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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
To our ideas of classicism we have, as a rule, given point and definiteness by contrasting it with its opposite, romanticism; and to make the contrast stronger we usually take extreme cases. This is a perfectly proper, perhaps necessary, proceeding. It is also proper and convenient to speak of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a classical age. The difficulty comes with the next step which our minds and those of our hearers unconsciously, but almost inevitably take, that of assuming that this abstract and extreme classicism was generally held in this classical age. We forget that classicism is one thing and the classicism of the eighteenth century quite a different thing.
Since the reading of this paper before the Association last Christmas, Professor W. A. Neilson has publisht his stimulating Essentials of Poetry (Boston, 1912), which treats of many of the matters herein considered. Professor Neilson has phrased admirably a number of the ideas that I have tried to present, as well as a great many that I have not toucht on. Yet, as both his purpose and method are different from mine, it has seemed best not to change what I had written. My concern is not to define romanticism or classicism but to study the tastes and interests of the average man of the early eighteenth century and to show that many of the things that have been thought to indicate “the beginnings of romanticism” are to be found in the most classical writers. Professor Neilson's illuminating definitions, e. g., “Classicism is the tendency characterized by the predominance of reason over imagination and the sense of fact,” should help in the formation of correct ideas of the period. The word “predominance” is particularly helpful.
page 299 note 1 There is evidence that they did so. Sir Richard Blackmore writes (Essays upon Several Subjects, 1716, p. 112), “To avoid the Monotony and Uniformity in finishing the Sense, and giving a Rest at the End of every Couplet, which is tedious and ungrateful to the Reader, the Poet should” use run-over lines and vary his pauses. Samuel Say (Poems on Several Occasions, written 1738, pp. 140-1, cf. p. 130) finds even the comparatively free blank verse of Glover too smooth and regular. Young's severe condemnation of the couplet will be found with Prior's stricture on pp. 321 f.; most of the other authors of the period who discuss blank verse have a fling at rime. In his Remarks on the Beauties of Poetry, 1762, Daniel Webb quotes eight lines from Pope's Essay on Man and observes, “Every ear must feel the ill effect of the monotony in these lines” (p. 7); he examines Pope's pauses and concludes (p. 12, cf. pp. 6, 8) “that the monotony of the couplet does not proceed, as has been imagined, (indicating that others had noticed it) from the repetition of the rimes, but from a sameness in the movement of the verse.” Some other heresies to the classical faith may be noted here. So distinguisht an authority as the first professor of poetry in Oxford, Joseph Trapp, has not scorn enuf to pour on that pet of the classicists, the pastoral, and even goes so far as to decry the imitation of the ancients (Praelectiones Poeticae, 2 vols., 1711-5, 3rd ed., 1736, i, pp. 45, 317-8). Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) is largely an attack upon this same imitation. “The less we copy the renowned ancients,” he writes, “we shall resemble them the more.” And again, “Though Pope's noble muse may boast her illustrious descent from Homer, Virgil, Horace; yet is an original author more nobly born” (Works, 1798, 3 vols., iii, pp. 180, 197). Leonard Welsted attacks another classical stronghold, treatises on poetry: “The truth is, they touch only the externals or form of the thing, without entering into the spirit of it; they play about the surface of Poetry, but never dive into its depths; the secret, the soul of good writing, is not to be come at through such mechanic Laws” (A Dissertation concerning the Perfection of the English Language, 1724, Works, 1787, p. 129). Similarly, a writer in Dodsley's Museum (July 4, 1747, iii, pp. 281-6) thinks little of “Instruction … Alterations and Improvements” in poetry. “Accuracy and Correctness,” he says, “are without Doubt Advantages … but still they are not Essentials … Genius … is the Essence of Poetry.”
page 300 note 1 P. 329.
page 304 note 1 Letters and Poems on Several Subjects, 2d ed., 1726, p. 71; letter dated June 19, 1712. Cf. p. 80 (August 30, 1712), “In the cool of the Evening, I took a Walk … and came to a small Cottage delightfully shaded with Trees, which had the Prospect of a murmuring Stream, that gently glided along; being wonderfully delighted with the gay Prospects of flower'y Meadows, and being captivated with the Beauty and Retirement of the Place, I sat down under a shady Covert.”
page 304 note 1 Ib., pp. 11-12.
page 305 note 1 Ib., pp. 3-4.
page 306 note 1 i, ll. 95-106.
page 306 note 2 Autumn, ll. 970-6.
page 306 note 3 Castle of Indolence, i, vi.
page 307 note 1 He was probably more of a romanticist than any other poet of the day, but not more than others who did not write. It should be remembered that, tho strongly romantic along some lines, Thomson was decidedly classic along others. He was, in the main, a quiet conventional man, an intimate friend of many of the leading classicists, including Pope, whom he admired, and like them was a deist. There is nothing of the Byronic revolt or morbid individualism about him, no airing of private griefs in his poetry. The element of reason is prominent and, as Professor Neilson has pointed out (Essentials of Poetry, pp. 138-42), The Seasons departs from classicism not by being romantic but by being realistic. We may regard The Castle of Indolence as romantic, while holding that its author is classic; for “rather than purely an expression of individual temperament” (loc. cit., p. 139) it is a tour de force of the kind that even Pope might have written. A study of all of Thomson's works will make clear that he was fundamentally classic.
page 308 note 1 From Sir Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library, article on Gray and His Friends (New York, 1884, iii, p. 137) which contains a number of sound observations on eighteenth-century romanticism.
page 309 note 1 Milton's poems, though showing little close observation, reveal a delicate sensitiveness to the broad aspects of nature. It should be remembered that in the marvellous passage in which he laments his lost sight he speaks first of
Marvell, who died in 1678, certainly had a deep feeling for nature.
page 310 note 1 Loc. cit., p. 24.
page 310 note 2 February, 1731.
page 311 note 1 The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement, pp. 14, 15.
page 311 note 2 Letters and Works, Bohn ed., 1898, i, p. 112.
page 311 note 3 Ib., i, pp. 256-7. Cf. ii, pp. 77, 128, 173, and 464, opening lines of Verses, Written at the Chiosk. The following passage seems particularly worthy of note (ii, p. 160): “I am now in a place the most beautifully romantic I ever saw in my life: … vast rocks of different figures, covered with green moss, or short grass, diversified by tufts of trees, little woods, and here and there vineyards, but no other cultivation, except gardens like those on Richmond-hill. The whole lake, which is twenty-five miles long, and three broad, is all surrounded with these impassible mountains, the sides of which, towards the bottom, are so thick set with villages … that I do not believe there is anywhere above a mile distance one from another, which adds very much to the beauty of the prospect.”
page 312 note 1 Pp. 85-6. The complete title of the work, which is anonymous, is A Journey Through England. In Familiar Letters from a Gentleman Here, to his Friend Abroad.
page 312 note 2 Itinerarium Curiosum. Or, An account of the Antiquities and Remarkable Curiosities in Nature or Art, Observ'd in Travels thro' Great Britain, 1724, p. 69.
page 313 note 1 Ib., p. 119.
page 313 note 2 In his Journal in the Lakes he records (October 13, 1769) that a landscape painter and two engravers had spent some time at Gordale-scar before he arrived there.
page 313 note 3 Works, New York, 1854, ii, p. 217. The passage continues as follows: “We were sometimes shivering on the top of a bleak mountain, and a little while after basking in a warm valley, covered with violets and almond-trees in blossom, the bees already swarming over them, though but in the month of February.”
page 313 note 4 Ib., ii, p. 263.
page 314 note 1 Ib., ii, p. 259. Three pages earlier he describes “one of the pleasantest spots I have seen. It is hid with vines, figs, oranges, almonds, olives, myrtles, and fields of corn, which look extremely fresh and beautiful, and make up the most delightful little landscape imaginable.” Passages like those quoted abound in the Remarks.
page 314 note 2 For example, in the Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Garter to Mrs. Montague, 1817, i, pp. 2, 3, written August 14, 1756: “This charming country. … a country wildly and pleasingly romantic.” And i, p. 27, written March 13, 1759: “I longed for you extremely the other night at Reading, to ramble by moonlight amongst the ruins of an old Abbey.” A letter of Mrs. H. M. Chapone, written in 1770, shows markt enthusiasm over the wildness of Scotland (Works, Boston, 1804, i, p. 121).
page 315 note 1 Rural Sports, close of Canto I.
page 315 note 2 Loc. cit., i, p. 77.
page 315 note 3 No. 477; September 6, 1712.
page 316 note 1 Pope apparently did so; to be sure, there are fairies in the Rape of the Lock but they are satiric, intellectual sylphs who lack the atmosphere, the charm, of fairy land. In 1723, Pope wrote to Mrs. J. Cowper, “I have long had an inclination to tell a fairy tale, the more wild and exotic the better … provided there be an apparent moral to it” (Works, ix, p. 431). The concluding clause shows Pope's real interest and how far he was from the true spirit of the fairy tale.
page 316 note 2 Nos. 70, 74, 419; May 21, 25, 1711, July 1, 1712.
page 316 note 3 P. 3.
page 317 note 1 This must have been written before July, 1717, when Parnell died.
page 317 note 2 P. 5. Cf. pp. 7-8. The Vision was published in 1715.
page 317 note 3 Hours in a Library, New York, 1894, i, p. 371.
page 318 note 1 Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, etc., ii, p. 152.
page 318 note 2 Ib.
page 318 note 3 Ib., ii, p. 313. The nine or ten lines which follow are hostile to the Gothic.
page 318 note 4 Ib., ii, p. 318.
page 319 note 1 Ib., ii, p. 350.
page 319 note 2 Quoted in Herbert Cory's “The Critics of Edmund Spenser” (University of California Pub. in Modern Philology, ii, 2, p. 147). The admiration for Spenser, which Dr. Cory shows to have been general in the early eighteenth century, is another indication that the classicism of the time was not as rigid as it has been thought.
page 319 note 3 P. 59; cf. p. 312, supra.
page 319 note 4 P. 57.
page 320 note 1 Pp. 138, 65; cf. Hereford, p. 67, etc.
page 320 note 2 P. 64.
page 320 note 3 The Celebrated Victory of the Poles over Osman (Works, 1810, iv, pp. 474-6), To Mitio (ib., iv, pp. 482-5), An Elegaic Thought on Mrs. Anne Warner (ib., iv, pp. 492-3), etc.
page 321 note 1 I took all the Harvard University Library possesses in this period, rejecting those largely devoted to well known authors.
page 321 note 2 This shows the folly of maintaining that Milton's minor poems caused any revival of the octosyllabic in the middle of the century.
page 322 note 1 Preface to Solomon.
page 322 note 2 Works, iii, pp. 194, 203.
In February, 1773 (xlii, p. 95), The London Magazine publisht the following extract from A Poetical Epistle on the English Poets, chiefly those who have Written in Blank Verse:
page 324 note 1 The Task, i, 1. 351, iii, 11. 357-8.