The Prayer for Indifference is much less varied in kind, and much more limited in degree, of attraction, but it is perhaps subtler. The personal application of it can escape no reader of Fanny Burney's Diaries, but is not necessary to appreciation. The idea is that of an appeal to Oberon for a "balm" slightly different from that which plays so important a part in A Midsummer Night's Dream—a spell causing neither love nor hate, but only indifference. The metre is ordinary ballad or common measure; the language not very different from the ordinary poetic diction of the time. You are not, as in Grongar Hill, made to believe that you are not in the eighteenth century at all, or, if at all, as far from its usual and central ways and thoughts as Grongar itself was and is from London. But, by a quaint and pleasing paradox, the suppliant infuses into her prayer qualities which were the very opposite of that which she prays for, and which in a certain sense might be said to be the quality of the century itself at least on the common estimate. Indifference—in the sense of abstinence from enthusiasm—certainly was affected by many, and positively approved by some, in those days. But when the lady says:
I ask no kind return in love,
No tempting charm to please—
Far from the heart such gifts remove
That sighs for peace and ease,
there is a quiver in verse and phrase and sense alike which indicates and expresses very effectively aspirations quite different from indifference. And the quiver becomes a throb, emphasised by the repetition of that potent word "far," as she goes on:
Nor ease, nor peace that heart can know
That, like the needle true,
Turns at the touch of joy or woe,
But, turning, trembles too.
Far as distress the soul can wound,
'Tis pain in each degree;
'Tis bliss, but to a certain bound,
Beyond, 'tis agony.
And there is not much less real passion, though the expression has become ironic instead of direct, in the concluding stanza:
And what of life remains to me
I'll pass in sober ease:
Half-pleased, contented I will be—
Content but half to please.
Now it is probably hopeless to expect readers who have been thoroughly broken to other styles of poetry themselves to be contented, to be even "half-pleased" with this. The metre will seem to them jog-trot, the language hopelessly prosaic, the expression, as Nietzsche says of John Stuart Mill, "offensively clear"; the absence of any attempt at elaborate ornament or elaborate ugliness almost more offensive still. And it may also seem idle boasting or sheer mendacity to observe that there are people who delight in intricate versification, who love even metaphysical ambiguousness and obscurity; people for whom Blake is not too uncommonplace or Rossetti too flamboyant, or—to come to more recent days, while keeping to the equal waters of the dead—Mary Coleridge too problematic, who yet can enjoy this verse very much indeed, and feel that, having known it, they could not do without it, which some have held to be the great test of poetry. Indeed, to them, not the least interesting point about it is that it does take the form and colour of the time to so large an extent and vindicates its indispensableness thereby. On the other hand, if anyone says, "But I do not perceive the quiver, or feel the throb of which you talk," why, of course, there is nothing more to be done or said. For that person Mrs. Greville's work is undoubtedly not poetry. But whether his or her state is the more gracious, because of the fact, is a further question, though one on which we need not enter. The whole purport of this paper is once more to make an effort to establish the old position that there are many mansions in the Heaven of Poetry, and that the mere fact that some one does not care to live in or to recognise the existence of this or that among them does not prove that they ought to be pulled down or that they do not exist at all.
It may, however, be admitted—in fact no admission or confession is required, no idea of contesting or denying having been entertained—that neither the qualities of Grongar Hill nor those of the Prayer, that still less the general characteristics of the group of romantic precursors from Collins to Blake distinguish eighteenth-century poetry generally. And it may in the same way be further allowed that some of the actual characteristics of this poetry in general are not strictly poetic at all. Its didacticism is perhaps the chief of these; but there are undoubtedly others. And we are busy not with what is not poetical in eighteenth-century verse, but with what is poetical in eighteenth-century poetry. There are two departments in which it is almost pre-eminent, in which it is certainly very distinguished. The strict poeticalness of both of them has indeed been denied by extremists. All of us probably have heard it said, perhaps some of us have said it ourselves, that rhetoric is not poetry; and (though here there may not have been so much agreement) that "light" verse, whether regularly satiric or not, is at best poetry by allowance and, short of the best, not poetry at all. Now undoubtedly some rhetoric is not poetry, and a good deal of light verse is poetry only by extremely generous allowance. But the complete ostracising of either kind from the poetical city involves two propositions which are contentious in the extreme, and which I and those who think with me hold to be abominable heresies. The one is that "All depends on the subject" in poetry, and the other is that "Verse is not an essential feature of poetry." We maintain that anything can be treated poetically, though some things are very rebellious to such treatment, and that though rhetoric is strictly a characteristic of prose, it cam be, so to speak, super-saturated with poetry when it adopts poetical form, the same contention extending to the subjects of satiric or of merely light verse. A great deal of the abundant rhetorical verse of the eighteenth century is no doubt not poetry, or not very poetical poetry, and a good deal of its abundant satire, not a very little of its vers de société and trifles is not poetry or not very poetical. But, on the other hand, not a very little of both kinds is poetry, and the reason and origin of its poetical character are by no means uninteresting to trace. There is no room, and indeed not much occasion, to do this at length here. Suffice it to say that for its rhetorical verse the century was very much indebted to Dryden, and that for its light verse it was still more indebted to Prior.
The positions of the two were indeed different, for Dryden was a dead man when the century opened, though he had died on its very eve, while Prior was an actual member of its first great literary group. And, further, Dryden's influence, though it continued to some extent directly through the whole time, was largely exercised at second-hand through Pope, while Prior's was first-hand all through. For which reasons we need not say anything more here on Dryden himself, while we must say something on Prior. But the rhetorical influence which had produced such great poetry (for great it is, let who will gainsay) as the finest passages of Dryden's satires, the opening of Religio Laici, the "wandering fires" paragraph in The Hind and the Panther, and not a few things in the neglected plays, was well justified of its children in the following century. I have never seen any successful attempt to deny the name of poetry to such magnificent things as the close of The Dunciad and the close of The Vanity of Human Wishes. I have never seen any real fight at all made for this denial except the endeavour to turn them, as scapegoats, into the wilderness of rhetoric. And that, as I have said already, is really a begging of the question. Most certainly there is rhetoric which is not poetry—there is a very great deal of it—in fact most of it; as certainly there is rhetoric which is. And the passages which may claim that name in the eighteenth century, if never quite so great as the two just mentioned, are very numerous. There is that fine one in Tickell's epitaph on Cadogan which, after the eclipse of eighteenth-century verse in the earlier nineteenth, Thackeray was the first to rediscover: