EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY
By GEORGE SAINTSBURY
(A paper based on, but not identical with, a discourse delivered at what may be called the headquarters of the subject—the Pump Room, Bath, October 1st, 1919)
THE effect of convincing anyone against his will is sufficiently familiar, but it may be questioned whether there is not another state of mind which is still more insusceptible of real conviction, which it is still more of a labour of Sisyphus to convince. In this state there is too much mere inertia for the word "will" to come in. There is no intention of relapsing into the same opinion; there is indeed no need of any, for the opinion is never disturbed. The attempts at convincing need not be resisted or contemned; they may even be listened to and enjoyed like a very pleasant song, but they are at once forgotten.
Something of this sort, it may be feared, is the case with the subject of this present paper. People have made up their minds that there was no eighteenth-century poetry or, at best, that such as there was was not properly eighteenth-century poetry at all, but merely a survival or an anticipation. The present writer had a perhaps accidental but certainly curious illustration of the fact in reference to the origin of this very paper; for having expressed his intention of discussing "eighteenth-century poetry," he found the subject announced at first as "eighteenth-century verse." In face of such a popular attitude—let us be bold and give it its proper name: such a vulgar error—it may not be quite idle to make a fresh attempt against it. I am not sure that in some of the versions of the Pagan Apocrypha it is not recorded that Sisyphus did get that stone lodged at last. At any rate it is worth trying, even at the risk, which is almost a certainty, of the very illogical suspicion that if you like eighteenth-century poetry, you don't like—or don't sufficiently understand—seventeenth and nineteenth. On that point the present writer may, he thinks, slap his sword home and decline duello with any man. But he will take the liberty firstly, in order to confine the matter within reasonable limits, of leaving Pope almost entirely out. Obviously the famous and much-argued question, "Was Pope a poet?" can be answered, even in the negative, without deciding our general point here.
There is, of course—the fact has been already admitted by glance—a division of the poetry of 1700–1800 to which, in a more or less grudging way, the poetical franchise is generally granted. Scraps of Lady Winchilsea and Parnell quite early; Dyer and Thomson at the beginning of the second quarter; Collins and Gray in the middle; Blake and Burns and Chatterton if not also Cowper and Crabbe, in the last division are admitted, if only to a sort of provincial or proselyte membership. Gray, indeed, has always been granted special grace, even, as some think, to an unfair comparative extent, and perhaps Mr. Swinburne's exuberant championship was never less wasted than in the cases of Collins and Blake. But Blake really does belong to no time at all except in a few fragments, and most of the others are too well known for further comment. Let us in the very limited space here available, before passing to other aspects of the subject, take two poems, one of the earlier, one of the later time, as examples of pure poetry charged with special eighteenth-century difference—for that is the point at issue. They shall be Dyer's Grongar Hill and Mrs. Greville's Prayer for Indifference. The one is a picture of that external nature to which as a rule the century is supposed to have been blind, yet charged with an "inwardness" to which that century is equally supposed to have been callous. The other is a poem of mood, almost a pathological poem, possessing the same inwardness, but charged with a flutter of feeling, again supposed to be quite unknown to the age of prose and sense. Both are curious examples of what is called the conventional phraseology of the time, flushed and animated by something additional—a characteristic which also appears in Collins, but is more disputable in Gray, save perhaps in the remarkable "Vicissitude" ode. Grongar Hill ought to be given whole, but it is not difficult of access; the "Hymn" is not so easy to get at, but it suffers less from "sampling."
There is not the slightest extravagance, from any catholic point of view over poetry, in calling Grongar Hill simply beautiful. I think it deserves that term better than anything of Gray's, though not perhaps quite so well as some things of Collins's in the first half of the century; while nothing outside them can touch it, and it came before both. Its attractions, to a somewhat close student, are manifold, not the least of them being the fashion in which, for the first time since Milton, and in a way not directly imitated even from him, it moulds the couplet of mixed eight and seven syllable lines. But one need not neglect the late Mr. Lowell's remark that when Edgar Poe talked of iambs and pentameters he made other people d——n metres. The poem has plenty of other attractions for the most untechnical reader. Dyer, who was himself a painter, invokes the Muse of Painting as well as Her of Poetry, and it is really remarkable how, at this time when hardly anybody is supposed to have had his eye on nature except Thomson, and in the very year of Winter itself, full eighty, too, before Scott provoked from Pitt his famous surprise that verse should be able to express the effect of painting—how visual as well as audible effect is produced. The exordium to the
Silent nymph with curious eye,
Who in the purple evening lie
On the mountain's lonely van;