III DEATH As in a journey just begun, So in our youth we measure slow And vanish into death. AARON HILL. In love, life's great affirmation, and in death, the great negation of life, the lyric poet has ever found the chief sources of inspiration. In the eighteenth century death was generally feared perhaps more than at any other time before or since in English history. What then is the particular quality of the lyrics of those minor poets of the age who sang of death? In one respect at least eighteenth-century elegiac verse is specially interesting to the modern reader, because there if anywhere he may find a key to one of the problems of the century-its manner of expressing and creating intimate feeling. Again and again the modern reader of eighteenthcentury poetry must feel that verses which leave him cold were for the poet's contemporaries full of pathos. Nor is direct evidence of this far to seek. Dr Johnson, in popular opinion the least impressionable of men, was found by Boswell in tears over Beattie's Hermit. "Such was his sensibility [says his biographer], and so much was he affected by pathetic poetry, that when he was reading Beattie's Hermit in my presence, it brought tears into his eyes." This surely is a significant and therefore an interesting fact. It may be worth our while in this attempt to investigate some of those elements which form the temper, the quality, of the eighteenth century to stop for a moment and endeavour to realise what exactly it was that so affected Johnson. We have the good fortune to know what lines of the poem made the most powerful appeal to him: ""Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more; To the modern reader the lines probably appear mere empty rhetoric, as he passes hastily, untouched. The mental and emotional currents of later ages have borne him far from the place where Beattie and his contemporaries stood. Here, as everywhere, the tide of life bears us away from an understanding and appreciation of the thought and art of those of our predecessors whose work is too deeply penetrated by evanescent modes of feeling and expression, too little imbued by that elemental spirit of humanity which 1 It may be well to remind the reader that "mourn" was pronounced in the eighteenth century to rhyme with "urn," as later here. Hence " mourn " and "morn" are not the repetitions they appear to be. gives to art a permanent appeal. We have seen this in our own day-the lines from Tennyson's Idylls of the King or Rossetti's Portrait, which moved men of taste and culture as late as the nineties, and now set the modern student a-giggle. If we are quite sure that those of the earlier age were hopelessly wrong, can we then be so comfortably certain that we are quite right? Dr Johnson may have found imaginary virtue in Beattie's Hermit, but we also may overlook virtues in it that were more obvious when it first appeared. In criticising such verses, work not of the first order, only by imaginative sympathy and insight can a fair estimate be made. Beattie may leave us cold, but before we leave him we should surely realise what it was in his poem that moved Johnson, and in so doing we shall gain a more intimate knowledge of Johnson's temperament, and of the quality of Johnson's age. There was first in Beattie's lines a new romantic note, due to the rhythm and the content. It is the beginning of what afterwards in the work of Thomas Moore took the world by storm for a time, and in Byron found its finest form combined with a firmer intellectual content. It is romantic in its blending of nature with human thought and emotion about life and death, and because it expressed more felicitously than most poems of the time, because indeed it tried to show what many refused to attempt, the hope, already growing tremulous and uncertain, of eternity, the thought and fear of death, which lay over the lives of men like a shadow, over the life of Johnson himself, so darkly; it was because all these elements in the poem gave to it a significance as the expression of a quality so important in his own life and character that Johnson was moved so strongly, and revealed, incidentally, how much of the romantic was hidden in his strangely mingled and restrained temperament.1 How near to the heart of the age such musings upon death were, is seen by the success which attended the few leading poets who dared to break through the reserve of the time and sing freely of this shadow over the lives of men. Young treated it in the manner of the pious moralist mingled with that of the showman who knows the economic value of the Chamber of Horrors." Gray sang of it as a poetic recluse whose melancholy, at times revealing life in a kind of sunset-splendour, gave him at least æsthetic satisfaction. All such poems, however, are but minor lights of the constellation which blazes in the poetic firmament of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the constellation whose major stars are Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's Essay on Man, and Tennyson's In Memoriam. For these three poems, so different superficially, are linked together by the fact that each is the attempt of its respective century to justify the ways of God to men." With the advent of a reasonable" age it was inevitable that such attempts would be made, and in the different way in which each age attempts it we may learn the changes of outlook which have passed over those centuries. The eighteenth century, at any rate, was keenly interested in Death, tricked death out in all the morbid pageantry it could devise of black plumes and drapery, midnight burials by torchlight, sepulchral urns, memorial stones and temples. At times indeed, amidst 1 Vide infra, p. 127. the orgy of woe, we can detect a positive enjoyment of this elaborated sorrow. "Poor Mr Thomson, Mr Pitt tells me, is dead" (Shenstone writes to his friend Jago on hearing of the death of the author of the Seasons). "He was to have been at Hagley this week, and then I should probably have seen him here. As it is, I will erect an urn in Virgil's Grove to his memory. I was really as much shocked to hear of his death, as if I had known and loved him for a number of years." my "I am fully bent on raising a neat urn to him in lower grove" (Shenstone adds eight days later), "if Mr Lyttelton does not inscribe one at Hagley before But I should be extremely glad of me. whereabouts to place it."1 your advice In a retired part of his garden at Twickenham Pope erected a plain obelisk eighteen feet high, in memory of his mother, with the inscription: "Ah EDITHA! Matrum Optima, Vale!" Johnson, too, reveals the attitude of the age to death when he says of Gray's Elegy: "The Churchyard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo." But the eighteenth century, though rhetorical at times, was, in its earlier years at least, no age of expansive feeling. Young might swim to fame if not fortune on a flood of rhetoric which is not without occasional 1 The italics are Shenstone's. |