CHAPTER IV THE AGE OF JOHNSON 1740-1780 THE period which we have just quitted was one of effort concentrated in one middle-class coterie in London, an age of elegant persiflage and opti mistic generalisation marshalled by a group of highly civilised and "clubable" wits. That at which we have now arrived was the exact opposite. Its leading exponents were not associates, or, in most cases, even acquaintances; its labours were not in any large degree identified with London, but with places all over the English-speaking world. From 1712 to 1735 attention is riveted on the mutual intercourse of the men who are writing, and then upon their works. From 1740 to 1780 the movements of literature, rather than those of men of letters, are our theme. Solitary figures closely but unconsciously and accidentally related to other solitary figures, ships out of call of one another, but blown by the same wind-that is what the age of Johnson presents to us. George II. After the Portrait by Thomas Worlidge If the combination of personal communication, so interesting in the earlier age, is lacking now, it is made up for to us by the definition of the principal creative impulses, which prove, to our curiosity and surprise, independent of all personal bias. The similarity between Swift and Arbuthnot, between Pope and Parnell, is easily explained by their propinquity. But how are we to account for the close relation of Gray and Collins, who never met; of Fielding and Richardson, who hated one another at a distance; of Butler 259 at Bristol, and Hume at Ninewells? This central period of the eighteenth century took a wider and more democratic colouring; its intellectual life was more general, we had almost said more imperial. Letters could no longer be governed by the dictatorship of a little group of sub-aristocratic wits met in a coffee-house to dazzle mankind. The love of literature had spread in all directions, and each province of the British realm contributed its genius to the larger movement. In poetry, which must occupy us first, the forces which now attract our almost undivided attention are not those which appealed to contemporary criticism. Pope and his school had given a perfect polish to the couplet, had revived a public interest in satire and philosophic speculation in verse, had canonised certain forms of smooth and optimistic convention, had, above all, rendered the technique of "heroic verse" a thing which could be studied like a language or a science. It was strictly in accordance with the traditions of literature that no sooner was the thing easy to do than the best poets lost interest in doing it. It was Thomson who made the first resistance to the new classical formula, and it is, in fact, Thomson who is the real pioneer of the whole romantic movement, with its return After the Portrait by Bartholomew Dandridge to nature and simplicity. This gift would be more widely recognised than it is if it had not been for the poet's timidity, his easy-going indolence. The Winter of Thomson, that epoch-making poem, was published earlier than the Dunciad and the Essay on Man, earlier than Gulliver's Travels and the Political History of the Devil; it belongs in time to the central "period of Queen Anne." But in spirit, in temper, in style, it has nothing whatever to do with that age, but inaugurates another, which, if we consider exactly, culminated, after a slow but direct ascent, in Wordsworth. Frederick, Prince of Wales The positive interest which the poetry of the middle of the eighteenth century now possesses for us may be slight; its relative or historical interest 4 Mr. Ciller (Colley) 1 Dn Johnson Gorrick 2 Bn of Jalu bury (D'Gilbert) 6 M. Proife (The Singer) 3 Ld Harcourt ur Pitt Earl of Chatham) 10 14 Dutch of of Norfolk (The Speaker) 14 Pachy Lincoln 1 Gamefter) 19 Miss Onflies. 16 The Baron (AG 17 Junym. (M. Richardfon) 20 Jun Johnsen the wife 21 Mr. Whiston Afterwards 15 Mr. Lite (kn Lord Lyttleton) 22 Luggan the artist] [23 The Woman of the Wells] Id Powis THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS 271 is very great. In it we see English verse timidly reasserting its characteristic qualities and resuming forbidden powers. The change was gradual, without revolution, without violent initiative. Passion did not suddenly return in its bolder forms, but an insidious melancholy shook the pensive bosom. For nearly eighty years the visual world, in its broader forms, had scarcely existed for mankind; it was not to be expected that shy and diffident poets, such as were those of this new period, men in most cases of subdued vitality, should flash out into brilliant colourists and high-priests of pantheism. They did their work gingerly and slowly; they introduced an obvious nature into their writings; they painted, with a deprecating pencil, familiar scenes and objects. With Thomson they removed the fog that had obscured the forms of landscape, with Gray they asserted the stately beauty of mountains, with Young they proclaimed anew the magic of moonlight, with Walpole they groped after the principles of Gothic architecture. That their scenes were painted in grey and greenish neutral tint, that their ruined arches were supported on modern brickwork, that falsity and fustian, a hollow eloquence and a frigid sententiousness spoiled many of their enterprises, is not to the point. We must occupy ourselves, not with what they failed to do, but with their faltering successes. They were the pioneers of romanticism, and that is what renders them attractive to the historian. As Nor was it in England only, but over all Europe, that the poets of the age of Johnson were the pioneers of romantic feeling and expression. In the two great movements which we have indicated-in a melancholy sensibility pointing to passion, in a picturesqueness of landscape leading to direct nature-study-the English were the foremost of a new intellectual race. a child of the eighteenth century, Stendhal, reminded the French, "Le pittoresque-comme les bonnes diligences et les bateaux à vapeur-nous vient d'Angleterre." It came to France partly through Voltaire, who recorded its manifestations with wonder, but mainly through Rousseau, who took it to his heart. Not instantly was it accepted. The first translator of the Seasons into French dared not omit an apology for Thomson's "almost hideous imagery," and it took years for the religious melancholy of Young to sink into German bosoms. But when there appeared the Nouvelle Heloïse, a great and catastrophic work of passion avowedly built up on the teaching of the English poets of the funereal school, a book owing everything to English sensibility, then the influence of British verse began, and from 1765 to 1770 the vogue and imitation of it on the Continent was in full swing. To the European peoples of that time Young was at least as great an intellectual and moral portent as Ibsen has been to ours. It was in a comparative return to a sombre species of romanticism, and in a revolt against the tyranny of the conventional couplet, that these poets mainly affected English literature. JAMES THOMSON is at the present hour but tamely admired. His extraordinary freshness, his new outlook into the whole world of imaginative life, deserve a very different recognition from what is commonly awarded to him. The Hymn which closes the Seasons |