times been most unjustly made to bear the sins of her imitators. "The truth is," he says, "that the sarcasms which have been directed against the puerile horrors of Mrs. Radcliffe ought justly to have been confined to the extravagances of her successors, who imitated her manner without either her imagination or her judgment, and conceived that the surest means of producing effect consisted in pressing the springs of the terrible as far as 'they would go. In the hands of these imitated imitators the castles became twice as large and ten times as perplexing in their architecture; the heroine could not open an empty drawer without stumbling on a mysterious manuscript written by her father or her mother; nor leave her room to take a twilight walk, of which heroines are always strangely fond, without stumbling on a nest of banditti; the gleam of daggers grew more incessant; the faces of the monks longer and more cadaverous, and the visits of ghosts so commonplace that they came at last to be viewed with the same indifference by the reader as they were of old by honest Aubrey or less honest Dr. Dee." CHAPTER X THE NEW POETRY COWPER-HIS ALLEGED REVOLUTION OF POETRY IN my last two lectures on the novels of the eighteenth century I tried to show you how much the public mind was occupied with this new kind of literature. Poetry was for the time pushed aside. You will now, I trust, understand that it is a very inadequate explanation of the small amount of poetry that was written between Pope and Wordsworth, and of the poorness in quality of much of that small amount, to say that the poets of the period were hampered by a slavish subservience to classical models. There is abundance of evidence that would-be poets, on the contrary, strained after originality. Even before Pope died, Matthew Green, a poet of whimsical and dainty vein, who wrote with great sprightliness of humor and lightness of touch, made it his boast that he was no imitator: 'Nothing is stolen: my Muse though mean, Draws from the spring she finds within; The truth is that Pope's perfect success was not encouraging to imitators; there was no chance of fame except in a different kind, and the mood of readers, delighted and fully occupied with prose fiction, was such as to chill poetic genius by the most blighting of all influences, indifference. The public was dancing to a different tune, and the poet sat silent with a feeling that he must pipe in vain. Now and again Poetry made a violent struggle to get a hearing and a following, as when Churchill, the satirist, in the sixties of the century, throwing all the refinements of Queen Anne satire to the winds, laid about him with rude, furious, distempered force. He made a noise in his time, but when interest in the ephemeral subjects of his boisterous abuse and fierce invective had passed away, his verse had not sufficient intrinsic merit to command readers. Churchill certainly was no bigot to classical rules, no victim to smooth and easy couplets. The next poet to make a popular and enduring mark gained his readers by accommodating his verse to an easy, familiar, dis cursive prose style, with which the great body of readers were for the time enchanted. It is usual to speak of Cowper as a "reformer of poetry, who called it back from conventionality to nature," and as the herald of Wordsworth and Byron. Universally this new movement is spoken of as a revolt against the authority of Pope; and as it took place simultaneously with the French Revolution, or nearly so, this revolt is regarded as one of the signs of the revolutionary temper of the time. Now, there can be little doubt that the intense excitement and ferment produced by the French Revolution and the career of Napoleon affected the poetry of the time. But it gives an essentially wrong impression to speak as if the struggle of the French people with a corrupt aristocracy and royalty stimulated the poets of England to take up arms against their poetic tyrant, and depose him with anger and contumely. We can hardly speak of deposing a tyrant when there is no tyrant to depose. And it is the merest fiction, the most unsubstantial shadow of a metaphor, to describe Pope as tyrannizing over English poetry at the close of the eighteenth century. A poet can tyrannize only as the temporary viceregent of the poetic spirit, and the poetic spirit itself had no COWPER'S ALLEGED REFORM OF POETRY 131 dominion over the affections of the English people at this time. Pope's deposition had, in fact, been accomplished by the coming to power of prose fiction. There had been a period of anarchy in poetry; every poet had been doing that which was right in his own eyes, struggling desperately after something new, catching at straws like a drowning man, and there had been no poet of sufficient eminence to establish a general empire. There was nobody to revolt against when Wordsworth appeared; the throne was vacant, open to any comer powerful enough to establish his right by poetic might. But Cowper, it is said, called poetry back from conventionality to nature. He pioneered Wordsworth in discarding the poetic diction sanctioned by the Queen Anne critics, their "heightened" expression, their vain endeavors to dress nature to advantage. That is to say, Cowper's diction is more like the language of prose. But was this a revolt against the tyranny of Pope? It seems to me more accurate to describe it as a submission to the tyranny of the novel-writers and pleasant, discursive prose-essayists. Cowper himself began his literary career as an essayist and writer of light, trifling verses in the style of Prior and Green; and it was by applying this same style to more serious subjects that he made a beginning in the so-called revolution. The worst of the revolution explanation of the great movement that Cowper is said to have heralded, an explanation so easy and simple and thought-saving, is that it radically misrepresents the sources of the revolution, and puts out of sight the real continuity of the literary history of the eighteenth century. It would lead us to suppose that the simpler diction, the discursive method, the prevalence of narrative by which the new poetry was characterized, were adopted out of antagonism to Pope; whereas really the new poetry was enriched by the prose-essayists and novelists, as these had themselves received benefits from the Queen Anne poets. There had thus been a substantial gain in literature from generation to generation, and real progress, real development. It was not, as the revolution explanation would import, that the Queen Anne style had been discarded in the third or fourth generation as an entirely false ideal, as a wasteful venture in a wrong direction, an unprofitable divergence from the true paths of imaginative literature. The prosemen of the middle forty years of the century were helped by the brilliant epigrammatic poets of the Queen Anne time; and the poets of the following generation received light and leading in their turn from the prosemen of the generation before them. Cowper, the herald of Wordsworth, may perhaps be described as a reformer of poetry, but it is more significant of his historical position to describe him as an essayist in verse. In the numerous biographical and critical sketches of Cowper, among which the latest, Mr. Goldwin Smith's and Mrs. Oliphant's, may be mentioned as perhaps the best, sufficient attention has not been paid to Cowper's literary work in his early manhood, before his first madness and his conversion to Evangelical Christianity, the events which are rightly regarded as the mainsprings of the poetry now associated with his name, " Table Talk," "The Task," and the "Occasional Poems." The work of his early manhood, while he was still a buckish and briefless barrister, is generally mentioned; but it is slurred over as if it were of no consequence in his history, as if it were a thing that had nothing in common with the productions of his regenerate days. It can be shown, I think, that, in so far as merely poetic qualities are concerned, this early work was quite as revolutionary or unrevolutionary as the poems of his pious old age. With the main outlines of Cowper's life you are, I dare say, familiar. He was the son of a country clergyman, the grandson of a Justice of the Common Pleas, the grand-nephew of a Lord Chancellor. After passing |