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the Iliad; it was the Iliad written in the style of the Henriade: by virtue of this travesty the public admired it. They would not have admired it in the simple Greek guise; they only consent ed to see it in powder and ribbons. It was the costume of the time, and it was very necessary to put it on. Dr. Johnson in his commercial and academical style affirms even that the demand for elegance had increased so much, that pure nature could no longer be borne.

Good society and men of letters made a little world by themselves, which had been formed and refined after the manner and ideas of France. They adopted a correct and noble style at the same time as fashion and fine manners. They held by this style as by their coat; it was a matter of propriety or ceremony; there was an accepted and unalterable pattern; they could not change it with out indecency or ridicule; to write, not according to the rules, especially in verse, effusively and naturally, would have been like showing oneself in the drawing-room in slippers and a dressinggown. Their pleasure in reading verse was to try whether the pattern had been exactly followed, originality was only permitted in details; a man might adjust here a lace, there some embroidered stripe, but he was bound scrupulously to preserve the conventional form, to brush every thing minutely, and never to appear without a new gold lace and glossy broadcloth. The attention was only bestowed on refinements; a more elaborate braid, a more brilliant velvet, a feather more gracefully arranged; to this were boldness and experiment reduced; the smallest incorrectness, the slightest incongruity, would have offended their eyes; they perfected the infinitely little. Men of letters acted like these coquettes, for whom the superb goddesses of Michael Angelo and Rubens are but milk-maids, but who utter a cry of pleasure at the sight of a ribbon at twenty francs a yard. A division, a displacing of verses, a metaphor delighted them, and this was all which could still charm them. They went on day by day embroidering, bedizening, narrowing the bright classic robe, until at last the human mind, feeling fettered, tore it, cast it

499 Now that

away, and began to move. this robe is on he ground the critics pick it up, hang it up in their museum of ancient curiosities, so that everybody can see it, shake it, and try to conjecture from it the feelings of the fine lords and of the fine speakers who wore it.

V.

It is not every thing to have a beauti ful dress, strongly sewn and fashionable; a man must be able to get into it easily. Reviewing the whole train of the English poets of the eighteenth century, we perceive that they do not easily get into the classical dress. This gold-embroidered jacket, which fits a Frenchman so well, hardly suits their figure; from time to time a too powerful, awkward movement makes rents in the sleeves and elsewhere. For instance, Matthew Prior seems at first sight to have all the qualities necessary to wear the jacket well; he has been an ambassador to the French court, and writes pretty French impromptus; he turns off with facility little jesting poems on a dinner, a lady; he is gallant, a man of society, a pleasant storyteller, epicurean, even skeptical like the courtiers of Charles II., that is to say, as far as and including political rog. uery; in short, he is an accomplished man of the world, as times went, with a correct and flowing style, having at command a light and a noble verse, and pulling, according to the rules of Bossu and Boileau, the string of mythological puppets. With all this, we find him neither gay enough nor refined enough. Bolingbroke called him wooden-faced, stubborn, and said there was something Dutch in him. manners smacked very strongly of those of Rochester, and the well-clad scamps whom the Restoration bequeathed to the Revolution. He took the first woman at hand, shut himself up with her for several days, drank hard, fell asleep, and let her make off with his money and clothes. Amongst oth er drabs, ugly enough and always dirty, he finished by keeping Elizabeth Cor and all but married her; fortunately he died just in time. I is style was like his manners. When he tried to imi

His

This dissonance increases, and atten tive eyes soon discover under the regu lar cloak a kind of energetic and pre cise imagination, ready to break through it. In this age lived Gay, a sort of La Fontaine, as near La Fontaine as an Englishman can be, that is, not very near, but at least a kind and amiable good fellow, very sincere, very frank, strangely thoughtless, born to be duped, and a young man to the last. Swift said of him that he ought never to have

tate La Fontaine's Hans Carvel, heard the Earl of Chesterfield's Ears, by made it dull, and lengthened it; he Voltaire, are more brilliant but not could not be piquant, but he was biting; more genuine productions. On the his obscenities have a cynical harsh whole, with his coarseness, want of ness; his raillery is a satire, and in one taste, prolixity, perspicacity, passion, of his poems, To a Young Gentleman there is something in this man not in in Love, the lash becomes a knock- accordance with classical elegance. down blow. On the other hand, he He goes beyond it or does not attain was not a common roysterer. Of his it. two principal poems, one on Solomon parap rases and treats of the remark of Ecclesiastes, “All is vanity." From this picture we see forthwith that we are in a biblical land: such an dea would not then have occurred to a boon companion of the Duke of Orleans, Regent of France. Solomon relates how he in vain "proposed his doubts to the lettered Rabbins," how he has been equally unfortunate in the hopes and desires of love, the possession of power, and ends by trusting to an "om-lived more than twenty-two years. "In niscient Master, omnipresent King." Here we have English gloom and English conclusions." Moreover, under the rhetorical and uniform composition of his verses, we perceive warmth and passion, rich painting, a sort of magnificence, and the profusion of an overcharged imagination. The sap in England is always stronger than in France; the sensations there are deeper, and the thoughts more original. Prior's other poem, very bold and philosophical, against conventional truths and pedantries, is a droll discourse on the seat of the soul, from which Voltaire has taken many ideas and much foulness. The whole armory of the skeptic and materialist was built and furnished in England, when the French took to it. Voltaire has only selected and sharpened the arrows. This poem is also wholly written in a prosaic style, with a harsh common sense and a medical frankness, not to be terrified by the foulest abominations. † Candide

* Prior's Works, ed. Gilfillan, 1851: "In the remotest wood and lonely grot, Certain to meet that worst of evils, thought ↑ Alma, canto ii. l. 937-978: * Your nicer Hottentots think meet With guts and tripe to deck their feet; With downcast looks on Totta's legs The ogling youth most humbly begs, She would not from his hopes remove At once his breakfast and his love. Before you see, you smell your toast, And sweetest she who stinks the most."

wit a man, simplicity a child," wrote
Pope. He lived, like La Fontaine, at
the expense of the great, travelled as
much as he could at their charge, lost
his money in South-Sea speculations,
tried to get a place at court, wrote
fables full of humanity to form the
heart of the Duke of Cumberland,* and
ended as a beloved parasite and the do-
mestic poet of the Duke and Duchess
of Queensberry. He had little of the
grave in his character, and neither many
scruples nor manners. It was his sad
lot, he said, "that he could get nothing
from the court, whether he wrote for or
against it." And he wrote his own
epitaph:

"Life is a jest; and all things show it,
I thought so once; but now I know it." ↑
This laughing careless poet, to revenge
himself on the minister, wrote the
Beggars' Opera, the fiercest and dirtiest
of caricatures. In this opera they cut
the throats of men in place of scratching
them; babes handle the knife like the
rest. Yet Gay was a laugher, but .n a
style of his own, or rather in that of his
country. Seeing "certain young men
of insipid delicacy," § Ambrose Fhilips

The same duke who was afterwards nicknamed the Butcher."

† Poems on Several Occasions, by Mr. John Gay, 1745, 2 vols. ii. 141.

See vol. iii. ch. iii. p. 81.

Poems on Several Occasions; The Proeme to The Shepherd s Week, i. 64.

for instance, who wrote elegant and to become in imagination compatriots tender pastorals, in the manner of Fon- of such men. We have become user tenelle, he amused himself by parody- to the pictures of these drunken boobie ing and contradicting them, and in the whom Louis XIV. called "baboons,' Shepherd's Week introduced real rural to these red-faced cooks who clean fish. manners into the metre and form of the and to the like scenes. Let us ge visionary poetry: "Thou wilt not find used to Gay; to his poem Trivia, or my shepherdesses idly piping on oaten the Art of Walking the Streets of Lonreeds, but milking the kine, tying up don; to his advice as to dirty gutters, the sheaves, or if the hogs are astray, and shoes "with firm, well-hammer'd driving them to their styes. My shep- soles;" his description of the amours herd... sleepeth not under myrtle of the goddess Cloacina and a scaver shades, but under a hedge, nor doth he ger, whence sprang the little shoe vigilantly defend his flocks from wolves, blacks. He is a lover of the real, has because there are none."* Fancy a a precise imagination, does not see ob shepherd of Theocritus or Virgil, com-jects wholesale and from a general pelled to put on hobnailed shoes and the dress of a Devonshire cowherd; such an oddity would amuse us by the contrast of his person and his garments. So here The Magician, The Shepherd's Struggle, are travestied in a modern guise. Listen to the song of the first shepherd, "Lobbin Clout:"

"Leek to the Welch, to Dutchmen butter's
dear,

Of Irish swains potatoe is the chear;
Oat for their feasts, the Scottish shepherds
grind,

point of view, but singly, with all their outlines and surroundings, whatever they may be, beautiful or ugly, dirty or clean. The other literary men act likewise, even the chief classical writers, including Pope. There is in Pope a minute description, with highcolored words, local details, in which comprehensive and characteristic features are stamped with such a liberal and sure hand, that we would take the author for a modern realist, and would Sweet turnips are the food of Blouzelind. find in the work an historical docuWhile she loves turnips, butter I'll despise, ment. As to Swift, he is the bitterest Nor leeks, nor oatmeal, nor potatoe prize."† positivist, and more so in poetry than The other shepherd answers in the in prose. Let us read his eclogue on same metre; and the two continue, Strephon and Chloe, if we would know verse after verse, in the ancient manner, how far men can debase the noble pobut now amidst turnips, strong beer, etic drapery. They make a dishclout fat pigs, bespattered at will by modern of it, or dress clodhoppers in it; the country vulgarities and the dirt of a Roman toga and Greek chlamys do not northern climate. Van Ostade and suit these barbarians' shoulders. They Teniers love these vulgar and clownish are like those knights of the middleidyls; and in Gay, as well as with ages, who, when they had taken Conthem, unvarnished and sensual drollery stantinople, muffled themselves for a has its sway. The people of the north, joke, in long Byzantine robes, and went who are great eaters, always liked riding through the streets in these discountry fairs. The vagaries of toss-guises, dragging their embroidery in the pots and gossips, the grotesque out- gutter. burst of the vulgar and animal mind, put them into good humor. A man must be a genuine man of the world or an artist, a Frenchman or an Italian, to be disgusted with them. They are the product of the country, as well as meat and beer: let us try, in order that we may enjoy them, to forget wine, delicate fruits, to give ourselves blunted senses,

* Poems on Several Occasions; The Proeme to The Shepherd's Week, i. 66.

Gay's Poems The Shepherd's Week; first pastoral, The Squabble, p. 80.

These men will do well ike the knights, to return to their mauor, to the country, the mud of their ditches, and the dunghill of their farm-yards. The less man is fitted for social life, the more he is fitted for solitary life. He enjoys the country the more for enjoy. ing the world less. Englishmen have always been more feudal and more fond Louis XIV. and Louis XV. the worst of the country than Frenchmen. Under * Epistle to Mrs. Blount, "on her leaving the town.

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misfortune for a nobleman was to go to | moisture t: ickli..g off." He perceives his estate in the country and grow rusty there; away from the smiles of the king and the fine conversatior of Versailles, there was nothing left but to yawn and die. In England, in spite of artificial civilization and the charms of polite society, the love of the chase and of bodily exercise, political interests and the necessities of elections brought the nobles back to their estates. And there their natural instincts returned.

A sad and impassioned man, naturally self-dependent, converses with objects; a grand gray sky, whereon the autumn mists slumber, a sudden burst of sunshine lighting up a moist field, depress or excite him; inanimate things seem to him instinct with life; and the faint lignt, which in the morning reddens the fringe of heaven, moves him as much as the smile of a young girl at her first ball. Thus is genuine descriptive poetry born. It appears in Dryden, in Pope himself, even in the writers of elegant pastorals, and shines forth in Thomson's Seasons. This poet, the son of a clergyman, and very poor, lived, like most of the literary men of the time, on donations and literary subscriptions, on sinecures and political pensions; for lack of money he did not marry; wrote tragedies, because tragedies brought in plenty of money; and ended by settling in a country house, lying in bed till mid-day, indolent, contemplative, but a simple and honest man, affectionate and beloved. He saw and loved the country in its smallest details, not outwardly only, as Saint Lambert,* his imitator; he made it his joy, his amusement, his habitual occupation; a gardener at heart, delighted to see the spring arrive, happy to be able to add another field to his garden. He paints all the little things, without being ashamed, for they interest him, and takes pleasure in "the smell of the dairy." We hear him speak of the "insect armies," and "when the envenomed leaf begins to curl,"† and of the birds which, foreseeing the approaching rain, “streak their wings with oil, to throw the lucid A French pastoral writer (1717-1803), who wrote, in imitation of Thomson, Les Saisons.TR.

Poetical Works of J. Thomson, ed. R. Bell, 855, a vols. ; ii. Spring, 18.

objects so clearly that he makes them visible: we recognize the English landscape, green and moist, half drowned in floating vapors, blotted here and there by violet clouds, which burst in showers at the horizon, which they darken, but where the light is delicately dimmed by the fog, and the clear heavens show at intervals very bright and pure:

"Th' effusive Scuth

Warms the wide air, and o'er the void of heaved

earth

Breathes the big clouds with vernal shower
distent.t ...
Thus all day long the full-distended clouds
Indulge their genial stores, and well-showered
Is deep enriched with vegetable life;
Till in the western sky, the downward sun
Looks out, effulgent, from amid the flush
of broken clouds, gay-shifting to his beam.
The illumined mountain; through the fores

The rapid radiance instantaneous strikes

streams;

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This is emphatic, but it is also opulent. In this air and this vegetation, in thi imagination and this style, there is a heaping up, and, as it were, an impasto of effaced or sparkling tints; they are here the glistening and lustrous robe of nature and art. We must see them in Rubens-he is the painter and poet of the teeming and humid clime; but we discover it also in others; and in this magnificence of Thomson, in this exaggerated, luxuriant, grand coloring, we find occasionally the rich palette of Rubens.

VI.

All this suits ill the classical em

The

broidery. Thor.son's visible imitations
of Virgil, his episodes inserted to fill up
space, his invocations to spring, to the
muse, to philosophy, all these pedan
tic relics and conventionalisms, produce
incongruity. But the contrast is much
more marked in another way.
worldly artificial life such as Louis
XIV. had made fashionable, began to
weary Europe. It was found meagre
and hollow; people grew tired of always
acting, submitting to etiquette. They
felt that gallantry is not love, nor mad.
rigals poetry, nor amusement happi
ness. They perceived that man is not
* Ibid. 19.
↑ Ibid.
+ Ibid. 20.

Like Rousseau, he praised gravity, patriotism, liberty, virtue; rose from the spectacle of nature to the contemplation of God, and showed to man glimpses of immortal life beyond the tomb. Like him, in short, he marred the sincerity of his emotion and the truth of his poetry by sentimental vapidities, by pastoral billing and cooing, and by such an abundance of epithets, personified abstractions, pom pous invocations and oratorical tirades, that we perceive in him beforehand the false and ornamental style of Thomas,* David,† and the first French Revolution.

an elegant doll, or a dandy the maste piece of nature, and that there is a world beyond the drawing-room. A Genevese plebeian (J. J. Rousseau), a Protestant and a recluse, whom religion, education, poverty, and genius had led more quickly and further than others, spoke out the public secret aloud; and it was thought that he had discovered o re-discovered the country,conscience, religion, the rights of man, and natural sentiments. Then appeared a new personality, the idol and model of his time, the man of feeling, who, by his grave character and liking for nature, contrasted with the man at court. Doubtless the man of feeling has not escaped Other authors follow in the same the influence of the places he has fre- track. The literature of that period quented. He is refined and insipid, might be called the library of the man melting at the sight of the young lambs of feeling. First there was Richardnibbling the newly grown grass, blessing son, the puritanic printer, with his Sir the little birds, who give a concert to Charles Grandison, ‡ a man of princicelebrate their happiness. He is em- ples,an accomplished model of a gentlephatic and wordy, writes tirades about man, a professor of decorum and morsentiment, inveighs against the age, ality, with a soul into the bargain. There apostrophizes virtue, reason, truth, and is Sterne too, a refined and sickly the abstract divinities, which are en- blackguard, who, amidst his buffoonergraved in delicate outline on frontis-ies and oddities, pauses to weep over pieces. In spite of himself, he con- an ass or an imaginary prisoner. § tinues a man of the drawing-room and the academy; after uttering sweet things to the ladies, he utters them to nature, and declaims in polished periods about the Deity. But after all, it is through him that the revolt against classical customs begins; and in this respect, he is more advanced in. Germanic England than in Latin France. Thirty years before Rousseau, Thomson had expressed all Rousseau's sentiments, almost in the same style. Like him, he painted the country with sympathy and enthusiasm. Like him, he contrasted the golden age of primitive simplicity with modern miseries and corruption. Like him, he exalted deep ove, conjugal tenderness, the union of souls and perfect esteem animated by desire, paternal affection, and all domestic joys. Like him, he combated contemporary frivolity, and compared the ancient republics with modern States:

"Proofs of a people, whose heroic aims Soared far above the little selfish sphere Of doubting modern life." *

There is, in particular, Henry Mackenzie, "the Man of Feeling," whose timid, delicate hero weeps five or six times a day; who grows consumptive through sensibility, dares not broach his love till at the point of death, and dies in broaching it. Naturally, praise induces satire; and in the opposite camp we see Fielding, a valiant roysterer, and Sheridan, a brilliant but naughty fellow, the one with Blifil, the other with Joseph Surface, two hypocrites, especially the second, not coarse, red-faced, and smelling of the vestry, like Tartuffe, but worldly, well clad, a fine talker, loftily serious, sad and gentle from excess of tenderness, who, with his hand on his heart and a tear in his eye, showers on the public his sentences and periods whilst he soils his brother's reputation and Jebauches his neighbor's wife. When a man of feeling has been thus created,

Anthony Léonard Thomas (1732-1785) wrote memoirs and essays on the character of cele brated men in highly oratorical and pompous style.-TR.

† See the paintings of David, called La *Poetical Works of Thomason, Liberty, part Fêtes de la Revolution. ↑ See ante, p. 168. See ante. p. 477.

108.

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