. Yet the style has its fascination and its influence, apparent in George Eliot's Poems. In her girlhood, that great writer had an adoration for Young - who was even then the favourite poet of the religious and half-cultured households, such as that in which she was born; and though she outgrew the taste, her own poetry was strongly coloured by this love of her childhood. Young cannot be credited with the first impulse to shake off the fetters of Pope's couplet. James Thomson, a Scotchman, born in 1700, published in 1726 his poem Winter; then Spring, Summer, and Autumn completed his Seasons, which were finished in 1730 (twelve years before the appearance of Young's Night Thoughts). Thomson's latest work, The Castle of Indolence, was published in 1746, after a pension had qualified him to write it, and freed him from the labour of writing indifferent tragedies. In it he showed his devotion to "the poet's poet" by reviving the Spenserian stanza - which he handled with admired success. There is no particular reason why anyone nowadays should read The Seasons. Poets stand at a great disadvantage; for a man who cannot acquire one of Turner's water-colours may still think himself truly happy in possessing a Cotman, or a work of some other of the masters whom Turner eclipsed. But we can all own Wordsworth, Scott, Shelley and the rest, who have done so much better what Thomson was the first to do that is, to express in verse the charm and suggestions of landscape. Nevertheless, in the history of English literature the fact is notable, that at the very height of Pope's ascendency this young and friendless Scotchman was able to catch the ear of London with poetry of which this is a good example: The keener tempests come: and fuming dun From all the livid east, or piercing north, Thick clouds ascend in whose capacious womb A vapoury deluge lies, to snow congealed. Heavy they roll their fleecy world along; And the sky saddens with the gathered storm. Through the hushed air the whitening shower descends, At first thin-wavering; till at last the flakes Fall broad, and wide, and fast, dimming the day Put on their winter robe of purest white. |