Class ^ 
 
 Book : 
 
 
 COF^'RIGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
l^tlmttan Iniu^rBttg 
 
 THE LOUIS CLARK VANUXEM FOUNDATION 
 LECTURES FOR 1914-1915 
 
2I1|? IComa Ollark lanux^m Jouttliattott 
 
 was established in 1913 with a bequest of $25,000 
 under the will of Louis Clark Vanuxem, of the 
 Class of 1879. By direction of the executors of 
 Mr. Vanuxem's estate, the income of the foun- 
 dation is to be used for a series of public lectures 
 delivered in Princeton annually, at least one half 
 of which shall be on subjects of current scientific 
 interest. The lectures are to be published and 
 distributed among schools and libraries generally. 
 
 The following lectures have already been pub- 
 lished or are in press: 
 
 1912-13 The Theory of Permutable Functions, by 
 Vito Volterra 
 
 1913-14 Lectures delivered in connection with the 
 dedication of the Graduate College of 
 Princeton University by Emile Boutroux, 
 Alois Riehl, A. D. Godley, and Arthur 
 Shipley 
 
 1914-15 Romance, by Sir Walter Raleigh 
 
 1915-16 A Critique of the Theory of Evolu- 
 tion, by Thomas Hunt Morgan 
 
LOUIS CLARK VANUXEM FOUNDATION 
 
 ROMANCE 
 
 TWO LECTURES BY 
 
 SIR WALTER RALEIGH 
 
 M.A., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, FELLOW OF 
 
 MERTON COLLEGE 
 
 LECTURES DELIVERED AT PRINCETON 
 UNIVERSITY, MAY 4th AND 5th, 1915 
 
 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 PRINCETON 
 
 LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1916 
 
A 
 
 Copyright, 1916, by 
 Princeton University Press 
 
 Published October. 1916 
 
 ■ tl 
 
 V'lf 
 
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 lCI.A4 45''ii»t) 
 
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THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 The period of English poHtical history which 
 falls between Pitt's acceptance of office as 
 prime minister, in 1783, and the passing of the 
 Reform Bill, in 1832, is a period rich in char- 
 acter and event. The same period of fifty years 
 is one of the most crowded epochs of our na- 
 tional literature. In 1783 Wilham Blake pro- 
 duced his Poetical Sketches, and George Crabbe 
 published The Village. In 1832 Scott died, 
 not many months after the death of Goethe. 
 Between these two dates a great company of 
 English writers produced a literature of im- 
 mense bulk, and of almost endless diversity of 
 character. Yet one dominant strain in that 
 literature has commonly been allowed to give 
 a name to the whole period, and it is often 
 called the Age of the Romantic Revival. 
 
 We do not name other notable periods of 
 our literature in this fashion. The name itself 
 
3 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 contains a theory, and so marks the rise of a 
 new philosophical and aesthetic criticism. It 
 attempts to describe as well as to name, and 
 attaches significance not to kings, or great 
 authors, but to the kind of writing which flour- 
 ished conspicuously in that age. A less am- 
 bitious and much more secure name would have 
 been the Age of George III ; but this name has 
 seldom been used, perhaps because the writers 
 of his time who reverenced King George III 
 were not very many in nmnber. The danger 
 of basing a name on a theory of literature is 
 that the theory may very easily be superseded, 
 or may prove to be inadequate, and then the 
 name, having become immutable by the force 
 of custom, is left standing, a monument of 
 ancient error. The terminology of the sciences, 
 which pretends to be exact and colourless, 
 is always being reduced to emptiness by the 
 progress of knowledge. The thing that struck 
 the first observer is proved to be less important 
 than he thought it. Scientific names, for all 
 their air of learned universality, are merely 
 fossilized impressions, stereotyped portraits of 
 a single aspect. The decorous obscurity of the 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 3 
 
 ancient languages is used to conceal an im- 
 mense diversity of principle. Mammal, amphi- 
 bian, coleoptera, dicotyledon, cryptogam, — all 
 these terms, which, if they were translated into 
 the language of a peasant, would be seen to 
 record very simple observations, yet do lend a 
 kind of formal majesty to ignorance. 
 
 So it is with the vocabulary of literary criti- 
 cism : the first use of a name, because the name 
 was coined by someone who felt the need of it, 
 is often striking and instructive ; the impression 
 is fresh and new. Then the freshness wears off 
 it, and the name becomes an outworn print, a 
 label that serves only to recall the memory of 
 past travel. What was created for the needs 
 of thought becomes a thrifty device, useful only 
 to save thinking. The best way to restore the 
 habit of thinking is to do away with the names. 
 The word Romantic loses almost all its mean- 
 ing and value when it is used to characterize 
 whole periods of our literature. Landor and 
 Crabbe belong to a Romantic era of poetry; 
 Steele and Sterne wrote prose in an age which 
 set before itself the Classic ideal. Yet there 
 is hardly any distinctively Classical beauty in 
 
4 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 English verse which cannot be exempHfied from 
 the poetry of Landor and Crabbe; and there 
 are not very many characteristics of Romantic 
 prose which find no illustration in the writ- 
 ings of Steele and Sterne. Nevertheless, the 
 very name of romance has wielded such a power 
 in human affairs, and has so habitually im- 
 pressed the human imagination, that time is not 
 misspent in exhibiting its historical bearings. 
 These great vague words, invented to facilitate 
 reference to whole centuries of hmiian history 
 — Middle Ages, Renaissance, Protestant Re- 
 formation, Revival of Romance — are very 
 often invoked as if they were something ulti- 
 mate, as if the names themselves were a suffi- 
 cient explanation of all that they include. So 
 an imperfect terminology is used to gain es- 
 teem for an artificial and rigid conception of 
 things which were as fluid as life itself. The 
 Renaissance, for instance, in its strict original 
 meaning, is the name for that renewed study of 
 the classical literatures which manifested itself 
 throughout the chief countries of Europe in 
 the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In 
 Italy, where the movement had its origin, no 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 5 
 
 single conspicuous event can be used to date it. 
 The traditions inherited from Greece and Rome 
 had never lost their authority; but with the 
 increase of vi^ealth and leisure in the city re- 
 publics they were renewed and strengthened. 
 From being remnants and memories they be- 
 came live models; Latin poetry was revived, 
 and Italian poetry was disciplined by the an- 
 cient masters. But the Renaissance, when it 
 reached the shores of England, so far from 
 giving new life to the literature it found there, 
 at first degraded it. It killed the splendid 
 prose school of Malory and Berners, and prose 
 did not run clear again for a century. It be- 
 wildered and confused the minds of poets, and 
 blending itself with the national tradition, pro- 
 duced the rich lawlessness of the English six- 
 teenth century. It was a strong tributary to 
 the stream of our national literature; but the 
 popular usage, which assigns all that is good in 
 the English literature of the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries to a mysterious event 
 called the Renaissance, is merely absurd. Mod- 
 ern scholars, if they are forced to find a begin- 
 ning for modern literature, would prefer to 
 
6 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 date it from the wonderful outburst of ver- 
 nacular poetry in the latter part of the twelfth 
 century, and, if they must name a birthplace, 
 would claim attention for the Court of King 
 Henry II. 
 
 In some of its aspects, the Romantic revival 
 may be exhibited as a natural consequence of 
 the Renaissance. Classical scholarship at first 
 scorned the vernacular literatures, and did all 
 its work of criticism and imitation in the Latin 
 tongue. By degrees the lesson was widened, 
 and applied to the modern languages. Study ; 
 imitation in Latin ; extension of classical usages 
 and principles to modern literature, — these were 
 the regular stages in the progress of the classi- 
 cal influence. When the poets of France and 
 England, to name no others, had learned as 
 much as they were able and willing to learn 
 from the masters of Greece and Rome, the 
 work of the Renaissance was done. By the 
 middle of the eighteenth century there was no 
 notable kind of Greek or Latin literature — 
 historical, philosophical, poetical; epic, elegy, 
 ode, satire — which had not worthy disciples and 
 rivals in the literatures of France and England. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 7 
 
 Nothing remained to do but to go further 
 afield and seek for new masters. These might 
 easily have been found among the poets and 
 prophets of the East, and not a few notable 
 writers of the time began to forage in that di- 
 rection. But the East was too remote and 
 strange, and its languages were too little 
 laiown, for this attempt to be carried far; the 
 imitation of Chinese and Persian models was 
 practised chiefly by way of fantasy and joke. 
 The study of the neglected and forgotten mat- 
 ter of mediaeval times, on the other hand, was 
 undertaken by serious scholars. The progress 
 of the mediaeval influence reproduced very 
 exactly the successive phases of the Classical 
 Renaissance. At first there was study; and 
 books like Sainte Palaye's Memoirs of 
 Ancient Chivalry, and Paul Henri Mallet's 
 Northern Antiquities, enjoyed a European 
 reputation. Then followed the period of for- 
 gery and imitation, the age of Ossian and 
 Chatterton, Horace Walpole and Bishop 
 Percy. Lastly, the poets enrolled themselves 
 in the new school, and an original literature, 
 suggested by the old, was created by Sir Wal- 
 
8 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 ter Scott, Coleridge, and Keats. It was the 
 temper of the antiquary and the sceptic, in 
 the age of Gibbon and Hume, that begot the 
 Romantic Revival; and the rebellion of the 
 younger age against the spirit of the eight- 
 eenth century was the rebellion of a child 
 against its parents. 
 
 It is not needful, nor indeed is it possible, to 
 define Romance. In the mathematical sciences 
 definitions are all-important, because with 
 them the definition is the thing. When a 
 mathematician asks you to describe a circle, he 
 asks you to create one. But the man who asks 
 you to describe a monkey is less exacting; he 
 will be content if you mention some of the fea- 
 tures that seem to you to distinguish a monkey 
 from other animals. Such a description must 
 needs be based on personal impressions and 
 ideas; some features must be chosen as being 
 more significant than the rest. In the history 
 of literature there are only two really signifi- 
 cant things — men, and books. To study the 
 ascertained facts concerning men and books is 
 to study biography and bibliography, two 
 sciences which between them supply the only 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 9 
 
 competent and modest part of the history of 
 literature. To discern the significance of men 
 and books, to classify and explain them, is an- 
 other matter. We have not, and we never shall 
 have, a calculus sufficient for human life even 
 at its weakest and poorest. Let him who con- 
 ceives high hopes from the progress of knowl- 
 edge and the pertinacity of thought tame and 
 subdue his pride by considering, for a moment, 
 the game of chess. That game is played with 
 thirty-two pieces, of six different kinds, on a 
 board of sixty-four squares. Each kind of 
 piece has one allotted mode of action, which is 
 further cramped by severe limitations of 
 space. The conditions imposed upon the game 
 are strict, uniform, and mechanical. Yet those 
 who have made of chess a life-long study are 
 ready to confess their complete ignorance of the 
 fundamental merits of particular moves; one 
 game does not resemble another; and from the 
 most commonplace of developments there may 
 spring up, on the sudden, wild romantic possi- 
 bilities and situations that are like miracles. If 
 these surprising flowers of fancy grow on the 
 chess-board, how shall we set a limit to the 
 
10 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 possibilities of human life, which is chess, with 
 variety and uncertainty many million times 
 increased? It is prudent, therefore, to say lit- 
 tle of the laws which govern the course of hu- 
 man history, to avoid, except for pastime, the 
 discussion of tendencies and movements, and to 
 speak chiefly of men and books. If an author 
 can be exhibited as the effect of certain causes 
 (and I do not deny that some authors can 
 plausibly be so exhibited) he loses his virtue as 
 an author. He thought of himself as a cause, 
 a surprising intruder upon the routine of the 
 world, an original creator. I think that he is 
 right, and that the profitable study of a man 
 is the study which regards him as an oddity, 
 not a quiddity. 
 
 A general statement of the law that gov- 
 erns literary history may perhaps be borrowed 
 from the most unreasonable of the arts — the 
 art of dress. One of the powerful rulers of 
 men, and therefore of books, is Fashion, and 
 the fluctuations of literary fashion make up a 
 great part of literary history. If the history 
 of a single fashion in dress could ever be writ- 
 ten, it would illuminate the literary problem. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 11 
 
 The motives at work are the same; thoughtful 
 wearers of clothes, like thoughtful authors, are 
 all trying to do sometliing new, within the 
 limits assigned by practical utility and social 
 sympathy. Each desires to express himself 
 and yet in that very act to win the admiration 
 and liking of his fellows. The great object is 
 to wear the weeds of humanity with a differ- 
 ence. Some authors, it is true, like timid or lazy 
 dressers, desire only to conform to usage. But 
 these, as M. Brunetiere remarks in one of his 
 historical essays, are precisely the authors who 
 do not count. An author who respects himself 
 is not content if his work is mistaken for an- 
 other's, even if that other be one of the gods of 
 his idolatry. He would rather write his own 
 signature across faulty work than sink into a 
 copyist of merit. This eternal temper of self- 
 assertion, this spirit of invention, this deter- 
 mination to add something or alter something, 
 is no doubt the principle of life. It questions 
 accepted standards, and makes of reaction 
 from the reigning fashion a permanent force in 
 literature. The young want something to do ; 
 they will not be loyal subjects in a kingdom 
 
13 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 where no land remains to be taken up, nor will 
 they allow the praise of the dead to be the last 
 word in criticism. Why should they para- 
 phrase old verdicts? 
 
 The sway of Fashion often bears hardest on 
 a good author just dead, when the generation 
 that discovered him and acclaimed him begins 
 to pass away. Then it is not what he did that 
 attracts the notice of the younger sort, but what 
 he left undone. Tennyson is discovered to be 
 no great thinker. Pope, who, when his star 
 was in the ascendant, was "Mr. Pope, the new 
 Poet," has to submit to examination by the 
 Headmaster of Winchester, who decides that 
 he is not a poet, except in an inferior sense. 
 Shakespeare is dragged to the bar by Thomas 
 Rymer, who demonstrates, with what degree 
 of critical ability is still disputed, but certainly 
 in clear and vigorous English, that Shakes- 
 peare has no capacity for tragic writing. 
 Dante is banished, by the critics of the Renais- 
 sance, into the Gothic darkness. So the pendu- 
 lum of fashion swings to and fro, compelled, 
 even in the shortest of its variable oscillations, 
 to revisit the greatest writers, who are nearest 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 13 
 
 to the centre of rest. Wit and sense, which are 
 raised by one age into the very essentials of 
 good poetry, are denied the name of poetry by 
 the next; sentiment, the virtue of one age, is 
 the exploded vice of another; and Romance 
 comes in and goes out with secular regularity. 
 The meaning of Romance will never come 
 home to him who seeks for it in modern con- 
 troversies. The name Romance is itself a 
 memorial of the conquest of Europe by the 
 Romans. They imposed their language on 
 half Europe, and profoundly influenced the 
 other half. The dialectical, provincial Latin, 
 of various kinds, spoken by the conquered peo- 
 ples, became the Romance speech; and Ro- 
 mance literature was the new literature which 
 grew up among these peoples from the ninth 
 century onwards, — or from an earlier time, if 
 the fringe of Celtic peoples, who kept their 
 language but felt the full influence of Chris- 
 tianity, be taken into the account. The chief 
 thing to be noted concerning Romance litera- 
 ture is that it was a Christian literature, find- 
 ing its background and inspiration in the ideas 
 to which the Christian Church gave currency. 
 
14 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 While Rome spread her conquests over 
 Europe, at the very heart of her empire 
 Christianity took root, and by slow process 
 transformed that empire. During the Middle 
 Ages the Bishops of Rome sat in the seat of the 
 Roman Emperors. This startling change 
 possessed Gibbon's imagination, and is the 
 theme of his great work. But the whole of 
 Gibbon's history was anticipated and con- 
 densed by Hobbes in a single sentence — "If a 
 man considers the original of this great eccles- 
 iastical dominion, he will easily perceive that 
 the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the 
 deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned 
 upon the grave thereof. For so did the Papacy 
 start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that 
 heathen power." 
 
 Here, then, is the answer to a question which 
 at once suggests itself. How do we get this 
 famous opposition between the older Latin lit- 
 erature and the literature of those countries 
 which had inherited or accepted the Latin tra- 
 dition? Why did not the Romans hand over 
 their literature and teach it, as they handed 
 over and taught their law? They did teach it in 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 15 
 
 their schools; grammar and rhetoric, two of 
 the chief subjects of a Hberal education, were 
 purely literary studies, based on the work of the 
 literary masters of Rome. Never was there 
 an education so completely literary as the or- 
 ganized education of Rome and of her prov- 
 inces. How came it that there was any breach 
 between the old and the new? 
 
 A question of this kind, involving centuries 
 of history, does not admit of a perfectly simple 
 answer. It may be very reasonably maintained 
 that in Rome education killed literature. A 
 carefully organized, universal system of educa- 
 tion, which takes for its material the work of 
 great poets and orators, is certain to breed a 
 whole army of slaves. The teachers, employed 
 by the machine to expound ideas not their own, 
 soon erect systems of pedantic dogma, under 
 which the living part of literature is buried. 
 The experience of ancient Rome is being re- 
 peated in the England of today. The officials 
 responsible for education, whatever they may 
 uneasily pretend, are forced by the necessities 
 of their work to encourage uniformity, and 
 national education becomes a warehouse of 
 
16 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 second-hand goods, presided over by men who 
 cheerfully explain the mind of Burke or of 
 Shakespeare, adjusting the place of each, and 
 balancing faults against merits. But Roman 
 education throughout the Empire had further 
 difficulties to encounter. To understand these 
 it must be remembered what Latin literature 
 was. The Latins, when we first discern them 
 in the dim light of the past, were a small, stren- 
 uous, political people, with a passion for gov- 
 ernment and war. They first subdued Italy, 
 and no very serious culture-problem resulted 
 from that conquest. The Etruscans certainly 
 contributed much to Latin civilization, but 
 their separate history is lost. No one knows 
 what the Etruscans thought. The Romans do 
 not seem to have cared. They welded Italy to- 
 gether, and thereafter came into contact with 
 the older, richer civilizations of the Mediter- 
 ranean shores. The chief of these, in its influ- 
 ence, was the Greek civilization, as it had 
 developed in that famous group of free city 
 states, fostered by the sun and air, and addicted 
 to life. In Athens, at the time of her glory, 
 life was not a habit, but an experiment. Even 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE IT 
 
 the conservative Romans were infected. They 
 fell under the sway of Greek thought. When 
 a practical man of business becomes intimate 
 with an artist, he is never the same man again. 
 The thought of that disinterested mode of life 
 haunts his dreams. So Rome, though she had 
 paid little regard to the other ancient peoples 
 with whom she had had traffic and war, put 
 herself to school to the Greeks. She accepted 
 the Greek pantheon, renamed the Greek gods 
 and goddesses, and translated and adopted 
 Greek culture. The real Roman religion was 
 a religion of the homestead, simple, pious, 
 domestic, but they now added foreign orna- 
 ments. So also with literature; their own 
 native literature was scanty and practical — 
 laws and rustic proverbs — but they set them- 
 selves to produce a new literature, modelled on 
 the Greek. Virgil followed Homer; Plautus 
 copied Menander; and Roman literature took 
 on that secondary and reminiscent character 
 which it never lost. It was a literature of cul- 
 ture, not of creed. This people had so practical 
 a genius that they could put the world in har- 
 ness ; for the decoration of the world they were 
 willing to depend on foreign loans. 
 
18 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 In SO far as Latin literature was founded on 
 the Greek, that is, in so far as it was a deri- 
 vative and imitative Hterature, it was not very- 
 fit for missionary purposes. One people can 
 give to another only what is its own. The 
 Greek gods were useless for export. An ex- 
 ample may be taken from the English rule in 
 India. We can give to the peoples of India 
 our own representative institutions. We can 
 give them our own authors, Shakespeare, 
 Burke, Macaulay. But we cannot give them 
 Homer and Virgil, who nevertheless continue 
 to play an appreciable part in training the 
 English mind; and we can hardly give them 
 Milton, whose subtlest beauties depend on the 
 niceties of the Latin speech. The trial for 
 Latin literature came when obscurely, in the 
 purlieus and kennels of Rome, like a hidden 
 fermentation, Christianity arose. The earliest 
 Christians were for the most part illiterate ; but 
 when at last Christianity reached the high 
 places of the government, and controlled the 
 Empire, a problem of enormous difficulty pre- 
 sented itself for solution. The whole elaborate 
 educational svstem of the Romans was founded 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 19 
 
 on the older literature and the older creeds. 
 All education, law, and culture were pagan. 
 How could the Christians be educated; and 
 how, unless they were educated, could they 
 appeal to the minds of educated men? So ^ 
 began a long struggle, which continued for 
 many centuries, and swayed this way and that. 
 Was Christianity to be founded barely on the 
 Gospel precepts and on a way of life, or was 
 it to seek to subdue the world by yielding to 
 it? This, the religious problem, is the chief 
 educational problem in recorded history. There 
 were the usual parties ; and the fiercest, on both 
 sides, counselled no surrender. Tertullian, 
 careful for the purity of the new religion, held 
 it an unlawful thing for Christians to become 
 teachers in the Roman schools. Later, in the 
 reign of Julian the Apostate, an edict forbade 
 Christians to teach in the schools, but this time 
 for another reason, lest they should draw away 
 the youth from the older faith. In the end the 
 result was a practical compromise, arranged by 
 certain ecclesiastical politicians, themselves lov- 
 ers of letters, between the old world and the 
 new. It was agreed, in eflPect, that the schools 
 
20 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 should teach humane letters and mythology, 
 leaving it to the Church to teach divine doctrine 
 and the conduct of life. All later history bears 
 the marks of this compromise. Here was the be- 
 ginning of that distinction and apportionment 
 between the secular and the sacred which is so 
 much more conspicuous in Christian communi- 
 ties than ever it has been among the followers 
 of other religions. Here also was the begin- 
 ning of that strange mixture, familiar to all 
 students of literature, whereby the Bible and 
 Virgil are quoted as equal authorities, Plato 
 is set over against St. Paul, the Sibyl confirms 
 the words of David, and, when a youth of 
 promise, destined for the Church, is drowned, 
 St. Peter and a river-god are the chief mourn- 
 ers at his poetic obsequies. This mixture is not 
 a fantasy of the Renaissance ; it has been part 
 and parcel, from the earliest times, of the tra- 
 dition of the Christian church. 
 
 History is larger than morality; and a wise 
 man will not attempt to pass judgment on 
 those who found themselves in so unparalleled 
 a position. A new religion, claiming an author- 
 ity not of this world, prevailed in this world, 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 21 
 
 and was confronted with all the resources of 
 civilization, inextricably entangled with the an- 
 cient pagan faiths. What was to be done? 
 The Gospel precepts seemed to adinit of no 
 transaction. "They that say such things de- 
 clare plainly that they seek a country. And 
 truly, if they had been mindful of that coun- 
 try from whence they came out, they might 
 have had opportunity to have returned. But 
 now they desire a better country, that is an 
 heavenly." The material prosperity and social 
 order which Law and Politics take such pains 
 to preserve and increase are no part of their 
 care. They are strangers and pilgrims in the 
 country where they pitch their tent for a night. 
 How dare they spend time on cherishing the 
 painted veil called Life, when their desires are 
 fixed on what it conceals? When Tacitus 
 called the Christian religion "a deadly super- 
 stition," he spoke as a true Roman, a member 
 of the race of Empire-builders. His subtle 
 political instinct scented danger from those 
 who looked with coldness on the business and 
 desire of this world. The Christian faith, which 
 presents no social difficulties while it is pro- 
 
22 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 fessed here and there by a lonely saint or seer, 
 is another thing when it becomes the formal 
 creed of a nation. The Christians themselves 
 knew that to cut themselves off from the coun- 
 try of their birth would have been a fatal 
 choice, so far as this world is concerned. Their 
 ultimate decision was to accept Roman civiliza- 
 tion and Roman culture, and to add Christian- 
 ity to it. 
 
 Then followed an age-long attempt to Chris- 
 tianize Latin literature, to supply believers with 
 e new poetry, written in polished and accom- 
 plished verse, and inspired by Christian doc- 
 trine. Of those who attempted this task, 
 Prudentius is perhaps the greatest name. The 
 attempt could never have been very successful ; 
 those who write in Latin verse must submit to 
 be judged, not by the truth of their teaching, 
 but by the formal beauties of their prosody, and 
 the wealth of their allusive learning. Even 
 Milton, zealot though he be, is esteemed for 
 his manner rather than for his matter. But the 
 experiment was cut short by the barbarian in- 
 vasions. When the Empire was invaded, St. 
 Jerome and St. Augustine, Prudentius and 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 23 
 
 Symmachus, Claudian and Paulinus of Nola, 
 were all alive. These men, in varying degrees, 
 had compounded and blended the two elements, 
 the pagan and the Christian. The two have 
 been compounded ever since. The famous 
 sevententh century controversy concerning 
 the fitness of sacred subjects for poetic treat- 
 ment is but a repetition and an echo of that 
 older and more vital difference. The two 
 strains could never be perfectly reconciled, so 
 that a certain impurity and confusion was be- 
 queathed to modern European literature, not 
 least to English literature. Ours is a great and 
 various literature, but its rarest virtue is sim- 
 plicity. Our best ballads and lyrics are filled 
 with the matter of faith, but as often as we 
 try the larger kinds of poetry, we inevitably 
 pass over into reminiscence, learning, criticism, 
 — in a word, culture. 
 
 The barbarians seized, or were granted, land ; 
 and settled down under their chiefs. They 
 accepted Christianity, and made it into a war- 
 like religion. They learned and "corrupted" 
 the Latin language. In their dialects they had 
 access neither to the literature of ancient Rome, 
 
24 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 nor to the imitative scholarly Christian litera- 
 ture, poetry and homily, which competed with 
 it. Latin continued to be the language of reli- 
 gion and law. It was full of terms and allu- 
 sions which meant nothing to them. They 
 knew something of government, — not of the 
 old republic, but of their own men and estates. 
 They believed wholly and simply in Christian- 
 ity, especially the miraculous part of it. To 
 them (as to all whom it has most profoundly 
 influenced) it was not a philosophy, but a his- 
 tory of marvellous events. When, by the oper- 
 ation of society, their dialect had formed itself, 
 a new literature, unlike anything that had 
 flourished in ancient Rome, grew up among 
 them. This was Romance, the great literary 
 form of the Middle Ages. It was a sincere lit- 
 erature, expressive of their pride in arms and 
 their simple religious faith. The early songs 
 and ballads, chanted in the Romance speech, 
 have all perished. From a later time there have 
 come down to us the Chansons de Geste, narra- 
 tive poems composed by the professional caste 
 of poets to celebrate the deeds and adventures 
 of the knights who fought the battles of Charle- 
 magne against the Saracen invader. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 35 
 
 The note of this Romance literature is that 
 it was actual, modern, realistic, at a time when 
 classical literature had become a remote con- 
 vention of bookish culture. It was sung in the 
 banqueting-hall, while Latin poetry was read 
 in the cells of monks. It flourished enor- 
 mously-, and extended itself to all the matter of 
 history and legend, to King Arthur, Theseus, 
 Alexander, ancient heroes and warriors who 
 were brought alive again in the likeness of 
 knights and emperors. Its triumph was so 
 complete, that its decadence followed swiftly. 
 Like the creatures that live in the blood of man, 
 literary forms and species commonly die of 
 their own excess. Romances were multiplied, 
 and imitated; professional poets, not content 
 with marvels that had now become familiar, 
 sought for a new sensation in extravagant lan- 
 guage and incident. The tales became more 
 and more sophisticated, elaborate, grotesque, 
 and unreal, until, in the fourteenth century, a 
 stout townsman, who ticketed bales in a cus- 
 tom-house, and was the best English poet of his 
 time, found them ridiculous. In Sir Thopas 
 Chaucer parodies the popular literature of his 
 
26 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 day. Sir Thopas is a great reader of romances ; 
 he models himself on the heroes whose deeds 
 possess his imagination, and scours the English 
 comitryside, seeking in vain for the fulfilment 
 of his dreams of prowess. 
 
 So Romance declined; and by the end of the 
 seventeenth century the fashion is completely 
 reversed ; the pendulum has swung back ; now it 
 is the literature inspired by the old classical 
 models that is real, and handles actual himian 
 interests, while Romantic literature has become 
 remote, fictitious, artificial. This does not 
 mean that the men of the later seventeenth 
 century believed in the gods and Achilles, but 
 not in the saints and Arthur. It means that 
 classical literature was found best to imitate 
 for its form. The greater classical writers had 
 described the life of man, as they saw it, in 
 direct and simple language, carefully ordered 
 by art. After a long apprenticeship of trans- 
 lation and imitation, modern writers adopted 
 the old forms, and filled them with modern 
 matter. The old mythology, when it was kept, 
 was used allegorically and allusively. Com- 
 mon-sense, pointedly expressed, with some 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 27 
 
 traditional ornament and fable, became the 
 matter of poetiy. 
 
 A rough summary of this kind is enough to 
 show how large a question is involved in the 
 history of Romance. All literary history is a 
 long record of the struggle between those two 
 rival teachers of man — books, and the exper- 
 ience of life. Good books describe the world, 
 and teach whole generations to interpret the 
 world. Because they throw light on the life of 
 man, they enjoy a vast esteem, and are set up 
 in a position of authority. Then they generate 
 other books; and literature, receding further 
 and further from the source of truth, becomes 
 bookish and conventional, until those who have 
 been taught to see nature through the spec- 
 tacles of books grow imeasy, and throw away 
 the distorting glasses, to look at nature afresh 
 with the naked eye. They also write books, it 
 may be, and attract a crowd of imitators, who 
 produce a literature no less servile than the 
 literature it supplants. 
 
 This movement of the sincere and indepen- 
 dent human mind is found in the great writers 
 of all periods, and is called the Return to Na- 
 
28 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 ture. It is seen in Pope no less than in Words- 
 worth; in The Rape of the Lock no less than 
 in Peter Bell. Indeed the whole history of the 
 mock-heroic, and the work of Tassoni, Boi- 
 leau, and Pope, the three chief masters in that 
 kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature 
 against the stilted conventions of the late liter- 
 ary epic. The Iliad is the story of a quarrel. 
 What do men really quarrel about? Is there 
 any more distinctive mark of human quarrels 
 than the eternal triviality of the immediate 
 cause? The insulting removal of a memorial 
 emblem from an Italian city; the shifting of 
 £i reading-desk from one position to another in 
 a French church ; the playful theft of a lock of 
 hair by an amorous young English nobleman 
 — these were enough, in point of fact, to set 
 whole communities by the ears, and these are 
 the events celebrated in The Rape of the 
 Bucket, The Rape of the Lectern, The Rape of 
 the Lock. How foolish it is to suppose that 
 nature and truth are to be found in one school 
 of poetry to the exclusion of another! The 
 eternal virtues of literature are sincerity, clar- 
 ity, breadth, force, and subtlety. They are to 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 29 
 
 be found, in diverse combinations, now here 
 and now there. While the late Latin Christian 
 poets were bound over to Latin models — to 
 elegant reminiscences of a faded mythology 
 and the tricks of a professional rhetoric — there 
 arose a new school, intent on making literature 
 real and modern. These were the Romance 
 poets. If they pictured Theseus as a duke, and 
 Jason as a wandering knight, it was because 
 they thought of them as live men, and took 
 means to make them live for the reader or 
 listener. The realism of the early literature of 
 the Middle Ages is perhaps best seen in old 
 Irish. The monk bewails the lawlessness of his 
 wandering thoughts, which run after dreams of 
 heauty and pleasure during the hour of divine 
 service. The hermit in the wood describes, with 
 loving minuteness, the contents of his larder. 
 Never was there a fresher or more spontaneous 
 poetry than the poetry of this early Christian 
 people. But it is not in the direct line of de- 
 scent, for it was written in the Celtic speech of 
 a people who did not achieve the government of 
 Europe. The French romances inherited the 
 throne, and passed through all the stages of 
 
30 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 elaboration and decadence. They too, in their 
 turn, became a professional rhetoric, false and 
 tedious. When they ceased to be a true pic- 
 ture of life, they continued in esteem as a school 
 of manners and deportment for the fantastic 
 gallantry of a court. Yet through them all 
 their Christian origin shines. Their very 
 themes bear witness to the teaching of Chris- 
 tian asceticism and Christian idealism. The 
 quest of a lady never seen ; the temptations that 
 present themselves to a wandering knight 
 under the disguise of beauty and ease ; — -these, 
 and many other familiar romantic plots bor- 
 row their inspiration from the same source. 
 Not a few of the old fairy stories, preserved in 
 folk-lore, are full of religious meaning — they 
 are the Christian literature of the Dark Ages. 
 Nor is it hard to discern the Christian origins 
 of later Romantic poetry. Pope's morality has 
 little enough of the religious character : 
 
 Know then this truth (enough for Man to know), 
 Virtue alone is Happiness below. 
 
 But Coleridge, when he moralizes, speaks the 
 language of Christianity: 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 31 
 
 He prayeth best, who loveth best 
 All things both great and small; 
 
 For the dear God who loveth us 
 He made and loveth all. 
 
 The like contrast holds between Dryden 
 and Shelley. It is perhaps hardly fair to take 
 an example from Dryden's poems on religion; 
 they are rational arguments on difficult topics, 
 after this fashion : 
 
 In doubtful questions 'tis the safest way 
 To learn what unsuspected ancients say ; 
 For 'tis not likely we should higher soar 
 In search of heaven than all the church before. 
 
 When Dryden writes in his most fervent and 
 magnificent style, he writes like this : 
 
 I will not rake the Dunghill of thy Crimes, 
 
 For who would read thy Life that reads thy rhymes? 
 
 But of King David's Foes be this the Doom, 
 
 May all be like the Young-man Absalom; 
 
 And for my Foes may this their Blessing be, 
 
 To talk like Doeg and to write like Thee. 
 
 Nor is it fair to bring Shelley's lame satires 
 into comparison with these splendors. When 
 Shelley is inspired by his demon, this is how he 
 writes : 
 
32 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; 
 To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; 
 
 To defy Power which seems omnipotent; 
 To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates 
 From its own wreck the thing it contemplates ; 
 
 Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; 
 This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be 
 Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; 
 This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory. 
 
 Some of the great poets of the Romantic 
 Revival took mediaeval literature for their 
 model, but they did more than that. They re- 
 turned to the cult of wild nature; they rein- 
 troduced the supernatural, which is a part of 
 the nature of man; they described seas, and 
 deserts, and mountains, and the emotions of the 
 soul in loneliness. But so soon as it passed out 
 of the hands of the greater poets, this revived 
 Romance became as bookish as decadent Clas- 
 sicism, and ran into every kind of sentimental 
 extravagance. Indeed revived Romance also 
 became a school of manners, and by making a 
 fashion and a code of rare emotions, debased 
 the descriptive parts of the language. A de- 
 scription by any professional reporter of any 
 Royal wedding is further from the truth to-day 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 33 
 
 than it was in the eighteenth century. The 
 average writer is looser and more unprincipled. 
 The word Romance supplies no very valu- 
 able instrument of criticism even in regard to 
 the great writers of the early nineteenth cen- 
 tury. Wordsworth, like Defoe, drew straight 
 from the life. Those who will may call him a 
 Romantic. He told of adventures — ^the ad- 
 ventures of the mind. He did not write of 
 Bacchus, Venus, and Apollo; neither did he 
 concern himself with Merlin, Tristram, and the 
 Lady of the Lake. He shunned what is de- 
 rived from other books. His theme is man, 
 nature, and human life. Scott, in rich and care- 
 less fashion, dealt in every kind of material that 
 came his way. He described his own country 
 and his own people with loving care, and he 
 loved also the melodrama of historical fiction 
 and supernatural legend. "His romance and 
 antiquarianism," says Ruskin, "his knighthood 
 and monkery, are all false, and he knows them 
 to be false." Certainly, The Heart of Midlo- 
 thian and The Antiquary are better than 
 Ivanhoe. Scott's love for the knighthood and 
 monkery was real, but it was playful. His 
 heart was with Fielding. 
 
34 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 There is nothing inconsistent in the best of 
 the traditions of the two j^arties. The Classical 
 school taught simplicity, directness, and mod- 
 esty of speech. They are right : it is the way to 
 tell a ghost story. The Romantic school taught 
 a wider imaginative outlook and a more curious 
 analysis of the human mind. They also are 
 right: it is the way to investigate a case in the 
 police courts. Both were cumbered, at times, 
 with the dead things that they found in the 
 books they loved. All literature, except the 
 strongest and purest, is cumbered with useless 
 matter — the conventional epithet, the grandi- 
 ose phrase, the out-worn classical quotation, 
 the self-conscious apology, the time-honored 
 joke. But there are only two schools of lit- 
 erature — the good, and the bad. As for na- 
 tional legend, its growth is the same in all ages. 
 The Greeks told tales of Achilles, the Romans 
 of Aeneas, the French of Charlemagne, the 
 British of Arthur. It is a part of the 
 same process, and an expression of the same 
 humanity. 
 
 I have tried to show that the Renaissance 
 bears the same relation to classical literature as 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 35 
 
 the Revival of Romance bears to mediaeval 
 literature, and that the whole history of the 
 literature of Europe is an oscillation between 
 Christian and Pagan ideals during that long 
 and wavering process whereby Christianity was 
 partially established as the creed and way of 
 life of a group of diverse nations. The his- 
 torical meaning of the word Romance is exact 
 and easy to define. But in common usage the 
 word means something much vaguer than this. 
 It is a note, an atmosphere, a kind of feeling 
 that is awakened not only by literature but by 
 the behavior of men and the disposition of 
 material objects. John Evelyn, the diarist, 
 enjoys the reputation of having been the first 
 to speak of a "romantic site," — a phrase which 
 leads the way to immeasurable possibilities in 
 the application of the word. Accuracy in the 
 definition of this larger meaning is unattain- 
 able ; and would certainly be false, for the word 
 has taken its meaning from centuries of usage 
 by inaccurate thinkers. A whole cluster of 
 feelings, impressions, and desires, dimly recog- 
 nized as cognate, has grown around the word, 
 which has now been a centre of critical discus- 
 
36 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 sion and controversy for the better part of a 
 century. Heine, in his dissertation on the Ro- 
 mantic School, takes the Christianity of the 
 Middle Ages as his starting-point, and relates 
 everything to that. Perhaps he makes too 
 much of allegory and symbolism, which have 
 always been dear to the church, but are not 
 conspicuous in early Romance. Yet no one can 
 go far astray who keeps in touch, as Heine 
 does, with the facts of history. Goethe, impa- 
 tient of the wistful intensities of youth, said 
 that the Classical is health, and the Romantic 
 disease. Much has been made, by many critics, 
 of the statue and the picture, as types of an- 
 cient and modern art, the one complete in itself, 
 the other suggesting more than it portrays. 
 Mr. Walter Pater, borrowing a hint from a 
 sentence of Bacon, finds the essence of Ro- 
 mance in the addition of strangeness to beauty, 
 of curiosity to desire. It would be easy to mul- 
 tiply these epigrammatic statements, which are 
 all not obscurely related to the fundamental 
 changes wrought on the world by Christian 
 ideas. No single formula can hope to describe 
 and distinguish two eras, or define two tempers 
 
^ THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 37 
 
 of mind. If I had to choose a single character- 
 istic of Romance as the most noteworthy, I 
 think I should choose Distance, and should call 
 Romance the magic of Distance. What is the 
 most romantic line in Virgil? Surely it is the 
 line which describes the ghosts, staying for 
 waftage on the banks of the river, and stretch- 
 ing out their hands in passionate desire to the 
 further shore : 
 
 Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore. 
 
 Scott expounds the harmonizing power of 
 distance in his Journal, where he describes the 
 funeral of his friend Laidlaw's infant: 
 
 I saw the poor child's funeral from a distance. Ah, 
 that Distance! What a magician for conjuring up 
 scenes of joy or sorrow, smoothing all asperities, 
 reconciling all incongruities, veiling all absurdness, 
 softening every coarseness, doubling every effect by 
 the influence of the imagination. A Scottish wedding 
 should be seen at a distance; the gay band of the 
 dancers just distinguished amid the elderly group of 
 the spectators, — the glass held high, and the distant 
 cheers as it is swallowed, should be only a sketch, 
 not a finished Dutch picture, when it becomes brutal 
 and boorish. Scotch psalmody, too, should be heard 
 from a distance. The grunt and the snuffle, and the 
 whine and the scream, should be all blended in that 
 
38 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 deep and distant sound, which rising and falling like 
 the Eolian harp, may have some title to be called 
 the praise of our Maker. Even so the distant funeral : 
 the few mourners on horseback with their plaids 
 wrapped around them — the father heading the pro- 
 cession as they enter the river, and pointing out the 
 ford by which his darling is to be carried on the last 
 long road — not one of the subordinate figures in dis- 
 cord with the general tone of the incident — seeming 
 just accessories, and no more — this is affecting. 
 
 The same idea is the subject of T. E. 
 Brown's poem, The Schooner: 
 
 Just mark that schooner westward far at sea — 
 
 'Tis but an hour ago 
 When she was lying hoggish at the quay. 
 
 And men ran to and fro. 
 And tugged, and stamped, and shoved, and pushed 
 
 and swore, 
 And ever and anon, with crapulous glee, 
 Grinned homage to viragoes on the shore. 
 
 And now, behold ! a shadow of repose 
 
 Upon a line of gray. 
 She sleeps, that transverse cuts the evening rose — 
 
 She sleeps, and dreams away, 
 Soft blended in a unity of rest 
 
 All jars, and strifes obscene, and turbulent throes, 
 'Neath the broad benediction of the West. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 39 
 
 Shelley finds the suggestion of distance in 
 beautiful music: 
 
 Though the sound overpowers, 
 Sing again, with thy sweet voice revealing 
 A tone 
 Of some world far from ours. 
 Where music and moonlight and feeling 
 Are one. 
 
 Wordsworth hears it in the song of the 
 Highland Girl: 
 
 Will no one tell me what she sings ? — 
 Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
 For old, unhappy, far-off things. 
 And battles long ago. 
 
 These quotations are enough to show what 
 a width of view is given to modern Romantic 
 poetry. Man is, in one sense, more truly seen 
 in a wide setting of the mountains and the sea 
 than close at hand in the street. But the ro- 
 mantic effect of distance may delude and con- 
 ceal as well as glorify and liberate. The 
 weakness of the modern Romantic poet is that 
 he must keep himself aloof from life, that he 
 may see it. He rejects the authority, and 
 many of the pleasures, along with the duties, of 
 society. He looks out from his window on the 
 
40 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 men fighting in the plain, and sees them trans- 
 figured mider the rays of the setting sun. He 
 enjoys the battle, but not as the fighters enjoy 
 it. He nurses himself in all the luxury of 
 philosophic sensation. He does not help to 
 bury the child, or to navigate the schooner, or 
 to discover the Fortunate Islands. The busi- 
 ness of every poet, it may be said, is vision, not 
 action. But the epic poet holds his reader fast 
 by strong moral bonds of sympathy with the 
 actors in the poem. "I should have liked to do 
 that" is what the reader says to himself. He 
 is asked to think and feel as a man, not as 
 a god. 
 
 The weakness of revived Romance found the 
 most searching of its critics in Tennyson, who 
 was fascinated, when he was shaping his own 
 poetic career, by the picture and the past, yet 
 could not feel satisfied with the purely aesthetic 
 attitude of art to life. In poem after poem he 
 returns to the question, Is poetry an escape 
 from life? Must it lull the soul in a selfish se- 
 curity? The struggle that went on in his mind 
 has left its mark on The Lady of Shalott, The 
 Palace of Art, The Voyage, The Vision of 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 41 
 
 Sifij The Lotos-Eaters, and others of his 
 poems. The Lady of Shalott Hves secluded in 
 her bower, where she weaves a magic web with 
 gay colors. She has heard that a curse will fall 
 on her if she looks out on the world and down 
 to the city of Camelot. She sees the outer 
 world only in a mirror, and 
 
 In her web she still delights 
 To weave the mirror's magic sights 
 
 — villages, market-girls, knights riding two and 
 two, funerals, or pairs of lovers wandering by. 
 At last she grows half-sick of seeing the world 
 only in shadows and reflections. Then a sud- 
 den vivid experience breaks up this life of 
 dream. Sir Lancelot rides past, in shining ar- 
 mor, singing as he rides. She leaves her magic 
 web and mirror, and looks upon the real 
 world. 
 
 Out flew the web and floated wide ; 
 The mirror crack'd from side to side ; 
 "The curse is come upon me," cried 
 The Lady of Shalott. 
 
 She goes into the world, and there she meets 
 her death. The poem is not an allegory, but 
 there is no mistaking the thought that gener- 
 
42 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 
 
 ated it. The mirror and the web are the em- 
 blems of Romantic art. The feehngs which stir 
 the heart to action, which spring to meet the 
 occasion or the object, are contrasted, in the 
 poem, with the more pensive feehngs which are 
 excited by the sight of the object in a mirror, 
 and the suggestions of color and design which 
 are to be transferred to the embroidery. The 
 mirror is a true and subtle symbol. When 
 Shakespeare treated the same problem, he 
 made King Richard II, the most romantic- 
 ally minded of all his kings, call for a mir- 
 ror. ^ The thing that it is easiest for a man to 
 see in a mirror is himself ; egotism in its many 
 forms, self-pity, self-cultivation, self-esteem, 
 dogs Romanticism like its shadow. The desire 
 to be the spectator of your own life, to see your- 
 self in all kinds of heroic and pathetic atti- 
 tudes, is the motive-power of Romantic poetry 
 in many of its later developments. Yet life 
 must be arrested and falsified before the desire 
 can be fulfilled. No one has ever seen himself 
 in a mirror as he is seen by others. He cannot 
 catch himself looking away, self-forgetful, in- 
 tent on something outward; yet only when he 
 
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE 43 
 
 is in these attitudes does his true character 
 show itself in his face. Nor, if he could so see 
 himself, would he be a witness of the truth. 
 The sensation of drowning, or of leading an 
 assault in war, is very unlike the sentiment 
 which is aroused in the spectator of either of 
 these adventures. Romanticism, in its decline, 
 confuses the sentiment with the sensation, and 
 covets the enjoyment of life on the easy terms 
 of a by-stander. 
 
 These faults and failings of late Romance 
 are far enough removed from the simple hero- 
 ism of the death of Roland in the pass of 
 Roncesvalles. Later Romance is known every- 
 where by its derivative, secondary, consciously 
 literary character. Yet it draws sometimes 
 from the original source of inspiration, and 
 attains, by devious ways, to poetic glories not 
 inferior to the old. 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 Romance is a perennial form of modern 
 literature, and has passed through many- 
 phases. No period has been without it, though 
 the esteem in which it is held has varied a good 
 deal from age to age. English literature is 
 strong in romance; there is something in the 
 English temper which makes scepticism un- 
 grateful to it, and disposes it to treat even 
 dreams seriously. Chaucer, who laughed at 
 the romantic writers of his day, yet gave a 
 new lease of life to Romance in Troilus and 
 Cressida and The Knightes Tale. Many of the 
 poets of the seventeenth century chose roman- 
 tic themes for their most serious work; if 
 Davenant and Chamberlayne and others had 
 been as successful as they were ambitious, they 
 would have anticipated the Revival of Ro- 
 mance. Even in the age of Pope, the old 
 romance subjects were still popular, though 
 
 44 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 45 
 
 they were celebrated in books which have long 
 been forgotten. Everyone who has studied the 
 Troy legend of the Middle Ages knows how 
 great a share in the popularization of the 
 legend belongs to the Sicilian lawyer, Guido 
 delle Colonne, who summarized, in the dull 
 style of a Latin chronicle, and without ac- 
 knowledgment, the brilliant Roman de Troie 
 which the French poet, Benoit de Sainte-More 
 had written for Queen Eleanor of England. 
 Guido's matter-of-fact compilation had an 
 enormous vogue; Chaucer, Lydgate, and 
 Shakespeare treated it as an authority; and 
 Caxton translated it into English prose. 
 Through all the changes of fashion Caxton's 
 version continued in esteem; it was repeatedly 
 revised and reissued; and, in the very age of 
 Pope, found what was doubtless a large pub- 
 lic under the title The Destruction of Troy, In 
 Three Books . . . With many Admirable 
 Acts of Chivalry and Martial Prowess, effected 
 by Valiant Knights, in the Defence and hove 
 of distressed Ladies. The Thirteenth Edition, 
 Corrected and much Amended. London, 
 Printed for Eben. Tracey, at the Three Bibles 
 
46 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 on London-Bridge. 1708. In the underworld 
 of literature Romance never died out. The Re- 
 vival of Romance took its special character 
 from a gradual and powerful reaction against 
 Dryden and Pope and all those masters of 
 Classical method who, during half a century, 
 had legislated for English poetry. It began 
 very early in the eighteenth century, long be- 
 fore the death of Pope. No sooner did a dy- 
 nasty of moralists and satirists claim possession 
 of the high places, and speak in the name of 
 English literature, than all the other interests 
 and kinds, which survived among the people, 
 began to range themselves in opposition, and 
 to assert their right to be heard. The suprem- 
 acy of Dryden and Pope was the most despotic 
 rule that English poetry has ever known, and 
 the revolt was strong in proportion. Satire 
 and morality very easily becomes tedious, espe- 
 cially when they are in close alliance. Despot- 
 ism may be tempered by epigrams, and so be- 
 come tolerable, but it is important that the 
 epigrams should not be made by the despot. 
 Outside the charmed circle of his friendships, 
 Pope was ready enough to use his wit against 
 any pretender. 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 47 
 
 The change began gradually, and in very in- 
 nocent fashion. Poetry had been taught to be 
 scholarly, self-conscious, experimental; and it 
 showed its skill in half-playful imitations of the 
 older English masters. Pope himself imitated 
 Chaucer and Spenser in burlesque fashion. 
 John Philips, in The Splendid Shilling, used 
 Milton's heightened style to describe the dis- 
 tresses of an impecunious poet. William Shen- 
 stone in The School-mistress, parodied Spen- 
 ser, yet the parody is in no way hostile, and 
 betrays an almost sentimental admiration. 
 Spenser, like Milton, never lost credit as a 
 master, though his fame was obscured a little 
 during the reign of Dryden. His style, it 
 must be remembered, was archaic in his own 
 time; it could not grow old, for it had never 
 been young. Addison, in A71 Account of the 
 Greatest English Poets, says that Spenser's 
 verse 
 
 Can charm an understanding age no more ; 
 The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, 
 While the dull moral lies too plain below. 
 
 But the Account is a merely juvenile work; 
 its dogma is not the sword of judgment, but 
 
48 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 the shield of ignorance. "The character he 
 gives of Spenser," said Pope, "is false; and I 
 have heard him say that he never read Spenser 
 till fifteen years after he wrote it." As for 
 Pope himself, among the English poets Wal- 
 ler, Spenser, and Dryden were his childhood's 
 favorites, in that order; and the year before 
 his death he said to Spence — "I don't know 
 how it is; there is something in Spenser that 
 pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it 
 did in one's youth. I read the Faerie Queene, 
 when I was about twelve, with infinite delight ; 
 and I think it gave me as much when I read it 
 over, about a j^ear or two ago." 
 
 The lyrical Milton and the romantic Spen- 
 ser found disciples among poets in the early 
 half of the eighteenth century. Two of these 
 disciples may be mentioned, both born about 
 the year 1700, only twelve years later than 
 Pope. John Dyer, the son of a solicitor in 
 Wales, was bred to the law, but gave it up to 
 study painting under Jonathan Richardson. 
 His earlier and better poems were written 
 while he wandered about South Wales in 
 pursuit of his art. Grongar Hill, the most 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 49 
 
 notable of them, was published in 1726. Love 
 of the country is what inspires his verses, 
 which have a very winning simplicity, only 
 touched here and there by the conventions 
 deemed proper for poetry; 
 
 Grass and flowers Quiet treads, 
 On the meads and mountain-heads, 
 Along with Pleasure, close ally'd, 
 Ever by each other's side; 
 And often, by the murmuring rill, 
 Hears the thrush, while all is still. 
 Within the groves of Grongar Hill. 
 
 The truth of his observation endeared him to 
 Wordsworth; and his moral, when he finds a 
 moral, is without violence : 
 
 How close and small the hedges lie ! 
 What streaks of meadows cross the eye ! 
 A step methinks may pass the stream, 
 So little distant dangers seem ; 
 So we mistake the Future's face, 
 Ey'd thro' Hope's deluding glass ; 
 As yon summits soft and fair. 
 Clad in colours of the air, 
 Which, to those who journey near, 
 Barren, and brown, and rough appear. 
 Still we tread tir'd the same coarse way. 
 The present's still a cloudy day. 
 
50 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 It takes a good poet to strike a clear note, 
 with no indecision, in the opening hnes of his 
 poem, as Dyer does in TJie Country Walk: 
 
 I am resolv'd, this charming day, 
 In the open fields to stray ; 
 And have no roof above my head 
 But that whereon the Gods do tread. 
 
 His landscapes are delicately etched, and are 
 loved for their own sake : 
 
 And there behold a bloomy mead, 
 A silver stream, a willow shade. 
 Beneath the shade a fisher stand, 
 Who, with the angle in his hand, 
 Swings the nibbling fry to land. 
 
 It would be absurd to speak solemnly of 
 Dyer's debt to Milton; he is an original poet; 
 but the writer of the lines quoted above can 
 never have been blind to the beauties of 
 U Allegro and II Penseroso. His two arts 
 brought him little material prosperity; in 1740 
 he took orders in the Church of England, and 
 in his later years did harm to his fame by a 
 long industrial poem called The Fleece, which 
 has on it none of the dew that glistens on his 
 youthful verses. 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 51 
 
 James Thomson, who won a great reputa- 
 tion in his own age, was the son of a parish 
 minister in Scotland, He was educated in 
 Edinburgh, and came to London to seek his 
 fortune. All Thomson's work shows the new 
 tendencies in poetry struggling with the ac- 
 cepted fashions. His language in The Sea- 
 sons is habitually rhetorical and stilted, yet 
 there is hardly a page without its vignettes of 
 truth and beauty. When he forgets what he 
 has learned in the Rhetoric class, and falls back 
 on his own memories and likings, the poet in 
 him reappears. In The Castle of Indolence, 
 published just before his death in 1748, he imi- 
 tates Spenser. One stanza of this poem is 
 more famous than all the rest; it is pure and 
 high romance: 
 
 As when a shepherd of the Hebrid-Isles, 
 Placed far amid the melancholy main, 
 (Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles, 
 Or that aerial beings sometimes deign 
 To stand embodied to our senses plain), 
 Sees on the naked hill, or valley low. 
 The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain, 
 A vast assembly moving to and fro ; 
 Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show. 
 
52 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 Many who are familiar with this simile have 
 never been at the pains to remember, or en- 
 quire, what it illustrates. Indeed its appear- 
 ance in the poem is almost startling, as if it 
 were there for no purpose but to prophesy of 
 the coming glories of English poetiy. The 
 visitors to the Castle of Indolence are met at 
 the gate by the porter, who supplies them 
 with dressing-gowns and slippers, wherein to 
 take their ease. They then stroll off to various 
 parts of the spacious grounds, and their dis- 
 appearance is the occasion for this wonderful 
 verse. Thomson cared no more than his read- 
 ers for the application of the figure ; what pos- 
 sessed him was his memory of the magic twi- 
 light on the west coast of Scotland. 
 
 Pope and Prior were metropolitan poets; it 
 is worth noting that Dyer belonged to Wales, 
 and Thomson to Scotland. It is even more sig- 
 nificant that Dyer was by profession a painter, 
 and that Thomson's poems were influenced by 
 memories of the fashionable school of land- 
 scape painting. The development of Romantic 
 poetry in the eighteenth century is inseparably 
 associated with pictorial art, and especially with 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 53 
 
 the rise of landscape painting. Two great mas- 
 ters of the seventeenth century, Salvator Rosa 
 and Claude Lorrain, are more important than 
 all the rest. We have here to do not with the ab- 
 solute merits of painting, nor with its technical 
 beauties and subtleties, but with its effect on 
 the popular imagination, which in this matter 
 does not much differ from the poetic imagina- 
 tion. The landscapes of Salvator Rosa and 
 Claude were made familiar to an enormous 
 public by the process of engraving, and poetry 
 followed where painting led. There are ex- 
 quisite landscapes in the backgrounds of the 
 great Italian masters; Leonardo, Titian, and 
 others; but now the background became the 
 picture, and the groups of figures were reduced 
 to serve as incidents in a wider scheme. Ex- 
 actly the same change, the same shift of the 
 centre of interest, maj^ be seen in Thomson's 
 poetry compared with Spenser's. No doubt 
 it would be difficult to balance the creditor and 
 debtor account as between poetry and paint- 
 ing; the earlier pictorial landscapes borrowed 
 some hints from the older romances; but in 
 England, at least, landscapes of wild rocks. 
 
54 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 and calm lakes, and feudal castles lit up by 
 the glow of the setting sun were familiar before 
 the reaction in poetry set in. Romance, in its 
 modern development, is largely a question of 
 background. A romantic love-affair might be 
 defined as a love-affair in other than domestic 
 surroundings. Who can use the word "ro- 
 mantic" with more authority than Coleridge? 
 In Kubla Khan, a poem which some would 
 choose as the high-water mark of English ro- 
 mantic poetry, he gets his effect from the 
 description of a landscape combining the ex- 
 tremes of beauty and terror: 
 
 But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted 
 
 Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover ! 
 
 A savage place ! as holy and enchanted 
 
 As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 
 
 By woman wailing for her demon lover ! 
 
 And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, 
 
 It flung up momently the sacred river. 
 Five miles meandering with a mazy motion 
 Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, 
 Then reached the caverns measureless to man, 
 And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean ; 
 And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far 
 Ancestral voices prophesying war! 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 55 
 
 Romance demands scenery ; and it should never 
 be forgotten that the age of Pope, the age 
 of symmetry and correctness in poetry, was 
 an age when the taste for wild scenery in 
 painting and in gardening was at its height 
 If the house was set in order, the garden 
 broke into a wilderness. Addison in the Spec- 
 tator (No. 414) praises the new art of land- 
 scape gardening: 
 
 There is generally in nature something more grand 
 and august, than what we meet with in the curiosities 
 of art. When, therefore, we see this imitated in any 
 measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted kind 
 of pleasure, than what we receive from the nicer and 
 more accurate productions of art. On this account 
 our English gardens are not so entertaining to the 
 fancy as those in France and Italy, where we see 
 a larger extent of ground covered over with an 
 agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which rep- 
 resent everywhere an artificial wildness, much more 
 charming than that neatness and elegancy which we 
 meet with in those of our own country. 
 
 Addison would have hesitated to apply this 
 doctrine to poetry; indeed the orthodoxy of 
 that age favored the highest possible contrast 
 between the orderly works of man, and the gar- 
 
56 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 den, which it chose to treat as the outpost of 
 rebelhous nature. Pope was a gardener as 
 well as a poet, and his gardening was extrava- 
 gantly romantic. He describes his ideal gar- 
 den in the Epistle to the Earl of Burlington: 
 
 Let not each beauty everywhere be spy'd, 
 
 Where half the skill is decently to hide. 
 
 He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds. 
 
 Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds. 
 
 Consult the genius of the place in all ; 
 
 That tells the waters or to rise, or fall ; 
 
 Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale, 
 
 Or scoops in circling theatres the vale ; 
 
 Calls in the country, catches opening glades, 
 
 Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades ; 
 
 Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines ; 
 
 Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. 
 
 Pope carried out these ideas as well as he could 
 in his garden at Twickenham, where he at- 
 tempted to compress every variety of scenic 
 effect within the space of five acres, so that it 
 became a kind of melodramatic peep-show. 
 The professional landscape-gardeners worked 
 on a larger scale ; the two chief of them perhaps 
 were Bridgeman, who invented the haha for 
 tlie purpose of concealing the bounds; and Wil- 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 57 
 
 liam Kent, Pope's associate and contemporary, 
 who disarranged old gardens, and designed 
 illustrations for Spenser's Faerie Queene. 
 Kent was an architect and bad painter, much 
 favored by George I. Lord Chesterfield com- 
 pares him to Apelles, who alone was permitted 
 to paint the portrait of Alexander: 
 
 Equal your varied wonders ! save 
 
 This difference we see, 
 One would no other painter have — 
 
 No other would have thee. 
 
 From 1716 onward he was much employed 
 by the Earl of Burlington. He helped to lay 
 out Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, with a fresh 
 and surprising view at every turn ; the wander- 
 ing visitor was introduced, among other de- 
 lights, to the Hermitage, the Temple of Venus, 
 tlie Egyptian pyramid, St. Augustine's cave 
 (artfully constructed of roots and moss), the 
 Saxon Temple, the Temple of Bacchus, and 
 Dido's cave. The craze for romantic garden- 
 ing, with its illusions of distance, and its ruins 
 and groves, persisted throughout the eighteenth 
 century. Shenstone's garden at The Leasowes 
 enjoyed a higher reputation even than his 
 
58 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 poetry, and it is well known how he strained 
 his slender means in the effort to outshine his 
 neighbors. "In time," says Jolinson, "his ex- 
 penses brought clamours about him that over- 
 powered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; 
 and his groves were haunted by beings very 
 different from fauns and fairies." 
 
 The chief of Kent's successors was Launce- 
 lot Brown, commonly called "Capability 
 Brown" from his habit of murmuring to him- 
 self, as he gazed on a tract of land submitted 
 for his diagnosis — ^"It has capabilities; it has 
 capabilities." He laid out Kew and Blen- 
 heim. Gazing one day on one of his own made 
 rivers, he exclaimed, with an artist's rapture, — 
 "Thames! Thames! Thou wilt never forgive 
 me." He certainly imposed himself upon his 
 own time, and, so far, was a great man. "Mr. 
 Brown," said Richard Owen Cambridge, "I 
 very earnestly wish that I may die before you." 
 "Why so?" said Brown with some surprise. 
 "Because," said he, "I should like to see 
 Heaven before you had improved it." Among 
 the romantic writers who were bitten by the 
 mania for picturesque improvement were Hor- 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 59 
 
 ace Walpole and even Sir Walter Scott. 
 Everyone knows how Walpole bought from 
 Mrs. Chevenix, the toy-shop woman, a little 
 house called "Chopp'd Straw Hall" which he 
 converted into the baronial splendors of Straw- 
 berry Hill; and how Scott transmitted a mean 
 Tweedside farm, called Clarty Hole, into the 
 less pretentious glories of Abbotsford. 
 
 After the practice came the theory. The 
 painters and landscape-gardeners were fol- 
 lowed by a school of philosophers, who ex- 
 pounded Taste and the laws of the Picturesque. 
 'Some extracts from the work of one of these, 
 Thomas Whately, whose Observations on 
 Modern Gardening appeared in 1770, will 
 show to what excesses the whole nonsensical 
 business had been carried. "In wild and roman- 
 tic scenes," says Whately, "may be introduced 
 a ruined stone bridge, of which some arches 
 may be still standing, and the loss of those 
 which are fallen may be supplied by a few 
 planks, with a rail, thrown over the vacancy. 
 It is a picturesque object: it suits the situation; 
 and the antiquity of the passage, the care taken 
 to keep it still open, though the original build- 
 
60 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 ing is decayed, the apparent necessity which 
 thence results for a communication, give it an 
 imposing air of reahty.' The context of this 
 passages shows that the bridge leads nowhither. 
 On the management of rocks Wliately is a con- 
 noisseur. "Their most distinguished charac- 
 ters," he says, "are dignity, terror, and fancy: 
 the expressions of all are constantly wild; and 
 sometimes a rocky scene is only wild, without 
 pretensions to any particular character." But 
 ruins are what he likes best, and he recom- 
 mends that they shall be constructed on the 
 model of Tintern Abbey. They must be ob- 
 vious ruins, much dilapidated, or the visitors 
 will examine them too closely. "An appen- 
 dage evidently more modern than the principal 
 structure will sometimes corroborate the effect ; 
 the shed of a cottager amidst the remains of a 
 temple, is a contrast both to the former and the 
 present state of the building." It seems almost 
 impossible that this should have been offered 
 as serious advice ; but it was the admired usage 
 of the time. Whately's book was a recognized 
 authority, and ran through several editions. 
 He is also known as a Shakespeare critic, of no 
 particular mark. 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 61 
 
 A more influential writer than Whately was 
 William Gilpin, an industrious clergyman and 
 schoolmaster, who spent his holidays wander- 
 ing and sketching in the most approved parts 
 of England, Wales and Scotland. His books 
 on the Picturesque were long held in esteem. 
 The earliest of them was entitled Observations 
 on the River Wye and several j^arts of South 
 Wales .... relative chiefly to picturesque 
 beauty (1782). Others, which followed in 
 steady succession, rendered a like service to the 
 Lake district, the Highlands of Scotland, the 
 New Forest, and the Isle of Wight. Those 
 books taught the aesthetic appreciation of wild 
 nature to a whole generation. It is a testimony 
 to their influence that for a time they enslaved 
 the youth of Wordsworth. In The Prelude he 
 tells how, in early life, he misunderstood the 
 teaching of Nature, not from insensibility, but 
 from the presumption which applied to the im- 
 passioned life of Nature the "rules of mimic 
 art." He calls this habit "a strong infection 
 of the age," and tells how he too, for a time, 
 was wont to compare scene with scene, and to 
 pamper himself "with meagre novelties of 
 
62 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 colour and proportion." In another passage 
 he speaks of similar melodi-amatic errors, from 
 conformity to book-notions, in his early study 
 of poetry. 
 
 The dignities of plain occurrence then 
 
 Were tasteless, and truth's golden mean, a point, 
 
 Where no sufficient pleasure could be found. 
 
 But imaginative power, and the humility 
 which had been his in childhood, returned to 
 him — 
 
 I shook the habit off 
 Entirely and for ever. 
 
 Yet in one curious respect Gilpin's amateur 
 teaching did leave its mark on the history of 
 English poetry. When Wordsworth and Col- 
 eridge chose the Wye and Tintern Abbey for 
 their walking tour, they were probably deter- 
 mined in that direction by the fame of the 
 scenery; and when they and Southey settled in 
 the Lake district, it may be surmised that they 
 felt other and stronger attractions than those 
 that came from Wordsworth's early associa- 
 tions with the place. The Wye, Tintern Ab- 
 bey, the English Lakes, the Scottish High- 
 lands — these were the favored places of the 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 63 
 
 apostles of the picturesque, and have now be- 
 come memorial places in our poetic history. 
 
 All these gardeners and aesthetic critics who 
 busied themselves with wild nature were aiming 
 at an ideal which had been expressed in many- 
 painted landscapes, and had been held up as 
 the top of admiration by one of the greatest 
 English poets. The influence of Milton on the 
 new landscape interest must be held to be not 
 less than the influence of his contemporaries, 
 Salvator Rosa and Claude. His descriptions of 
 Paradise did more than any painting to alter 
 the whole practice of gardening. They are 
 often appealed to, even by the technical gar- 
 deners. In garden-lore Milton was a convinced 
 Romantic. He has two descriptions of the 
 Garden of Eden; the slighter of the two occurs 
 on the occasion of Raphael's entry, and merely 
 resumes the earlier and fuller account: 
 
 Their glittering tents they passed, and now is come 
 Into the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrhe, 
 And flowering Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balme ; 
 A Wilderness of Sweets; for Nature here 
 Wantoned as in her prime and plaid at will 
 Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet, 
 Wilde above rule or art; enormous bliss. 
 
64 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 Coleridge has some remarks, in his Table 
 Talkj on Milton's disregard of painting. There 
 are only two pictures, he says, in Milton ; Adam 
 bending over the sleeping Eve, and the en- 
 trance of Dalilah, like a ship mider full sail. 
 Certainly the above lines are no picture; but 
 they are more exciting than any clear delinea- 
 tion could be; they are full of scent, and air, 
 and the emotions of ease and bliss. The other 
 passage has more of architectural quality in it, 
 and describes what first met Satan's gaze, when 
 he entered the Garden and sat, perched like a 
 cormorant, upon the Tree of Life. 
 
 The crisped Brooks 
 With mazie error under pendant shades 
 Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed 
 Flours worthy of Paradise which not nice Art 
 In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon 
 Poured forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plaine 
 Both where the morning sun first warmly smote 
 The open field, and where the unpierc't shade 
 Imbround the noontide Bowers : Thus was this place, 
 A happy rural seat of various view: 
 Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and 
 
 Balme, 
 Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde 
 Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true, 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 65 
 
 If true, here onely, and of delicious taste : 
 Betwixt the Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks 
 Grasing the tender herb, were interpos'd, 
 Or palniie hilloc, or the flourie lap 
 Of some irriguous Valley spread her store, 
 Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose: 
 Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves 
 Of coolc recess, o'er which the mantling Vine 
 Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps 
 Luxuriant ; mean while murmuring waters fall 
 Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake, 
 That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crown'd. 
 Her chrystall mirror holds, unite their streams. 
 The Birds their quire apply ; aires, vernal aires, 
 Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune 
 The trembling leaves, while Universal Pan 
 Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance 
 Led on th' Eternal Spring. 
 
 Here is all the variety of hill and valley, 
 wood and lawn, rock and meadow, waterfall 
 and lake, rose and vine, which the landscape 
 artists also loved to depict, and which, together 
 with ruined temples and castles, unknown in 
 Paradise, became the cherished ideal of land- 
 scape gardening. By the influence of Paradise 
 Lost upon the gardeners, no less than by the 
 influence of U Allegro and II Penseroso upon 
 the poets, Milton may claim to be regarded as 
 
66 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 one of the forefathers of the Romantic Revival. 
 There is no need to distinguish carefully be- 
 tween poetry and painting in discussing their 
 contributions to Romance. A great outcry was 
 raised, in the last age, against literary criticism 
 of pictures. But in this question we are con- 
 cerned with this effect of pictures on the nor- 
 mal imagination, which is literary, which cares 
 for story, and suggested action, and the whole 
 chain of memories and desires that a picture 
 may set in motion. Do not most of those who 
 look at a romantic landscape imagine them- 
 selves wandering among the scenes that are 
 portrayed? And are not men prone to admire 
 in Nature what they have been taught by Art 
 to notice? The landscape art of the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries taught them to 
 imagine themselves in lonely scenes, among old 
 ruins or frowning rocks, by the light of sunrise 
 or sunset, cast on gleaming lakes. These were 
 the theatre of Romance; and the emotions 
 awakened by scenes like these played an enor- 
 mous part in the Revival. It was thus that 
 poets were educated to find that exaltation 
 in the terrors of mountainous regions which 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 6T 
 
 Gray expressed when he said: "Not a preci- 
 pice, not a torrent, not a chff, but is pregnant 
 with rehgion and poetry." 
 
 The weaker side of modern Romance, the 
 play-acting and pretence that has always ac- 
 companied it, may be seen in the gardening 
 mania. It was not enough to be a country gen- 
 tleman; the position must be improved by the 
 added elegances of a hermit's cell and an 
 Egyptian pyramid. It is like children's play; 
 the day is long, the affairs of our elders are 
 tedious, we are tired of a life in which there is 
 no danger and no hunger; let us pretend that 
 we are monks, or ancient Romans. The mature 
 imagination interprets the facts; this kind of 
 imagination escapes from the facts into a world 
 of make-believe, where the tyranny and cause 
 and effect is no longer felt. It is not a hard 
 word to call it childish ; the imagination of these 
 early Romantics had a child's weakness and a 
 child's delightful confidence and zest. 
 
 The same play activity expressed itself in lit- 
 erature, where an orgy of imitation ushered in 
 the real movement. The antiquarian begin- 
 nings of Romantic poetry may be well illus- 
 
68 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 trated by the life and works of Thomas War- 
 ton. He passed liis hfe as a resident Fellow 
 of Trinity College, Oxford, and devoted his 
 leisure, which was considerable, to the study of 
 English poetry and Gothic architecture. He 
 was not yet thirty when, in 1757, he was elected 
 Professor of Poetry, a post which he held lor 
 ten years. During this time he planned a com- 
 plete History of English Poetry, a task which 
 Pope and Gray in turn had contemplated and 
 abandoned. The historical interest which is so 
 conspicuous in early Romanticism owed not a 
 little, it may be remarked in passing, to the 
 initiative of Pope, who must therefore be given 
 a place in any full genealogy of the Romantic 
 family. Warton's History, so far as it was 
 completed, was published between 1774 and 
 1781, when he relaxed his efforts, and took up 
 lesser tasks. In 1785 he was made Poet Lau- 
 reate on the strength of his early poems and 
 later scholarship. He died in 1790. 
 
 Warton's poems are a curious study. Spen- 
 ser and Milton are his masters, and he is a docile 
 pupil. His poetry is all derivative, and might 
 be best described as imitation poetry. Christo- 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 69 
 
 pher North said of him that "the gods had 
 made him poetical, but not a poet," a saying 
 which contains the whole truth. He puts to- 
 gether a mosaic of phrases borrowed from his 
 teachers, and frames them in a sentimental 
 setting of his own. Here are some passages 
 from The Pleasures of Melancholy, which, 
 though he wrote it at the age of seventeen, does 
 not differ in method or inspiration from the 
 rest of his poetical work : 
 
 Beneath yon ruin'd abbey's moss-grown piles 
 
 Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, 
 
 Where thro' some western window the pale moon 
 
 Pours her long-levell'd rule of streaming light; 
 
 While sullen sacred silence reigns around. 
 
 Save the lone screech-owl's note, who builds his bow'r 
 
 Amid the mould'ring caverns dark and damp, 
 
 Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves 
 
 Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green 
 
 Invests some wasted tow'r. . . . 
 
 Then, when the sullen shades of ev'ning close, 
 
 Where thro' the room a blindly-glimm'ring gleam 
 
 The dying embers scatter, far remote 
 
 From Mirth's mad shouts, that thro' th' illumin'd 
 
 roof 
 Resound with festive echo, let me sit, 
 Blest with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . . . 
 O come then. Melancholy, queen of thought ! 
 
70 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 O come with saintly look, and steadfast step, 
 From forth thy cave embower'd with mournful yew, 
 Where ever to the curfeu's solemn sound 
 List'ning thou sitt'st, and with thy cypress bind 
 Thy votary's hair, and seal him for thy son. 
 
 Melancholy seems not to have answered these 
 advances. In later life Warton was a short, 
 squat, red-faced man, fond of ale, and a cheer- 
 ful talker, with a thick utterance, so that he 
 gobbled like a turkey-cock. Some of his verses 
 are cheerful. This is from the Ode on the Ap- 
 proach of Summer: 
 
 Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand 
 
 With thee lead a buxom band; 
 
 Bring fantastic-footed Joy, 
 
 With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy: 
 
 Leisure, that through the balmy sky 
 
 Chases a crimson butterfly. 
 
 Bring Health, that loves in early dawn 
 
 To meet the milk-maid on the lawn ; 
 
 Bring Pleasure, rural nymph, and Peace, 
 
 Meek, cottage-loving shepherdess ! 
 
 It is all like this, fluent and unnecessary. Per- 
 haps no verses in English were ever made so 
 exactly in the approved fashion of modern 
 Latin verses. Warton writes pleasantly, his 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 71 
 
 cento of reminiscences is skilful, and his own 
 epithets are sometimes happy, yet nothing 
 comes of it. His work suggests the doubt 
 whether any modern Latin verse, even the best, 
 would deceive an intelligent citizen of ancient 
 Rome. 
 
 The strange thing about the Romantic Re- 
 vival is that an epidemic of this sort of imita- 
 tion at last produced real poetry and real ro- 
 mance. The industrious simulation of the 
 emotions begot the emotions simulated. Is 
 there not a story told of a young officer who, 
 having dressed himself in a sheet to frighten 
 his fellows, was embarrassed by the company of 
 a real ghost, bent on the same errand; and 
 retired from the enterprise, leaving it wholly 
 to the professional? That, at any rate, is 
 very much what happened to the Romantic 
 impersonators. 
 
 Another parallel may perhaps be found in 
 the power of vulgarity to advance civilization. 
 Take, for instance, the question of manners. 
 Politeness is a codification of the impulses of 
 a heart that is moved by good will and consid- 
 eration for others. If the impulses are not 
 
72 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 there, the poHteness is so far unreal and in- 
 sincere — a cheap varnish. Yet it is insisted on 
 by society, and enforced by fear and fashion. 
 If the forms are taught, the soul of them may 
 be, and sometimes is, breathed in later. So 
 this imitative and timid artifice, this conform- 
 ity to opinions the ground and meaning of 
 which is not fully understood, becomes a great 
 engine of social progress. Imitation and for- 
 gery, which are a kind of literary vulgarity, 
 were the school of Romanticism in its nonage. 
 Some of the greater poets who passed this way 
 went on to express things subtler and more 
 profound than had found a voice in the poetry 
 that they imitated. 
 
 The long debate on the so-called poems of 
 Ossian is now ended. Thej^ are known to be a 
 not very skilful forgery by James Macpherson. 
 Yet their importance in literary history re- 
 mains undiminished, and the life of Macpher- 
 son has a curious kind of pathos. He was the 
 creature and victim of the Romantic move- 
 ment, and was led, by almost insensible degrees, 
 into supplying fraudulent evidence for the fa- 
 vorite Romantic theory that a truer and deeper 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 73 
 
 vein of poetry is to be found among primitive 
 peoples. Collins's Ode on the Popular Super- 
 stitions of the Highlands of Scotland and 
 Gray's Bard show the hterary world prepared 
 to put itself to school to Celtic tradition. Mac- 
 pherson supplied it with a body of poetry which 
 exactly fulfilled its expectations. The crucial 
 date in his history is his meeting in 1759 with 
 John Home, the author of the once famous 
 tragedy of Douglas. In the summer of that 
 year Home was drinking the waters at Moffat, 
 and among the visitors assembled there found 
 Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, 
 then a boy of ten, and his tutor, James Mac- 
 pherson, a young Highlander, shy and ambi- 
 tious, who had been educated at Aberdeen and 
 Edinburgh, and had dabbled in verse. Home, 
 full of the literary gossip of the hour, seized 
 upon the opportunity to question Macpherson 
 concerning the poems that were rumored to 
 have survived among the Gaelic-speaking pop- 
 ulation of Scotland. In the light of what we 
 now know it is not difficult to understand the 
 genesis of this great European fraud. Mac- 
 pherson was proud of his race, which he had 
 
74 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 celebrated in an heroic poem called The High- 
 lande7\ He had interested himself in Gaelic 
 poetry, though his knowledge of the tongue 
 was not good, and he had by him some frag- 
 ments of genuine Gaelic poems. He was flat- 
 tered by Home's appeal to him, and, feeling 
 perhaps that the few and shght genuine poems 
 which he could produce would hardly warrant 
 the magnificence of his allusions to Gaelic lit- 
 erature, he forged a tale in poetic prose, called 
 The Death of Oscar, and presented it to Home 
 as a translation from the Gaelic. The poem 
 was much admired, and Macpherson, unable 
 now to retrace his steps without declaring him- 
 self a cheat, soon produced others from the 
 same source. These were submitted to the lit- 
 erary society of Edinburgh, with the great 
 Dr. Blair at its head, and were pronounced to 
 be the wonder of the world. From this point 
 onward, during a long and melancholy life, 
 poor Macpherson was enslaved to the fraud 
 which had its beginning in the shyness and 
 vanity of his own character. He was bound 
 now to forge or to fail ; and no doubt the con- 
 sciousness that it was his own work which 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 75 
 
 called forth such rapturous applause sup- 
 ported him in his labors and justified him to 
 his own conscience. A subscription was easily 
 raised in Edinburgh to enable him to travel 
 and collect the remains of Celtic poetry. For 
 a few months he perambulated the western 
 highlands and islands, and returned to Edin- 
 burgh bringing with him Fingal, a complete 
 epic poem in six books. This was followed by 
 Temora^ in eight books, also attributed to the 
 great Gaelic bard Ossian; and the new Celtic 
 fashion was established. ^ 
 
 These poems had an immense success. 
 Everyone knows how they influenced the 
 youth of Goethe, and captured the imagina- 
 tion of Napoleon. It is less surprising that 
 they enraptured the poet Gray, and were ap- 
 proved by the professor Blair, for they were 
 exactly modelled on the practice and theory 
 of these two critics. All the fashionable doc- 
 trine of that age concerning the history of 
 poetry was borne out by these works. Poetry, 
 so it was held, is to be found in its perfection 
 only in primitive society, before it is overlaid 
 by the complexities of modem civilization. Its 
 
76 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 most perfect, and therefore its earliest, form, 
 is the epic; and Dr. Blair must have been de- 
 lighted to find that the laws of the epic, which 
 he so often explained to his class in Edin- 
 burgh University, were minutely observed by 
 the oldest of Scottish bards. He died without 
 suspecting that the inspiration of the Ossianic 
 poems had come partly from himself. 
 
 The belief that Celtic literature is essentially 
 and eternally melancholy, — a belief which per- 
 sisted down to the time of Matthew Arnold, 
 also drew its strength from the poems of Os- 
 sian. Here again theory showed the way to 
 practice. The melancholy of the Ossianic 
 poems is not the melancholy of the Celt, but a 
 melancholy compounded of many simples, and 
 extracted from works that were held in high 
 esteem in the eighteenth centuiy — Young's 
 Night Thoughts, Blair's Grave, Gray's Bard, 
 and the soliloquies of Milton's Satan. 
 
 Macpherson was soon challenged, and his 
 whole life was passed in a brawl of controversy. 
 Two famous men dismissed him contemptu- 
 ously. Dr. Johnson, who knew what honesty 
 means among scholars, treated him as an impu- 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 77 
 
 dent impostor. Wordsworth, who knew what 
 simplicity means in poetry, declared that all 
 the imagery of the poems is false and spurious. 
 But the whole question early became a national 
 quarrel, and the honor of Scotland was in- 
 volved in it. There are signs that Macpherson 
 would gladly have escaped from the storm he 
 had raised. Aided by his early literary success, 
 he became a prosperous man, held a well-paid 
 post at court, entered Parliament, and was 
 pensioned by the govermnent. Still the con- 
 troversy persisted. He had found it easy to 
 take up a haughty attitude towards those hos- 
 tile critics who had doubted his good faith and 
 had asked him to produce his Gaelic originals. 
 But now the demand for the originals came 
 from his champions and friends, who desired 
 to place the fame of Scotland's oldest and 
 greatest poet on a sure foundation. He wrig- 
 gled on the hook, and more than once timidly 
 hinted that the poems owed not a little to the 
 poetic genius of the translator. But this half- 
 hearted attempt to rob the great Ossian of a 
 part of his fame stirred the Caledonian en- 
 thusiasts to a frenzy of indignation. At last. 
 
78 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 when he was no longer able to restrain his sup- 
 porters, the wretched Macpherson found no 
 escape but one. In middle age, some twenty- 
 years after his first appearance on the poetic 
 horizon, he sat down, with a heavy heart and 
 an imperfect knowledge of the Gaehc tongue, 
 to forge the originals. In 1807, eleven years 
 after his death, these were at last published. 
 The progress of genuine Celtic scholarship 
 during the succeeding century did the rest; 
 and the old blind bard rejoined the mists and 
 vapors which were the inspiration of his Muse.* 
 The poems of Ossian are only one, though 
 perhaps the most signal, instance of the for- 
 geries which prevailed like an epidemic at the 
 time of the Romantic Revival. Some of these, 
 like Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries, were little 
 better than cold-blooded mercenary frauds. 
 Others, like Chatterton's Rowley Poems and 
 Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, are full 
 of the zest and delight of play-acting. Even 
 Coleridge's Ancient Mariner^ though it is free 
 from the reproach of forgery, is touched by the 
 
 * For some of the facts in this account of Ossian I am 
 indebted to Mr. J. S. Smart's fascinating book, James Mac- 
 pherson, an Episode in Literature (David Nutt, 1905). 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 79 
 
 same spirit. The severe morality of scholar- 
 ship had not yet been applied to mediaeval or 
 modern matter. Scholars are the trustees of 
 poets; but where this trust is undertaken by 
 men who are poets themselves, there is usually 
 a good deal of gaiety and exuberance in its 
 performance. 
 
 I have now traced some of the neglected 
 sources of revived Romance, and have shown 
 how in this movement, more notably, perhaps, 
 than in any other great movement in literature, 
 it was not the supply which created the de- 
 mand, but the demand which created the 
 supply. The Romantic change was wrought, 
 not by the energy of lonely pioneers, but by a 
 shift in public taste. Readers of poetry knew 
 what it was they wanted, even before they 
 knew whether it existed. Writers were soon 
 at hand to prove that it had existed in the past, 
 and could still be made. The weakness of 
 vague desire is felt everywhere in the origins 
 of the change. Out of the weakness came 
 strength; the tinsel Gothic castle of Walpole 
 was enlarged to house the magnanimous soul 
 of Scott ; the Sorrows of Werther gave birth to 
 FaiLst. 
 
80 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 The weakness of the Romantic movement, 
 its love of mere sensation and sentiment, is 
 well exhibited in its effect upon the sane and 
 strong mind of Keats. He was a pupil of 
 the Romantics; and poetry, as he first con- 
 ceived of it, seemed to open to him boundless 
 fields of passive enjoyment. His early work 
 shows the struggle between the delicious swoon 
 of reverie and the growing pains of thought. 
 His verse, in its beginnings, was crowded with 
 "luxuries, bright, milky, soft, and rosy." He 
 was a boy at the time of England's greatest 
 naval glory, but he thinks more of Robin 
 Hood than of Nelson. If Robin Hood could 
 revisit the forest, says Keats, 
 
 He would swear, for all his oaks 
 Fallen beneath the dockyard strokes. 
 Have rotted on the briny seas. 
 
 His use of a word like "rich," as Mr. Robert 
 Bridges has remarked, is almost inhuman in 
 its luxurious detachment from the human 
 situation. 
 
 Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 
 To cease upon the midnight with no pain. 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 81 
 
 Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, 
 Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave. 
 
 By his work in this kind Keats became the 
 parent and founder of the Aesthetic School of 
 poetry, which is more than half in love with 
 easeful death, and seeks nothing so ardently as 
 rest and escape from the world. The epilogue 
 to the Aesthetic movement was written by Wil- 
 liam Morris before ever he broke out from 
 those enchanted bowers : 
 
 So with this earthly paradise it is. 
 If ye will read aright, and pardon me 
 Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss 
 Midmost the beating of the steely sea. 
 Where tossed about all hearts of men must be, 
 
 Whose ravening monsters mighty men must slay, 
 
 Not the poor singer of an empty day. 
 
 Yet there is another side to the work of 
 Keats, more wonderful in its broken promise 
 than all the soft perfections of his tender 
 Muse. He grew tired of imitation and ease. 
 Weakness may exclude the world by forget- 
 ting it; only strength can conquer the world. 
 What if this law be also the law of beauty? 
 The thought inspires his last great attempt. 
 
82 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 the fragment of Hyperion. Men have their 
 dynasties and revolutions; but the immortals 
 also, whom men worship, must change to live. 
 
 So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 
 A power more strong in beauty. 
 
 And this power cannot be won by those who 
 shirk the challenge of ugly facts. 
 
 O folly ! for to bear all naked truths, 
 And to envisage circumstance, all calm, 
 That is the top of sovereignty. 
 
 As if to enforce his thought by repetition, 
 Keats made an allegorical framework for his 
 revised version of the poem. There he exhibits 
 himself as wandering among the delights of the 
 garden of this life, and indulging himself to 
 the point of drunkenness. Awaked from his 
 swoon, he finds himself at the steps of the 
 temple of fame. He is told he must climb or 
 die. After an agony of struggle he mounts to 
 the top, and has speech there with a veiled fig- 
 ure, who tells him that this temple is all that 
 has been spared in the war between the rival 
 houses of the Gods, When he asks why he 
 
IMITATION AND FORGERY 83 
 
 has been saved from death, the veiled figure 
 makes reply: 
 
 "None can usurp this height," return'd that shade, 
 "But those to whom the miseries of the world 
 Are misery, and will not let them rest." 
 
 "Are there not thousands in the world," said I, 
 Encourag'd by the sooth voice of the shade, 
 
 "Who love their fellows even to the death, 
 Who feel the giant agony of the world. 
 And more, like slaves to poor humanity. 
 Labour for mortal good? I sure should see 
 Other men here, but I am here alone." 
 
 "Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries," 
 Rejoined that voice; "they are no dreamers weak; 
 They seek no wonder but the human face. 
 No music but a happy-noted voice : 
 They come not here, they have no thought to come ; 
 And thou art here, for thou art less than they. 
 What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, 
 To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, 
 A fever of thyself: think of the earth; 
 What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? 
 What haven? every creature hath its home. 
 Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, 
 Whether his labours be sublime or low — 
 The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: 
 Only the dreamer venoms all his days, 
 Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve." 
 
84 IMITATION AND FORGERY 
 
 In this, wliich is almost his last deliberate 
 utterance, Keats expresses his sense of the fu- 
 tility of romance, and seems to condemn poetry 
 itself. A condemnation of the expression of 
 profound thought in beautiful forms would 
 come very ill from Keats, but this much he 
 surely had learned, that poetry, the real high 
 poetry, cannot be made out of dreams. The 
 worst of dreams is that you cannot discipline 
 them. Their tragedy is night-mare; their 
 comedy is nonsense. Only what can stand se- 
 vere discipline, and emerge the purer and 
 stronger for it, is fit to endure. For all its sins 
 of flatness and prosiness the Classical School 
 has always taught discipline. No doubt it has 
 sometimes trusted too absolutely to discipline, 
 and has given us too much of the foot-rule and 
 the tuning-fork. But one discipline, at least, 
 poetry cannot afford to neglect — the discipline 
 of facts and life. The poetry that can face this 
 ordeal and survive it is rare. Some poets are 
 tempted to avoid the experience and save the 
 dream. Others, who were poets in their 
 youth, undergo the experience and are beaten 
 by it. But the poetry which can bear all naked 
 truth and still keep its singing voice is the only 
 immortal poetry. 
 
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