A history of English literature

by Edward Albert

OTHER TRANSITIONAL POETS

1. Thomas Gray (1716–71). Gray was born in London, the son of a money-scrivener, a kind of lawyer, who was in affluent circumstances. Gray, however, owed his education largely to the self-denial of his mother; he was educated at Eton and Cambridge, at the latter of which places he met Horace Walpole. With Walpole he toured Italy; then, returning to the university, he took his degree, finally settling down to a life that was little more than an elegant futility. He was offered the Laureateship, but refused it (1757); he obtained a professorship at Cambridge, but he never lectured. He wrote a little, traveled a little; but he was a man of shrinking and fastidious tastes, unapt for the rough shocks of the world, and, fortunately for himself, able to withdraw beyond them.

His first poem was the Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1747), which contained gloomy moralizings on the approaching fate of those “little victims,” the schoolboys. Then, after years of revision and excision, appeared the famous Elegy written in a Country Churchyard (1751). This poem was smooth and graceful; it contained familiar sentiments turned into admirable, quotable phrases; and so, while it was agreeably familiar, it was fresh enough to be attractive. Its popularity has been maintained to the present day. His Pindaric Odes (1757) were unsuccessful, being criticized for their obscurity. The Bard and The Progress of Poesy, the two Pindaric Odes in the book, certainly require some elucidation, especially to readers not familiar with history and literature. At the first glance Gray’s odes are seen to have all the odic splendor of diction; in fact, the adornment is so thickly applied that it can almost stand alone, like a robe stiff with gems and gold lace. Yet the poems have energy and dignity. Johnson, who had a distaste for both the character and the work of Gray, cavils at the work, saying that it has a strutting dignity. “He is tall by walking on tiptoe. His art and his struggle are too visible.”

The prose work of Gray is notable. It consists partly of letters written during his travels, describing the scenes he visits. In them he shows vigor of style, a sharp eye and a generous admiration for the real beauties of nature. His descriptions, such as those of the Lake District, are quite admirable, and well in advance of the general taste of his age.

In spite of its slender bulk, Gray’s achievement both in prose and verse is of great importance. He explored the origins of romance in the early Norse and Celtic legends; his sympathies with the poor and oppressed were genuine and emphatically expressed; and his treatment of nature was a great improvement upon that of his predecessors.

Johnson’s final estimate of Gray is not unfair, and we can leave the poet with it: “His mind had a large grasp; his curiosity was unlimited, and his judgment cultivated; he was likely to love much where he loved at all, but he was fastidious and hard to please.”

2. William Collins (1721–59). Collins was born at Chichester, and was educated at Winchester and Oxford, but all his life he was weighted with the curse of insanity, and for this reason he had to take untimely leave of the university. He tried to follow a literary career in London, but with scant success, being arrested for debt. He was released by the generosity of his publishers, and a fortunate legacy relieved him from the worst of his financial terrors. He lapsed into a mild species of melancholia, finally dying in his native city at the early age of thirty-eight.

The work of Collins is very small in bulk, and even of this scanty stock a fair proportion shows only mediocre ability. His Persian Eclogues (1742) are in the conventional style of Pope, and though they profess to deal with Persian scenes and characters, the Oriental setting shows no special information or inspiration. The book that gives him his place in literature is his Odes (1747), a small octavo volume of fifty-two pages. The work is a collection of odes to Pity, Fear, Simplicity, Patriotism, and kindred abstract subjects. Some of the odes are overweighted with the cumbrous creaking machinery of the Pindaric; but the best of them, especially the Ode to Evening (done in unrhymed verse), are instinct with a sweet tenderness, a subdued and shadowy pathos, and a magical enchantment of phrase. In the same book two short elegies, one beginning “How sleep the brave” and the other on James Thomson (“In yonder grave a Druid lies”), are as captivating, with their misty lights and murmuring echoes of melancholy, as the best of Keats. In the finest work of Collins, with his eager and wistful searching, with what Johnson morosely called his “flights of imagination that pass the bounds of nature,” we are ushered over the threshold of romance.

3. William Cowper (1731–1800). Cowper was born at Great Berkhampstead, in Hertfordshire, where his father was rector. He was to have been a barrister, and was actually called to the Bar (1754), but a great and morbid timidity of disposition, which increased till it became religious and suicidal mania, hampered him cruelly through life. Family influence obtained for him a good post on the clerical staff of the House of Lords, but his extreme shyness made him quite unfit for this semi-public appointment. The consequent disappointment disordered his wits, and he attempted suicide, but was fortunately prevented. The latter part of his life was spent chiefly at Olney, in Buckinghamshire, where his good friends the Unwins treated him with great kindness and good sense. His feeling of gratitude for their care, expressed or implicit in many of his poems and letters, is one of the most touching features in the literature of the time. This comparatively happy state of affairs did not last till the end, for the years immediately preceding his death were much clouded with extreme mental and bodily affliction.

Cowper’s poems were produced late in life, but in bulk the work is large. It is curiously mixed and attractive in its nature. His Poems (1782) is his first attempt at authorship. The book contains little that is noteworthy. The bulk of it is taken up with a collection of set pieces in heroic couplets, quite in the usual manner, on such subjects as The Progress of Error, Truth, Hope, and Charity. At the very end of the volume a few miscellaneous short pieces are more encouraging as novelties. One of them is the well-known poem containing the reflections of Alexander Selkirk (“I am monarch of all I survey”). His next work is The Task (1785), a long poem in blank verse, dealing with simple and familiar themes and containing many fine descriptions of country scenes. In places the style is marked by the prevailing artificial tricks, and as a whole the poem is seldom inspired with any deep or passionate feeling; but his observation is acute and humane, it includes the homeliest detail within its kindly scope, and he gives us real nature, like Thomson in The Seasons. At the end of this volume the ballad of John Gilpin finds a place. It is an excellent example of Cowper’s prim but sprightly humor, an extraordinary gift for a man of his morbid temperament. Other short poems were added to later editions of his first volume. These include the Epitaph on a Hare, curiously and touchingly pathetic; lines On the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture, which reveal only too painfully the suppressed convulsions of grief and longing that were stirred within him by memories of the past; and The Castaway, written in a lucid interval just before the end, and sounding like the wail of a damned spirit. The poem gives a tragic finality to his life. It describes the doom of a poor wretch swept overboard in a storm, and concludes:

No poet wept him; but the page

Of narrative sincere,

That tells his name, his worth, his age,

Is wet with Anson’s tear;

And tears by bards or heroes shed

Alike immortalise the dead.

I therefore purpose not, or dream,

Descanting on his fate,

To give the melancholy theme

A more enduring date:

But misery still delights to trace

Its semblance in another’s case.

No voice divine the storm allay’d,

No light propitious shone,

When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,

We perished, each alone:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.

Cowper’s letters, private epistles addressed to various personal friends, are among the most delightful of their kind. They show the man at his best—almost jovial in a delicate fashion, keenly observant, and with a genuine gift for narrative. The style is so clear that the disposition of the writer shines through it with unruffled benignity.

Though Cowper comes late among the transition poets, he does not travel very far on the road to novelty. His mind is over-timorous, and he lacks robustness of temper. But in his feeling for nature, in the ease and versatility of his poetical work, in his undoubted lyrical gift (rarely expressed), his work marks an advance far beyond that of the classicists.

4. George Crabbe (1754–1832). Crabbe comes very late among the poets now under review, but in method he is largely of the eighteenth century. He was born in Suffolk, at Aldeburgh, where his father had been a schoolmaster and a collector of customs. He was apprenticed to a surgeon, but later left his native town to seek fame as an author in London (1780). He had little success at first, but gradually attracted attention. He fixed on a settled career by taking holy orders, and obtained the patronage of several influential men. Ultimately he obtained the valuable living of Trowbridge (1814), where he died as late as 1832, only a few months before Sir Walter Scott.

His chief poetical works are The Library (1781), The Village (1783), which made his name as a poet, The Borough (1810), and Tales in Verse (1812). The poems in their succession show little development, resembling each other closely both in subject and style. They are collections of tales, told in heroic couplets with much sympathy and a good deal of pathetic power, dealing with the lives of simple countryfolk such as Crabbe encountered in his own parish. There is a large amount of strong natural description, though it is subsidiary to the human interest in the stories themselves. Crabbe has often been criticized for being too gloomy and pessimistic; he is pessimistic in the sense that he is stubbornly alive to the miseries of the poor, and he is at a loss how to relieve them. His work was warmly recognized by Wordsworth and other thinkers who had the welfare of the poor at heart. Crabbe, however, cannot be classed as a great poet; he lacks the supreme poetic gift of transforming even squalor and affliction into things of splendor and appeal; but he is sympathetic, sincere, and an acute observer of human nature.

5. Mark Akenside (1721–70). Akenside was born at Newcastle, studied medicine at Edinburgh, and graduated at Leyden in 1744. He started practice at Northampton, but did not succeed. Later he had more success in London. In the capital he took to political writing, in which he was moderately proficient, and he obtained a pension as a reward. He was a well-known character, and is said to have been caricatured by Smollett in Peregrine Pickle.

His best political poem is his Epistle to Curio (1744), which contains some brilliant invective against Pulteney. His best-known book is The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744), a long and rambling blank-verse poem. The style is somewhat Miltonic in its energy and its turn of phrase, but it is deficient in the Miltonic genius. The poem has some loud but rather fine descriptive passages, especially those dealing with his native Tyne, for the beauties of which he shows a laudable enthusiasm.

6. Christopher Smart (1722–71). Smart was born in Kent, and was educated at Cambridge, where he graduated. He was a man of unbalanced mind, which, leading him into many extravagances, brought him finally to a madhouse and a miserable death in a debtor’s prison.

The poem connected with his name is The Song to David (1763), which is said to have been partly written on the walls of the madhouse in which he was confined. The poem, consisting of nearly a hundred six-line stanzas, is a wild, rhapsodical effusion, full of extravagance and incoherence, but in places containing bursts of tremendous poetic power. The following stanzas, the last in the poem, give an idea of these poetical bomb-shells:

Glorious the sun in mid career;

Glorious the assembled fires appear;

Glorious the comet’s train:

Glorious the trumpet and alarm;

Glorious the Almighty’s stretched-out arm;

Glorious the enraptured main:

Glorious the northern lights astream;

Glorious the song, when God’s the theme;

Glorious the thunder’s roar:

Glorious hosanna from the den;

Glorious the catholic amen;

Glorious the martyr’s gore:

Glorious—more glorious is the crown

Of Him that brought salvation down,

By meekness called thy Son;

Thou that stupendous truth believed,

And now the matchless deed’s achieved,

Determined, Dared, and Done.

7. William Shenstone (1714–63). Born at the Leasowes, in Worcestershire, Shenstone was educated at Oxford. After leaving the university he retired to his estate, which he beautified in the fashion of the time. He was a man of an agreeable nature, but was shy and retiring, and spent nearly all his life in the country.

His published works consist chiefly of odes, elegies, and what he called Levities, or Pieces of Humour (often dreary enough), and The Schoolmistress (1742). His poems are largely pastoral, but they are by no means the artificial pastoral of Pope. He studies nature himself, and does not derive his notions from books. In this matter he resembles Cowper. The Schoolmistress, which by a notable advance is written in the Spenserian stanza, deals in rather a sentimental fashion with the teacher in his first school; it is sympathetic in treatment, and in style is an interesting example of the transition.

8. Charles Churchill (1731–64). Churchill was educated at Westminster School and at Cambridge, took orders (1756), and obtained a curacy. When he was about twenty-seven years old he suddenly started on a wild course of conduct, abandoned his curacy, took to politics and hack journalism, and to drinking and debauchery. He died at Boulogne at the age of thirty-three.

He lives in literature as a satirical poet, and the best of his work is in The Rosciad (1761), a bitter attack on the chief political and social figures of the time. The poem, which is written in the Dryden heroic couplet, was greeted as the work of a new Dryden, but it has little of that poet’s superb elevation and contempt. It is vigorous and acute, but it is too often cheap and nasty. It had much popularity, but when the topical need for it was over it had no permanent value. Churchill continued to satirize the age in a wild indiscriminate fashion in poems called Night (1761), The Ghost (1763), and The Prophecy of Famine (1763).

9. Robert Blair (1699–1746). Blair was born at Edinburgh, and became a clergyman in East Lothian. The poem that brought him his transitory reputation was The Grave (1743). It is a long blank-verse poem of meditation on man’s mortality. It does not make cheerful reading, and the sentiments are quite ordinary. It has, however, a certain strength and dignity, and the versification shows skill and some degree of freshness. The poem is reminiscent of Young’s Night Thoughts.