COPXRIGHT DEPOSm •58p (Btovst |). Palmer THE ENGLISH POEMS OF GEORGE HERBERT. With frontispiece. Edited by George H. Palmer. INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY IN THE SON- NETS OF SHAKSPERE. Ingersbll Lecture. THE PROBLEM OF FREEDOM. THE TEACHER AND OTHER ESSAYS AND AD- DRESSES ON EDUCATION. By George H. Palmer and Alice Freeman Palmer. THE LIFE OF ALICE FREEMAN PALMER. With Portraits and Views. Ne^v Edition. THE ENGLISH WORKS OF GEORGE HERBERT. Newly arranged and annotated, and considered in rela- tion to his life, by G. H. Palmer. Second Edition. In 3 volumes. Illustrated. THE NATURE OF GOODNESS. THE FIELD OF ETHICS. THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER. Books I-XII. The Text and an English Prose Version. THE ODYSSEY. Complete. An English Translation in Prose. THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. Translated into English. With an Introduction. A SERVICE IN MEMORY OF ALICE FREEMAN PALMER. Edited by George H. Palmer. With Ad- dresses by James B. Angell, Caroline Hazard, W. J. Tucker, and Charles W. Eliot. With Portraits. FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY. A MARRIAGE CYCLE. By Alice Freeman Palmer. Edited by George H. Palmer. HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston and New York FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY TEE EARL LECTURES OF 1917 BY GEORGE HERBERT PALMER BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1918 ^^^ COPYRIGHT, I918, BY GEORGE HERBERT PALMER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published November, iqiB ^ 'SO NOV 20 1918 ©Ci.A5i)K65a <\ry I PREFACE The substance of this book was delivered as a series of lectures on the Earl Foundation be- fore the Pacific Theological Seminary in Berke- ley, California, during the spring of 1917. The subject was one which had long interested me. I had spoken on it before the Lowell Institute in Boston in 1913 and subsequently on several occasions had found for it eager auditors and critics among college students. This frequent traversing of the same ground has helped me to perceive more plainly the path to be fol- lowed and has controlled the inclination to turn to this side or that in search of better prospects. My aim is a narrow one. The book is not a history of Enghsh poetry, not even an outhne. At only half a dozen periods in the long and magnificent course of that poetry do I examine it, those periods being separated by intervals widely dissimilar and occupied by poets not always of the first rank. Some of the greatest names in our literature are not touched at all. The drama is omitted altogether; and I have vi PREFACE not inquired how far changes in prose writing attended those traced here in poetry. Even my seven chosen torch-bearers I have dealt with very imperfectly, turning to them only for the light they throw on the connected march of mind. In my judgment the English understanding of poetry has unfolded itself slowly, passing through certain well-marked crises or epochs at each of which has stood a revolter from past practice who, setting up antagonistic, yet really supplemental, conceptions of poetry has thrown open tracts of emotion which our beautiful art had not previously touched. Of course minor changes of this sort occur continually. I have wished to fix attention on the half-dozen fun- damental, logical and productive crises which have brought us the rich poetry we now possess and may yet bring us richer still. There are dangers in such an undertaking. No important change comes about without long preparation, however great the genius who finally perceives its significance and gives it recognizable form. So condensed an account as mine is apt to make history appear a thing of leaps and bounds, as if settled practice sud- denly gave way to novelty. But I have thought PREFACE vii this danger worth incurring if I could so bring out more clearly the type toward which many tendencies converged and present it embodied in him who first fully comprehended it. I am sorry, too, that my plan obliges me to pass by many important writers whom one might naturally expect to find here. Where, for example, are Sidney and Shakspere with their sonnets, where Herrick, Marvell, Dryden, Gray, Byron, Keats, Shelley — superb poets all — preeminent, many readers will think, above several I have chosen? But they were not types. While all subsequent verse undoubt- edly shows their influence, they did not estab- lish a crisis and form a turning-point. More plausibly may it be objected that there is no such epochal separation between Tennyson and Browning as between the earlier mem- bers of my group. In justification I would plead that two great poets living so near us, and with whose writings we are so familiar, offer an exceptional opportunity for studying minutely and in less emphasized form the whole conception of a type. For one huge omission, however, I have little excuse beside incompetence. Milton was too big for me. I reverence him beyond any other viii PREFACE inventor of harmonies and feel that without eyes he saw more deeply into beauty than any of our other poets have seen with them. But on that account I did not think I could ex- pound him in any such space as was at my disposal. And, after all, was not Wordsworth right in thinking him solitary as a star.f^ In a group he is out of scale. No doubt all the world was changed as soon as Milton wrote. But he left no school. Men opened their eyes and ears, wondered and were glad. But the wise ones went on their own way, and only the little ones imitated. He showed no path for others to follow. None but a Milton walks steadily there. In dealing with individual poets my method is somewhat peculiar. I attempt to criticize from within out, not, as is more usual, from without in. That is, after gaining pretty full acquaintance with a poet I am apt to discover in him some central principle from which most of his peculiarities radiate. To seize this cen- tral type or interest and through it to give a unitary view of the man seems to me the true aim of criticism. One may easily press the method too far and thus regard complexity and discord too little. Few of us are completely PREFACE ix harmonized. Yet p>oets tend toward harmony about in proportion to their greatness, and in this book none but great men appear. I shall not distort them if I show each as moving from something hke a single centre. At the close of each of these lectures, as origi- nally delivered, I read for half an hour from the poet discussed. Criticism, taken apart from that which is discussed, is arid and blinding stuff. I accordingly at first thought of printing after each lecture a selection of "illustration material." But seeing that this would double the size of my book, and possibly render it less attractive to those who found there poetry already pretty familiar, I abandoned the plan and have substituted brief lists, sufficient, how- ever, to enable the novice to bring my judg- ments to the test. Perhaps a word of apology is needed for here venturing outside my province. My profes- sional work has been in Philosophy. To the poets I have listened only as an amateur. Yet every one is wise, whatever his occupation, in cherishing some collateral interest which pro- duces nothing for the market, is amenable to no social standard, and is valued simply for sweetening his own life. Such an unpaid in- X PREFACE vigorator has poetry been to me during a long life. On nearing the close I am glad to give it publicity and commend it as a privy councillor to others. Harvard University August 1, 1918 CONTENTS I. Introductory 1 II. Geoffrey Chaucer 31 III. Edmund Spenser 63 IV. George Herbert 99 V. Alexander Pope 135 VI. William Wordsworth .... 181 VII. Alfred Tennyson 223 VIII. Robert Browning 271 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY I Introductory FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY I INTRODUCTORY What is poetry? What its function? Where run the bounds which part it from other varie- ties of human expression? Why have certain special forms of rhythmic utterance been gen- erally thought necessary for conveying emo- tional appeal? What value has that appeal? Why do many persons on reaching maturity persistently neglect poetry while others tumult- uously acclaim it? Perhaps poetry, like human reason itself, is too deeply entwined with the roots of our being to be detached, inspected, and separately defined. Certainly critics equally competent have given widely dififerent answers to the questions here proposed. I shall not attempt to settle their contentions. On the contrary, I am more anxious to stir my reader into thought, inconsistent thought, about these beautiful mysteries than to ease him with plausible solutions. Yet certain 4 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY dominant conceptions about the substance, form, and importance of poetry so shape the discussions of this book that it seems only fair to state them plainly in an introductory chap- ter and thus enable the reader as we proceed to reject or accept the evidence adduced. Our first business will be a negative clearing of the ground. Certain misconceptions must be disposed of. So soon as we have determined what poetry is not, we shall be in better condi- tion for understanding what it essentially is. Poetry is commonly identified with verse and contrasted with prose. But on reflection few will persist in the error; for a large body of tolerable verse has no poetic quality. Nothing in its substance requires the verse form. For effecting any purpose it might as well have been written in prose. Verse however conveys to the ear a peculiar pleasure; and when there is nothing else to be conveyed, the writer who drops that drops all. Verse, therefore, always giving us something agreeable, is peculiarly tempted into emptiness and needs for its justi- fication only occasionally to deviate into sense. To maintain that a succession of sweet sounds makes poetry is much like finding prose in a dozen words taken at random from the die- INTRODUCTORY 5 tionary. Even if we regard rhythm and metre as equally essential to poetry, as words are to prose, they are essential merely to its structure and not to its substance. How far that substance can be detached from its usual outward form is an unsettled question. The great experimenters of the past — the translators of the Psalms, Nicholas Breton in his "Fantastickes," Milton in "Samson Agonistes" and in passages of his prose works, Traherne in his joyous outpour- ings, Jeremy Taylor in his sermons, Ossian in heroic song, Blake in mystic vision, Carlyle and Ruskin in social denunciation or aesthetic rhapsody. Whitman in democratic chant — have gone far, but not far enough to satisfy the rebellious poets of to-day. These would abolish metre altogether, cut their lines with scissors, and give us so little of rhythm as to be audible to few beside themselves. Personally I would not assert that poetry must perish under such conditions. I have seen instances of its sur- vival where the wrench has been severe. I merely say that poetry able to withstand such dislocation will call for a twofold emotional power. The poet has cast away aids which centuries have experimented to fashion. Un- 6 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY supported by these, to hold his poetry upright will require a stalwart arm. But the mere attempts, clumsy as they usually are, testify to the sound feeling that poetry is larger than verse and should not be confused with it. A second misconception, and one into which both individuals and nations in their early years are certain to fall, is that poetry is merely an impressive means for reporting some incident, character, story, or wise thought. In reality the description of what is seen, the telling an interesting tale, the statement of a valued truth, in short any mere reproduction of fact is something quite apart from the busi- ness of poetry. Yet great poets have made this mistake, and many readers look for nothing else. Early English history was repeatedly written in rhymed "fourteeners," and no doubt history was easier to remember in this form. Drayton in his "Polyolbion" wrote a complete geographic account of England in verse. Sir John Davies versified human psy- chology in his "Nosce Teipsum"; and Phineas Fletcher, in his "Purple Island," human physi- ology. What has all this to do with poetry, we may well ask. Dryden composed his "Religio Laici" to demonstrate the iniquity INTRODUCTORY 7 of the Catholic Church. And when in later life he himself became a Catholic, he wrote "The Hind and the Panther" to prove the errors of the English Church and the certainty of Cath- olic doctrine. But how unimportant for poetry are such matters of observation, description, and argument! I might be a Catholic or Protestant and still find much to admire in both of Dryden's poems; for the poetry would lie elsewhere than in the jdoctrine. And in the same way, though I cared nothing for Dray- ton's geography or Davies' psychology, I could not fail on every few pages of their books to come upon glorious poetic passages which are in marked contrast with their prosaic surround- ings. In each case what constitutes the main theme is not poetry at all and might be ex- pressed more neatlj^ in prose. Whatever poetry is there is independent of that theme. No, we may altogether rule out from the field of poetry matters of fact, or at least may count them collateral and subordinate, a mere framework for the display of costly material. - The child's fancy that when he is entertained by a good story, jinglingly told, he is enjoying poetry, must be abandoned. It is no exaggeration to say that poetry is not concerned with facts. 8 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY We test its worth by asking if it is beautiful or ugly, not if it is true or false. There remams the gravest of all misconcep- tions. We are apt to think of poetry as serving some useful end, aiming in some way to make its readers better. We Americans are pecul- iarly liable to tliis error, so slender is our sesthetic sense, so swollen our practical. We are always asking what a thing is for. But poetry is not for anything except itself. It seeks to produce beauty and counts beauty its own excuse for being. Its quality should be judged independently of whatever moral principles or practical measures may chance to profit by it. About a third of Whittier's writ- ings are devoted to the denunciation of slavery, and they have perished with that which tliey chivalrously attacked. Mrs. Browning wrote page after page in advocacy of an alliance be- tween France and Italy, .and we do not read those pages now. Kipling has employed poetry to eulogize Tory imperialism; but since much of it is good poetry, the liberal enjoys it no less than the conservative. To take a case from America: our enjoyment of William Vaughn Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation" should not depend on our view of tliis country's duty INTRODUCTORY 9 to the Philippines. Poetry is not dogmatic, nor need our poets be preachers with a mes- sage. We do not ask if a symphony by Bee- thoven is true or of good moral tendency. Enough that it is beautiful. So much for what poetry is not. Its province is distinct from that of observation or conduct. And from how large a part of human interest is it thus excluded! Our chief business in life is to become acquainted with facts and to learn to separate the false from the true. Most of the remainder is covered by conduct, those prac- tical activities where we discriminate right from wrong. Wliat remains then for the poet after he has cast away the cognitive intellect and the directing will.^ Beyond these lies the field of emotion, all that part of individual experience which is not concerned with ascer- taining truth or achieving ends. The feelings, the varying moods of the poet, are what he writes about. Strictly speaking, poetry has but a single subject, the mind of the poet. We readers are interested in accompanying that mind and in adding its emotions to our own. We might, then, offer a preliminary definition of poetry, considered from the poet's point of view, and call it the conscious transmission of 10 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY an emotional experience to another imagina- tive mind. A striking bit of evidence that the real ground of poetry does thus lie within the poet himself, rather than in the facts which purport to be his subject, is furnished by a group of poems whose professed aim is objective de- lineation. Shakspere's "Sonnets," Spenser's "Astrophil," Milton's "Lycidas," Shelley's "Adonais," Tennyson's "In Memoriam," Arnold's "Thyrsis," Woodberry's "North Shore Watch," form a majestic series of la- ments for a friend whose memory they would snatch from oblivion. Yet while they give a pungent sense of the grief of the mourner, in all alike he who is mourned is but thinly painted. What the facts of his life were, his intellectual interests, the detailed traits of his character, or even what was his outward ap- pearance we do not learn. He in whose honor the poem was written remains a shadow, while our interest in him who has suffered the loss is deep and poignant. The transmission of a mood, however, is no simple matter. Three difficulties attend it: vagueness of the original mood, entanglement with other mental factors, and imperfect mas- INTRODUCTORY 11 tery of the means of transmission. The poet's rank is fixed by the way in which he meets these obstacles. The most serious of them is the first. Adverse or favorable circumstances excite feeling in us all, but the feeling is usually vague. Many of us can hardly distinguish the emotional coloring of one hour from another. We pass our time largely in routine, and only occasionally does an incident induce a mood so vivacious and solid as to hold our attention for more than a brief space. Now, good poetry is the expression of high emotion. Whether prompted by direct experience or by sympa- thetic imagination, the feeling must be abun- dant, fresh, piercing, clearly outlined, if it will move the imagination of a reader. In it there should be stock enough for the poet to develop, hold enough on the world of fact to render it credible, and dignity enough in its theme to win enduring approval. Most of us, however, experience no such weighty emotions. To the men of genius we turn to obtain them. Nine tenths of ordinary verse shows little emotional experience. Its writers cannot make poetry because they have nothing to make it of. Or may the seeming deficiency be partly due to a different cause.? Feeling does not present 12 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY itself alone, but in company with observation, reflection, purpose, and effort, by all which it is blurred. Yet while the ingredients of a mental state cannot be altogether parted, they can be so discriminated that attention becomes fixed on some of a certain kind to the comparative neglect of others. This sorting is the poet's work. He throws into the foreground those emotional elements which in the experience of the common man are overlaid by practical affairs. In daily life judgments of fact and of right cannot be passed by without seriously stopping the current of feeling. Perhaps these poets do not so much impart what they alone possess as reveal to us what we too already blindly have. Their report, accordingly, we recognize as veracious and familiar, and are grateful to them for revealing our hidden wealth. Without their aid we could not have detached it from its context. Or if some piercing experience has thrown into exceptional prominence a certain phase of feeling, how small is the chance that we can deliver it unabated to another person! As well expect an ordinary man to paint a landscape merely because its beauty is daily spread before his chamber window. Receiving emotion and INTRODUCTORY 13 expressing it are not the same thing. The latter requires a special aptitude, inventive- ness, practice, readiness to comprehend an- other's mind, ability to keep feeling fresh under inspection, and a gradual mastery of those artistic agencies which time has proved to have the power of appeal. Accordingly I have felt obliged to clog my definition of poetry v/ith an adjective and call it the conscious transmission of feeling to a thoughtful mind. If, for example, I have been struck with some sudden joy or stabbed with sudden pain, and an exclamation is forced from me which well expresses what I feel, I am not thereby proved a poet. Something more than an instinctive cry is needed for that. There must be a purpose of communication, a definite plan of attack on another's mind. Poetry is no casual and spontaneous affair. It involves criticism and control. Wordsworth rightly warns us that, unlike feeling felt, poetry is feeling recalled in moments of tranquillity. And how difficult is such recall. The poet is to envisage a mood already past, to hold it firm, precise, and vivid, and then devise means for conveying it entire to the mind of another. Of course a certain cooperation is assumed. 14 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY The reader must be capable of receiving. He should be willing to drop for the moment his own conditions and take on those of a different person. To do its work then poetry requires a shaping intelligence besides its emotional matter. Un- organized, the mood of feeHng we seek to con- vey has little appeahng power. Originally bound up with diverse experiences, together constituting a life, when detached for report it is fragmentary, and appearing — so to speak — with ragged edges, is unimpressive. A land- scape casually seen is far from being a work of art. It contains irrelevant details, while much that is needed for understanding is absent. An artistic object is one that is complete within itself. Unlike nature, it shows no lack or super- fluity. Its clear beginning, middle, and end give it coherent form. That is what we mean by beauty. Self-sufficient, the piece stands as if it had always been so, as if indeed the artist had imparted only what already belonged to it. Accordingly the universal demands of artis- tic form may be summarized thus : every piece of fine art must possess an inner structure adapted to its theme; must contain within its own compass whatever is necessary for its INTRODUCTORY 15 comprehension; all its contents must har- moniously reinforce the dominant note; what- ever does not, through being superfluous, acci- dental or jarring, must be eliminated; and the process of accomplishing all this must not attract attention. Good art attains an ease which seems inevitable. Yet while all the arts require form, or struc- tural unity, each has its own technique, or set of tested agencies for conveying emotion of its particular kind. Poetry is primarily an art of sounds, though unlike music, its nearest of kin, it addresses the understanding no less than the ear. In great poetry sound and sense so cooperate that a good ear as readily recognizes an excellent poem by the sequence of its sylla- bles as a good intellect does by the weight and coherence of its thought. A person possessed by a passionate and significant mood, if unable to translate it into beautiful sound, may win attention in prose but lacks something of being a poet. Furthermore, the sound, even if beautiful, must be suited to the sense. Rightly we speak of a tone of feeling; for certain tones convey certain moods, regardless of what is said. Tones are the only language of the brutes. Like 16 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY them, we too receive emotional impulse from pitch, stress, duration, swiftness, repetition, pause; only that possessing articulation, which brutes do not, we are able to get greater pre- cision in our emotions through suggestive groupings of vowels and consonants. These the poet harmoniously adjusts. Instinctively or consciously he perceives what sounds are no mere means for reporting emotions. They have worth of their own and are of the very stock and substance of the poetry. In naming just now the possible modulations of sound, I included pitch. By it most of the effects of music are obtained. In poetry it plays but a small part, and herein lies a funda- mental difference of the two arts. Though not altogether absent from verse, it enters into it only in the same way as it enters prose, as a means by which a reader's voice avoids monot- ony. But verse has not, like music, a notation for indicating pitch. Its chief reliance is on time and stress. Southern nations attaching greater consequence to time. Northern to stress. So extreme is the insistence on stress in English that the length or shortness of sylla- bles is largely determined by their degree of emphasis. Among the Greeks and Romans it INTRODUCTORY 17 was not so. Accent was subordinated, sylla- bles being rated by the time spent in pro- nouncing tliem. Since these ancient writers were the first to analyze poetry and to fix its nomenclature, their terms have descended to us, and it is usual to call a weighty syllable long, a light one short. I shall not quarrel with the usage, as many poetic reformers do to-day. Abrupt breaks with the past do not attract me. Greek prosody has a neatness lacking in most of the systems invented since, and will not expose us to error if we remember that an un- accented syllable usually requires less time in utterance than an accented. Until English speakers distinguish more sharply between the length and stress of sounds we shall not fall into error if we somewhat broaden the mean- ing of our inherited metrical terms. A few of these terms I will here explain, so that hereafter I may use them intelligibly when pointing out the metrical habits of the poets studied. The presumption with which all poetry starts is that between feeling and rhythm there is an inherent bond. What the nature of this is may be gathered from the fact that feeling does not, like argument or narra- tive, advance in a straight line. It broods, 18 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY recurs, hovers over. The emotion is returned to again and again. Repetition, accordingly, is a mighty engine in all the Fine Arts. In those where feeling is most dominant, as in music and poetry, it is perpetually present. Yet it cannot be felt till linked with variety. The sound of a clock soothes us best when we attribute a little greater loudness to its alter- nate ticks. We differentiate our heart-beats. Whenever successive sounds occur we construct a rhythmic unit, which we then take pleasure in repeating indefinitely. Music has such a primary unit, the bar, where the duration of sound is fixed, but the pitch and continuity vary. Repetitions of the bar give a larger unit, the phrase. In close analogy to the musical bar stands the primary element of poetry, the foot, com- posed of several syllables, each having a pre- scribed length or stress. The favorite foot in English is the so-called Iambus, a short sylla- ble followed by a long. The reverse of this, a long syllable followed by a short, is the Tro- chee. Two long syllables, the Spondee, though impossible in successive feet, may sometimes be introduced singly into a line to give it weight. Feet of three syllables, common in the poetry of INTRODUCTORY 19 the last century and a half, have always entered into folk-song, but our early poets of standing avoid them. They are of two sorts : the Dactyl, a long syllable followed by two short, and the Anapaest, two short followed by a long. But enough of definition. These four or five feet will be sufl5cient for our purpose. In order to fix them in mind I give a familiar example of each: The cur | few tolls | the knell | of par | ting day Tell me | not in I mournful | numbers I am mon|arch of all | I siu-vey Half a league, | half a league, | half a league [ onward. How many feet shall a line contain? As many as suit the phase of feeling described. Fitting the measure to the mood requires poetic skill. Our ancestors in their rhymed chronicles were fond of fourteen syllables, seven iambics. Tennyson builds "Locksley Hall" with eight trochees. But lines so long are too much for a single breath. In reading, most persons will divide them, making two out of each. Even shorter lines become easier for the breath and the understanding if a slight pause is introduced near the middle, called a cut or csesura. A rhyming word at the end of a fine will emphasize its finished unity while 20 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY marking its companionship with some other line or lines. Thus arises a new unit, the stanza. A group of stanzas of similar length, and all developing a single theme, will then complete the metric structure of the poem. Among the minor technicalities alliteration and assonance may be mentioned, the former employed to give greater impressiveness to certain words by rhyming their initial conso- nants; the latter, where vowels of a hke kind distribute a common tone of feehng through- out an entire passage. But these are dangerous expedients. If noticed, they defeat tlieir end by withdrawing attention from the feeling and fixing it on trivial details. When Tennyson tells us how in a certain courtyard "The golden gorge of dragons spouted forth A flood of fountain foam," we are likely to forget the fountain in our won- derment at the feat of Tennyson. Delicacy, too, is needed in stopping a line at its end or sending it on to find its pause somewhere in the following line. Different effects accompany each, and either may be excessive. In this detailed anatomy of verse — stress, foot, line, stanza, caesura, end-stopping, vowel- color, alliteration — I would not be under- INTRODUCTORY 21 stood as accounting for the charm of poetry. Much of that must always, outside these tech- nicahties, remain mysterious, a result of the untraceable genius of the individual poet. We shall enjoy him more if we know what his poetic resources are and something about his under- lying processes. But these should not be taken as fixed rules, to be universally observed. The Fine Arts lose their meaning when they cease to be free. Their laws are not made to be kept, but to be deviated from, to be circled around. If, for example, a poet has no central type of verse in mind, art ceases and his poem sprawls. While if his conformity to type is too exact, we remain unmoved, as before any other piece of mechanism. No Indian weaver begins his rug without having in mind an orderly pattern for its little figures; but never are tliose figures re- peated precisely. Blank verse follows a com- mon type in Wordsworth and Browning, but the product is as different as the two men. Counting the fingers will never show how a fine poem is built. Beauty is to be had only when an orderly form bears the modifying impress of a living personality. Having thus said the little that is possible about the substance, form, and technique of 22 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY poetry, it only remains to indicate its impor- tance. For the writer its importance is obvious. Expression eases inner tension. A painful feel- ing loses something of its pain when it ceases to be exclusively one's own, receives outward form, and becomes a thing of beauty; while a joyful experience clamors for utterance and when spoken seems doubly secure. We all find pleasure in expressing ourselves, and that high- est form of expression which leaves behind it a beautiful, lasting and shareable result brings dignity to him who employs it. But where lies the value to the community of such transmis- sion of feeling to a thoughtful reader .?* What contribution can poetry make toward invigor- ating human life.f^ The first and most considerable comes from its work in training the imagination. Poetry offers us our best opportunity for entering into experiences not our own. It thus corrects our tendency to become shut up within our sepa- rate selves. People differ widely in understand- ing the life of others. Some, of imagination all compact, know instinctively the moods of those whom they approach. Others seem in- capable of comprehending any other minds than their own. And how petty, tactless, iso- INTRODUCTORY 23 lated, and poverty-stricken are such lives! We are social beings. Each life naturally inter- locked with that of others, suffers depression when detached. Swift mutual understanding brings pleasure and eflSciency. Because poetry can train us in a habit of mind so generous, it has high social value. Yet in this matter there is a marked con- trast between the use of poetry by the young and the mature. Youth has its private moods, states of feeling which it does not understand and of which it is half ashamed. Then, to its surprise and dehght, it finds that the poets have had the same experiences. In them, the things at which the youth or maiden blushed appear glorious. Young people thus gain im- portance in their own eyes, poetry expressing them better than they can express themselves. This I call the sentimental use of poetry, and it is something not altogether to be despised. For a time it assists growth. Looking into the mirror of humanity, one sees one's own face there and knows himself a person of worth. But such sentimentality cannot long continue, It is childish and enfeebling, a mere means oi shutting ourselves more securely within our own little cabin. Before they are twenty, most 24 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY sensible men discard poetry altogether, while a few devote themselves to it with a new serious- ness, having discovered its imaginative value. Like all fine art, it then becomes a means of escape from one's own limitations. Through it we are able to comprehend subtly moods that never were ours and so to live many lives in- stead of our little one. When I travel, I do not seek the places that are like my home. I go abroad for broadening, and consequently turn to scenes with a character of their own, scenes strange and refreshing. Not that I prefer them to mine. On the contrary, I usually return to my habitual surroundings with new respect and a clearer understanding. But by the study of human differences I have gained flexibility, dis- cernment, and sympatliy. Now, poetry, when rightly taken, is a species of fireside travel. It can remove us from the habitual round more swiftly than train or steamer. The greater the poet, too, the better will he do this, bring- ing as he does a wealth of experience. Under his discipline, how much better lawyer I be- come, how much better physician, how much better merchant, how much better anything, because I have broken the bondage that binds us all — the bondage to self. Taken imagina- INTRODUCTORY 25 lively, poetry is a great liberator. Those who go through life without its aid, repelled by its sentimental use, work with stunted powers. Liberating us from ourselves then, poetry becomes also our best means of acquaintance witli the spiritual ideals of our race. At the beginning of this chapter I said that poetry records feelings rather than facts or ideals. But the saying may easily be misunderstood. After all, in order to feel one must feel about something. One does not feel in vacuo. Poetry reflects what has moved men most. Feeling, willing, and knowing are not detachable func- tions. In some degree all enter into every men- tal state. We may approach experience as the observer does, to note its facts; as the moralist does, to urge the best treatment of the facts; or as the poet does, to picture how his particu- lar mind is affected by those facts. These are merely three modes of dealing with the same matter. Each emphasizes a single aspect of life, and to doing its own work each should be true. Poetry should not turn aside from its individual experience in order to increase know- ledge or to stimulate socially useful acts. Such alien aims may dull the picture. But feelings 26 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY that are large and significant spring from large and significant things. In poetry we read what has impressed men as most significant. Here as in a gallery we see the multifold personal reactions of joy, sorrow, aspiration, disappoint- ment, revolt, triumph, religion, which contact with this puzzling world of nature and man induces. The history of poetry is a history of the ideals which men have counted valuable, a truthful history, too, because it shows these ideals not as offered to other persons, but as affecting the mind of the poet himself. A book like the present, which exhibits the gradual unfolding of a nation's mind through succes- sive conceptions of poetry, is a chapter in the history of that nation's civilization. When prosaic Audrey asks Touchstone if poetry is a true thing, we may confidently answer that after its kind it is. It brings us face to face with reality. More than any other species of writing it sets down how a given individual has been affected by nature, regard- less of whatever may have come to some one else. On faithfulness in this psychologic truth its success is staked. For the historic truth of how things happened, or even for scientific truths, seen in laws and the general principles INTRODUCTORY 27 sought by scholars, it cares Httle. Only sup- posing things did happen so and so, according to such and such laws, there must be no error in stating the feelings experienced. I have sometimes thought the two kinds of truth might be illustrated by two consecutive stanzas of "The Eve of St. Agnes." In the first Keats tells how the moon, shining through the stained window of Madeline's chamber, "threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast." It is said that moonlight will not transmit colors. I have never inquired into the fact. It does not affect the poetry. But when in the next stanza it is narrated how in the maiden's undressing "Of all her wreathed pearls her hair she frees, Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one. Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees; Half hidden like a mermaid in sea-weed Pensive awhile she dreams awake," I suspect a psychologic, that is, a poetic, error. Keats has previously described the room as intensely cold. Did he keep that feeling in mind when he allowed Madeline to linger naked, meditating over her fantastic dream? Human nature does not work in that way. 28 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY Great poet that Keats is, he seldom slips. In his "Belle Dame Sans Merci" he tells how he "met a lady in the meads." Perhaps he did, perhaps not. No matter. But of what terrible veracity is his picture of bhnd longing, mad pursuit, empty attainment, and a disappoint- ment which strips the world of beauty! Here poetry "is a true thing." Just so Shelley's "Sky-Lark" sings more truthfully than did ever feathered bird. And because of this psychological veracity poetry is necessary for us all. It repairs the wastes of time. Custom lays on most of us a heavy hand, removing the background of real- ity from our words and thoughts and leaving them as mere signs for the guidance of conduct. We get used to things, and how dull things then become! Glibly we speak of the dazzling beauty of a flower; but how much do we ever have in mind of what Herbert saw when he wrote, "O rose, whose hue angrie and brave ^ Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye"? The genuine poet never grows used to any- thing. He starts with an individual thrilling experience and restores for his readers the fresh- ness of their early days. Childhood's wonder- INTRODUCTORY 29 ment returns, and over the marvels all around us we glow anew. Rightly are poets called seers. He who rejects their illuminating aid moves stupidly through life with half-closed eyes. II Geoffrey Chaucer II GEOFFREY CHAUCER It might well seem presumptuous for a person with any pretensions to scholarship to under- take to set forth in a single brief chapter one of the most voluminous poets of our language. In Skeat's edition Chaucer's works fill nearly two thousand large octavo pages. But I make no pretension to literary scholarship and in this field am but an amateur. To be a scholar in Chaucer demands the devotion of half a life- time, so many questions relating to him are still in controversy. What ones among the many pieces bearing his name were written by him? What ones merely composed under his influence.^ From what sources does he derive his material.'* For this creative genius, like Shakspere, seldom invents what he can bor- row. Then too what are the precise facts of his life? Plentiful rumors about him have floated down from antiquity; but are these rumors trustworthy? What evidence is there for them, and do they harmonize with other known facts? It is a vast affair, becoming 34 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY acquainted with Chaucer. But shall we delay our enjoyment till all these puzzling questions are settled? If we had picked a volume of Chaucer out of an ash barrel, and never had heard his name, should we not see at once the quality of the writing and know that its author must have had a prodigious influence over his contemporaries and successors? It is this aesthetic interest in Chaucer — an interest open even to one who lacks special historic training — which I would emphasize. I wish my readers to look upon his work as the best example we have of an important type of poetry, one of the earliest types and he the first to present it adequately. All else in the great world of Chaucer I pass by. Whatever facts about him I borrow from the accredited author- ities will have sole reference to this aim. As an account of Chaucer this chapter will be meagre indeed. For illustrating a certain formative type of delightful poetry, it may be suflScient. But the word "type" is obscure, almost mysterious. It needs definition. If we are to find "formative types" in English poetry, we should know precisely what to look for. Here then, in connection with our first poet I will try to make the matter plain. In my first GEOFFREY CHAUCER B5 chapter I pointed out that poetry does not primarily seek to inform : it is not a statement of facts or of ethical precepts. It aims at the conscious transference of a mood. Accordingly; in estimating the beauty of a poem our chief question is how completely is that mood pre- sented.'' Is it vivid, rounded, fully organized.'* Has everything been stated which belongs to it, which would enable it to affect us as it affected the poet himself .f* And then, of course, the universal demand of art — is it severe; has everything been cut away which could pos- sibly be spared? The significance of a mood, however, varies according as it is a profound and permanent or a transient one. We all have our temporary moods, and not infrequently pungent ones. Something makes us taste of life more deeply than is our wont, and our dull tongues are quickened. We try to set forth our emotion for others to share. Under an urgent experience an ordinary man may become temporarily a poet. The very forms of verse bring a relief to his mood. Such persons who rise to the height of a single poem, or a few poems, we may call poetic writers, in contrast to the true poets. And of course many a one sinks below 36 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY this level. He has some vague feeling which he imperfectly comprehends and can only imper- fectly state; yet having a certain knack of verse he writes with neatness and we loosely speak of what he produces as "poetry." How can we distinguish this from the true stuff .^^ From the point of view of the writer I have called poetry the conscious transference of a mood. From that of the reader it is a fragment of reality seen through a temperament. The poetic writer has no temperament; the poet has. To get an understanding of what we mean by a temperament we had better go quite out- side the realm of poetry and examine certain experiences of common life. Suppose on a street-corner of a busy city a group of men stand watching the moving crowd in the street. Their eyes turned in the same direction, do they all see the same things? The majority of them perhaps do. If we could penetrate their inner minds we should probably find little difference in the perceptions of four fifths of the onlookers. Their observation is superficial. What is seen stirs no one of them deeply. Each casts a glance, sees a moving object, recognizes it as a human being, and that is about all. But in the group are three persons of a different GEOFFREY CHAUCER 37 type. One is an artist who, as he gazes on the swaying street, is struck with the multi- tude of moving arms and legs, with great dark spots of body, with certain illuminated masses here balancing other illuminated masses there. Among the swift motions certain show a har- monious rhythm, but there are maladjust- ments too, and he is studying how these might be pulled together to form an integral whole. That is what the artist sees. At his elbow stands a statesman, concerned over the well- being of his townsmen. He has before him what we are accustomed to call the same crowd as the artist, but yet how different! For as he turns his face upon that struggling crowd he is asking how many of these people are well-to-do, how many in poverty, what proportion do the criminally inclined bear to the good citizens, have any sunk so low in the social scale that there is no more hope for them — such are the statesman's questions. And since such ques- tions fill his mind, such are his observations. If his artist neighbor should say to him, "Did you see that splendid splash of color up there on the left.^^" would he not answer, "No, I only saw a v/retchedly ragged woman, hiding her head in her shawl." This the artist had not 38 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY seen, for he had been looking for something else. But near these two moves a man of God. Looking into the wan faces, he asks himself how many are lovers of the ways of righteousness, how many have grown careless and fallen into vice, how many have lost their self-respect and can no longer think of duty as a friend.'^ Though the statesman and he are scanning the same faces, each receives a different shade of im- pression. And just these special prepossessions of sight will be carried away when the three friends move from the sidewalk and go up into the less frequented parts of the town. Whatever they see will come to them colored by their tempera- ment, that is, their habitual mode of regard. These men have encompassed themselves with limitations of vision which, while allowing much that is of value to escape, enable them to perceive more fully the value of what they do see. Each of these temperamental persons is so inwardly fashioned that only certain sides of the world can come at him. And with this state of things each is on the whole content. His work is thus defined. He knows what he is called to do. And so far from despising such a one, we should honor him for accepting so lim- GEOFFREY CHAUCER 39 ited a section of life. Only so can he acquire an aptitude of sight and judgment, and become able to disclose the deeper things of the world to his fellows. Now, what is obvious here in common life is no less true in poetry. The great poets are those who have a temperament, a permanent attitude of mind, who have habituated them- selves to approach all things on certain single sides and are contented with their limitations. Their moods are not thin and shifting. A tem- peramental type stamps all their work. How idle then for us when we would read poetry to bring with us a standard of what all poets should be; and because on opening a volume we do not find this there, to close it again thinking it has no value for us, we don't like it! "Like" or "don't like," that is the test ordinarily applied; and nothing more surely hinders growth. We bring our prepossessions, our little fragmentary temperaments and ex- pect the great man to have no other. We go to the poets with the demand that they reflect ourselves. If they do, we give them the supreme honor of liking them ; if they do not, we decline the labor of understanding. Such is the senti- mental way of reading poetry, and it should b^ 40 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY dropped in our teens if we would not grow up weaklings. But if we desire to enlarge our imagination and increase the scope of our life, we cannot do better than to turn to the great poets pre- cisely because they are of a different type from ourselves. Let them take us in charge and in- struct us how the world looks from their point of view. It is the poet's work to emancipate us from ourselves. Other men are able to do it but partially. The poets do it veraclously. For the moment they can make their life ours, if we will put ourselves under their guidance and not insist on all doing the same thing. In some such way English poetry will be studied in this book. Regarding each of these poets as but a medium for bringing about the enlargement of the English mind, I give no detailed account of a poet's life and writings. I seek to furnish insight, not information. Such facts as can be had from a biographical dic- tionary I omit, or use only so far as they help to determine the type of the poet. I want to lay bare his psychology and to show how natu- rally connected with this are the peculiarities of his writings. What is his attitude of mind.'^ What aspects of the world is he interested in GEOFFREY CHAUCER 41 setting forth? That is all. If I can conduct my readers to the point of view from which they can comprehend what each poet has to say, I shall count it of little consequence that they do not like what he says. Has he said it well, I ask, and felt it deeply .^^ If so, let us be grate- ful. Every phase of human nature, truly dis- played, has value and enriches us all. Let us then be flexible-minded and, putting ourselves successively in charge of these men, let us en- deavor to see the world as each of them saw it. But while varieties of individual tempera- ment create a multitude of interesting types, these are not all of equal consequence. The difTerences among them are often small. But from time to time, and usually when old ways of poetizing are outworn, some genius appears whose temperament is of so divergent, fresh and pronounced a type that it becomes forma- tive over his successors. Some new phase of human experience, or at least a new mode of handling it, is disclosed by him, and those who come after are enabled to see and do what without him they could not have seen and done. It is these truly formative types which interest me. A small number of those which have been most influential I here examine. 42 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY When English poetry first sets out — I do not meddle with the Saxon and Norman forms which preceded — but when that which may fairly be called English poetry first sets out, we meet a mighty figure, Geoffrey Chaucer, 1340-1400 — easy dates to remember. His work is in an elementary type of poetry, but one which needed to be developed before others could arise at all. That type we must keep steadily in mind if we would enjoy him, for from it most of his excellence is derived. It is narrative poetry, vivid description, rooted in the observation of facts. Chaucer looks out upon the world, enjoys it, and attempts to reproduce it for our pleasure. His poetry re- flects hearty content with the world as it stands. Such mere reproduction of welcomed experience must underlie all other varieties of verse. Of it Chaucer is the acknowledged master. The closer we come to Chaucer, the more remarkable it seems that he was able to do work of this naturalistic sort. The conven- tional obstacles which he inherited were enor- mous. Under the magnitude of them a lesser genius would have succumbed. For a vast store of theology was handed over to him which GEOFFREY CHAUCER 43 had been accumulated reverently through cen- turies, though only half understood either by those who read or wrote it. An ecclesiasticism too protected by the State, sternly prescribed what men should beHeve and read, repressing individual inquiry. At this time it was ren- dered freshly suspicious by Wiclif and his fol- lowers. Verbose moralizing was also in fashion, platitudes w^ere accepted as profundities, and to their length, tedium, and emptiness, no one seems to have objected. Everybody too de- hghted in fantastic allegory, the very opposite of obser^T^ational truth. And if we are to com- plete the catalogue of Chaucer's adverse condi- tions, we must mention the fondness of his age for the inferior writers of antiquity and for those extravagant legends of chivalry where mere events and coincidences are the main thing and little attention is given to human character. Such was Chaucer's burdensome inheritance. He did not reject it. The wise man counts pre- cious the stock the past brings him, enters into it heartily, but ever adds to and modifies it. It is a good saying that a man or nation that has no past is not likely to have a future. He who rebels against what he receives is apt to be 44 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY left meagre. But what is received must not be allowed to keep its outgrown character. The poet, at least, puts his own impress on all that comes his way. How just is Bacon's statement that the beauty of excellent art consists in the homo additus natures, the stamp of the human being set on the world around! And the re- mark is no less tiiie of the world of inner experi- ence, which tradition brings, than of the physi- cal world reported by our senses. The poet accepts them both, but passes them through his special temperament. At least so Chaucer did. All the rubbish of the past which I have assembled in my previous paragraph Chaucer uses about as abundantly as do his contemporaries. Obvious moralizing does not disturb him. Sonorous divinity, fre- quent quotation, magical agencies, strained allegory, belief in absurd legends — yes, even the dream as the framework of a tale — all the literary furniture of his time he cheerfully adopts. His stories are often not his own, but have been already told by Latin, Itahan, or French writers, he recasting them according to his f ancy^ He often strikes one as too mod- est, over docile, too much inclined to look up to those who are beneath him. Yet he borrows GEOFFREY CHAUCER 45 nothing that he does not transform. Dead matter of the past he fills with living character. Vivid individual portraiture which hitherto had hardly been attempted in English litera- ture, is Chaucer's passion. All his improbable stories, stuffed with theologic, moral and physi- cal lore are prized by him as material for the setting of endless varieties of mankind. Just as it exists, he rejoices in humanity, in its squalor, splendor, misfortune, tragedy. All gives him what he wants, the opportunity to depict. No doubt unworthy people are often his subjects, coarse and degraded people. A coarse man too is sure to think coarse thoughts and use coarse words. He who depicts him accurately must not be squeamish over foul- ness. Chaucer is not. In its indication of char- acter he even takes a hearty pleasure. On the other hand Chaucer's world abounds in high- bred knights, priests, scholars, lawyers, admin- istrators, with attractive, refined and dutiful women not a few, all trained from youth to noble thought and gentle manners; and to these again Chaucer does imaginative justice. His aim everywhere is that announced by Shakspere, "to hold the mirror up to nature." If Chaucer can only get the moving world — 46 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY the human world as he sees it in rich variety around him, — if he can get this actual world transferred to his pages, and make us as inter- ested as himself in the queer actions, the ab- surdities, the glories, the degradations even, of his fellow men he will be content. His dra- matic power is extreme. He suits each tale to the character of him who tells it. But if the desire to keep close to reality is the distinctive mark of Chaucer, can we give his writings the name of poetry? By doing so shall we not come into conflict with the doc- trine of our first chapter .^^ There it appeared that the antithesis of poetry was not prose, but fact. Poetry, being the conscious trans- mission of emotion into responsive minds, may use as its medium verse or prose, if only what it transmits is something else than fact. Accord- ingly we have defined poetry as a fragment of reality seen through a temperament, and have regarded the temperament as the more im- portant part of the mixture. Now if we merely hold a mirror up to nature and content ourselves with what is reflected there, we leave out exactly that which is precious. Many therefore deny the name of poetry to narra- tive verse, and with much plausibility. Verse GEOFFREY CHAUCER 47 that furnishes information about men and things, however subtle that information may be and conveyed in however dehcate phrases, is after all only exquisite prose. The name of poetry should be reserved for that which con- veys emotion, and this descriptive verse need not do. With such views I largely agree and hold that so far as any verse fixes attention on a mere sequence of happenings, its poetry re- cedes. But I also feel that such opinions should in no way lessen our admiration of Chaucer. He interests us not primarily by the facts he presents, but by his emotional presentation. His is a marvelous temperament. That multi- tude of curiously diversified persons to whom he introduces us is seen through an exceptional reflecting medium. Nowhere else is such bon- homie to be found, such candor, such indispo- sition to judge — at least to judge harshly — such modesty, such incessant playfulness, such power of pathos and of memorable utterance. It is because this golden glov/ is over all his pages that we turn to them as artistry. Most of the information recorded there is rubbish and negligible. But the poetry is abundant and precious. 48 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY The few events of his life that are surely known show him to have been fortunately trained for the office of human interpreter. No doubt another man might pass through his experiences and bring out a different result. We cannot judge circumstances without refer- ence to the character they affect. Perhaps a character like Chaucer's would have turned the most unpromising to profit. But certainly there are few men who through a long career can be counted so continuously fortunate. Fortune favored him at the start, making him a member of no single class. He was not of noble birth and so cut off from knowledge of the common lot; not even a university man, disciplined into undue reverence for the past. He came out of the ranks of trade. Indeed his father followed a trade most suitable for the parent of so genial a gentleman. His father was a wine merchant in good circumstances, who probably supplied wines to the court. Nothing is known of his son's youth till in 1357 we find him mentioned as being measured for a suit of livery in the train of the wife of the Duke of Clarence, one of the King's sons. That is, he now crosses the border line, leaves the men of commerce, and joins the noble class. GEOFFREY CHAUCER 49 with which his Hfe is henceforth allied. Chaucer is an excellent climber. He never goes back- ward in the social scale. He loves all that is rich and splendid and is skilful in appropriat- ing a good share to himself. By the time he is a man, therefore, Chaucer is acquainted both with court and commonalty. Critics divide his life into four periods; the first, the period of his youth, running from about 1340 — the date of his birth is not cer- tain — to 13G0. Few events are reported of him in this period. There is his change in station, probably too he began early to write verse; and then in 1359, as a soldier in the Hundred Years' War, he crossed with the Eng- lish army to France, was taken prisoner there, and ransomed a year later. Such an experience of war and imprisonment might naturally pro- duce rancor tov/ard the foe. But in Chaucer's kindly soul there was no room for rancor. On the contrary, this imprisonment gave him an opportunity to know his sweet enemy. Franco, and to become better acquainted with French literature. He always remained an admirer of things French, though eight or ten years later he took part in anotlier campaign in France. A second period of Chaucer's life is that be- 50 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY tween 1360 and 1372. Near the beginning of this period he seems to have left the service of the Duke of Clarence for that of the King and to have come under the special patronage of his powerful son John of Gaunt, Duke of Lan- caster. In 1366 he married Philippa, one of the ladies in waiting on the Queen. Her last name is not known. Throughout this time he wrote under French influence and, always disposed to over-estimate the powers of others in com- parison with his own, he busied himself with translating and adapting the beautiful French poetry which he had learned to enjoy. During this time he was rapidly advancing in court favor, in power and property. In 1372 a new period of his life begins and extends to 1386. In 1372 he was sent to Italy to settle some perplexing questions of trade. A year was spent in Genoa and Florence. In Italy he found the Renaissance even more advanced than in France and of course much more than in remote England. He came under the influence of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. They opened to him a new world of beauty and gave fresh impulse to his poetic powers. For while Chaucer is a courtier, soldier, envoy, practical man of affairs, he is also persistently GEOFFREY CHAUCER 51 a writer, eager not merely to enjoy the world but also to report it for the enjoyment of others. His audience too was a definite one. He was a singer to court circles, to those who valued entertainment and the light touch more than earnest reflection. His verse needed to be attractive. The years from 1372 to 1386 have been called Chaucer's Italian period when the influence of Italy succeeded that of France. But the period involved much busi- ness besides. Duiing it Chaucer served seven times as a foreign envoy. By 1386 there is reason to believe he had set himself seriously to planning and compos- ing the "Canterbury Tales." A truly English poetry is here begun. Chaucer has found him- self, has cast off foreign influences and hence- forth ventures to set forth what he discovers in ordinary English life. And now for the first time there fell upon him a few years of hard- ship, hardship wliich he did not allow to check his poetic activity. On the contrary, he seized on the unwonted leisure and made it helpful for his great design. In 1388, Parliament obliged the young King Richard II to dismiss his uncle, John of Gaunt, Chaucer's constant friend and protector, and to put himself under 52 FOEMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY the guidance of Gaunt's brother and enemy, Gloucester. Chaucer shared in the disfavor of his patron. He was no longer acceptable at court, was dropped from his offices, obliged to mortgage his pensions, and the splendid house which had been his was taken away. He shows at this time every sign of hardship. At the beginning too of this dark period his wife died. But hardship could not long attend a man so cheerful, attractive, and useful. When in 1389 John of Gaunt was recalled, offices were once more given to Chaucer, and for his remaining years he had little to complain of except that his income was not always sufficient for his expensive modes of living. Throughout his life, with the exception of the brief period men- tioned, all that men desire seems to have been his. Besides holding other lucrative offices, he was comptroller of wool, collector of cus- toms. Clerk of the King's Works, inspector of roads, and member of Parliament. Yet he pursued intellectual beauty through all his busy days and, coming in contact with a wide range of human nature, he enjoyed it all and de- lighted to depict its varieties for our delecta- tion. In the "Canterbury Tales" Chaucer assem- GEOFFREY CHAUCER 53 bles twenty-nine characters, men and women, each sharply distinguished from the rest and each representing a social type. We have here a kind of epitome of English society. It has been well said that if all other histories of the time should perish, Chaucer's book alone re- maining, we might know pretty well how the people of those days lived. These twenty-nine having assembled at the Tabard Inn in Lon- don, set forth on horseback the following day on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury. Pilgrimages were at that time the popular mode of combining diversion, piety, good company, and safe travel. To relieve the tedium of the way the host of the Tabard Inn, their leader, proposed that each should tell a couple of tales on the way to Canterbury and a couple more on the way home. Of course the scheme, if seriously intended, was too ambi- tious and remained unfinished. Only twenty- four tales are recorded. But how vivid these are! How marked with the high spirits, the keen observation, the humor and narrative skill of him who was the first in our poetry to study his fellow men! We cannot suppose all the tales to have been written during the last years of Chaucer's life. He is more likely to 54 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY have then brought together much of the work of previous years, to have reshaped it with ripened judgment for his immediate purpose, to have added certain new tales, and then to have set forth the whole, happily welded to- gether with interludes of talk, as a kind of Comedie Humaine of the English people. Here then is the first great type of English poetry, that observational type which under- lies all others. The aim is pure representation, the joyous exhibit of the world as we find it. It is inapposite to complain that it offers us no high ideals. Certainly not. Why should Chaucer concern himself with such perplexing things.'^ Would he have been able to depict his characters with his present hearty accuracy if he had also felt obliged to weigh the worth of their springs of action .^^ Instead, he makes his cheerful sun to shine on the just and on the un- just. In his eyes degraded and exalted are of equal interest. That is, he works as Shakspere works, dealing as fairly with his villains as with the purest of his heroines. All are here. There is nothing one-sided in his picture. Only it is mere depicting, re-presentation. Feeling strongly the glow of the world and marvelously endowed with the power to transfer that glow GEOFFREY CHAUCER 55 to his pages, he sits in judgment on no man. Yet where, outside Shakspere, can such a multi- fold world be seen? How we may enlarge our experience if, putting ourselves under Chau- cer's guidance, we let him introduce us to the delightfully mixed society he knew! For while his subjects are often drawn from antiquity, from legends of Greece and Rome as well as from the credulous stories of the Middle Ages, the men and women in them come straight from the streets of London. Even when their names are those of great ones of old, their char- acters are such as Chaucer knew. To what extremes Chaucer was ready to carry abstention from praise and blame in order to remain true to his special task of dis- passionate dramatic narration may best be seen if we recall the four momentous events of his time: the great war with France, the reli- gious awakening under Wiclif and his follow- ers, the Black Death which destroyed half the population of England, and the rising of the wretched farm-laborers under Wat Tyler. One would think that such occurrences would have power to turn any one from pleasant story- telling and oblige some expression of personal emotion. Chaucer was closely involved in 5Q FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY them all. He was a soldier in the first. His patron, John of Gaunt, favored the second. The third was carrying off his friends and acquaint- ances by the hundred. And the fourth shook London to its foundations. Yet from no writ- ing of Chaucer's could one guess the signifi- cance of any of these tremendous events. While minutely faithful in reporting the characters of his age, he keeps prudently clear of men- tioning its incidents. Wise courtier he! To carry over to his readers such novel moods of mind as these, so making them feel the Hving world as he felt it, Chaucer needed technical instruments of wider compass and flexibility than he at first possessed. A few standard verse-forms had answered well enough most previous requirements, and several of them Chaucer retained and managed with heightened skill. The early alliterative verse, still continued in "Piers Plowman," and also the "fourteener" — seven iambic feet — a favorite measure of rhyming chroniclers and popular balladists, he discarded. He kept, however, another common metre of the time, the octosyllabic, of four iambics, perceiving how well it suited subjects of such easy grace as those of this "Boke of the Duchesse." His GEOFFREY CHAUCER 57 contemporary, Gower, had employed it for solid narrative and grave reflection, for which it was little fit. Milton followed Chaucer's lead in his "Allegro" and "Penseroso," though with exquisite variations of the foot; and But- ler found in it the appropriate medium for the irresponsible mockery of "Hudibras." Another form inherited by Chaucer and brought by him to perfection is the Rhyme Royal, seven pentameter lines rhyming ababbcCy and differing from our ordinary six-lined stanza only by the insertion of a line between the quatrain and the final couplet. This line, delaying and poising the stanza, and giving it fuller body, imparts to it a delicate lingering beauty which the six-lined form lacks. To it is due much of the pathetic majesty of "Troilus and Criseyde." In the age immediately after Chaucer Rhyme Royal was much in fashion. Then for a time it fell out of favor. Words- worth used it in "The Leech-Gatherer." And it is pleasant to see Morris and Masefield show- ing by their right comprehension of its apti- tudes that they are true metrical children of Chaucer. But if only a few standard measures lay ready to Chaucer's hand, he set his own strong 58 FORMATI\«: TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY mark on those few and added to them one which has proved of extreme value in Enghsh verse. He is the inventor of the heroic couplet, the measure in which ten syllables, five iambic feet, make up a line which rhymes with a sim- ilar one following. In the connecting rhyme the couplet finds its unity, becoming thus the shortest of English stanzas. Already we have seen octosyllabic couplets, but these were in- adequate for Chaucer's purpose. He needed a more wealthy and weighty line. He added therefore an iambic foot to each octosyllabic line, still keeping the rhyme. In this way he obtained something peculiarly suitable for story-telling. Within a fairly capacious couplet a piece of reality is, as it were, broken off. After this has been contemplated as a united whole, the reader passes to a further section of the story in a second couplet, and so on. Or if reality appears thus too disjointed, it is easy to check the pause at the end of any couplet and send the thought directly on into the succeed- ing line. So by arranging run-over or end- stopped lines different metrical effects can be fitted to different moods of mind. This form of verse has ever since been found immensely useful in more ways than that in GEOFFREY CHAUCER 59 which Chaucer employed it. It serves admir- ably for epigrammatic and moral sayings. Words of wisdom are doubly impressive when massed in this brief but sufficient compass. Indeed the measure fits so well many ends that it has become one of our commonest. But that very flexibility exposes it to dangers. It may easily lack dignity and continuous interest. Managed as it is by Chaucer, it is an instru- ment of great power and animation. I have called Chaucer the inventor of this verse, the heroic couplet, as it has been named. More exactly he is its introducer. Five foot iambic lines existed before his time, and occasional instances of combining them into a couplet could no doubt be found in French poetry. But Chaucer was the first to perceive the impor- tance of such a couplet, to develop its possi- bilities, and through his weighty example to bring it into familiar use. SUGGESTIONS FOR READING For Chaucer's sharp drawing of individual character, read the Prologue of the "Canterbury Tales." Or, if only a few sections can be read, "The Knighte," lines 43- 78, "The Prioresse," lines 118-162, "The Cook," lines 285-308, "The Persoun," lines 477-528, "The Miller," lines 545-564, will show the range and accuracy of his portraiture. Read too, for continuous humor, "The Nonne Preestes Tale," with its Prologue as an example of the conversa- tions on the road. For splendid description, "The Temple of Mars in The Knightes Tale," Imes 1970-2050. For psychologic and dramatic insight, the meeting of the lovers in "Troilus and Criseyde," bk. ii, st. 88-97. For spirited action, the sea-fight of Cleopatra, in the "Legend of Good Women," lines 624-665. For lightness of touch in depicting a charming lady, "The Boke of the Duchesse," lines 805-906. Ill Edmund Spenser Ill EDMUND SPENSER In the popular mind Chaucer and Spenser are grouped together, as if separated by only a brief interval. In reality two hundred years intervene. What this means we can make clearer by saying that there is the same distance between the "Canterbury Tales" and "The Faerie Queene" as there is between the latter and the "Lyrical Ballads" of Wordsworth; that is, the interval would stretch across two thirds of all poetry since Spenser's time. How does it happen, then, that we so confuse the eras of the two? There are two grave reasons, apart from the fact that Spenser looks up to Chaucer as his master and speaks of him as the one whom poetically he follows. In the first place, distance is regularly "foreshortened in the tracts of time." In looking far back we do not measure intervals with anything like the vividness we feel for those that have recently passed. But more misleading still is the bar- renness of the intervening period. Names 66 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY enough of poets appear in these centuries, respectable men who have each done some- thing to keep the tradition of poetry unbroken, but they are men of mediocre power. Such was the Httle group immediately around Chaucer — Gower, Lydgate, Occleve. The writers who followed — Skelton, Hawes, Barclay — were imable to hold the path which Chaucer had marked out. They could not write verse of his flexible firmness. Their lines either, retaining his ten syllables, show a mechanical rigidity or more commonly through looseness of structure the line is almost lost. In the middle of the sixteenth century Wyatt, Surrey, Sackville, Gascoigne form a group of scholars interested in developing the resources of the language and in giving better structure to its verse. Their admirable work reaches its consummation in Spenser, with whom modern poetry begins. Reasons for the long delay are not far to seek. During these two centuries no man of any- thing like Chaucer's genius was born. Politi- cal conditions, too, were unfavorable; in the early time the Wars of the Roses, in the later the change from the Catholic to the Protes- tant faith. But probably a greater hindrance was the unsettled state of the language itself. EDMUND SPENSER 67 As the perplexing final e used by Chaucer gradually disappeared from popular speech, it became increasingly diflScult to read him metrically. His great example was lost, and it became necessary to formulate again the principles of English prosody. This was accom- plished by Spenser and the group immediately preceding him. We have seen how Chaucer had perfected a type of poetry expressive of satisfaction with the world as it stands — joie de vivre, delight in everything that belongs to man. The form which this observational verse assumes is natu- rally the narrative, a form by no means con- fined to Chaucer. He was merely the first to unfold its dramatic possibilities. But narra- tive poets are common throughout the follow- ing ages, though few of these story-tellers pos- sess Chaucer's vital interest in humanity. Spenser himself once tried this type in "Mother Hubberd's Tale," and wisely abandoned it. In the seventeenth century it was extensively used. Chamberlayne's " Pharronida," Daven- ant's "Gondibert," Chalkliill's "Thealma and Clearchus" are examples. In the eighteenth century it declined and was largely superseded by aphoristic verse and prose fiction. When 68 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY once the novel is established there would seem to be no more need of narrative verse. But on the contrary, descriptive poetry takes on new life. With the nineteenth century, Scott writes rhymed and unrhymed novels. Crabbe follows hard after Chaucer in depicting the life of his time, and a long train of narrative poets fol- low, each having his own special color. In Byron and Shelley the tale becomes doctrin- aire. Hunt, Keats, and William Morris revive its earlier narrative interest. The last especially has often been mistaken for a child of Chaucer. He has stirring stories much after the fashion of the "Canterbury Tales," and frequently too he uses Chaucer's couplet and Rhyme Royal. Yet what a gulf separates Morris's work from Chaucer's! The two are antithetic. For Chaucer is not merely a story-teller. He tells stories of his own time, fills them with the things and people he knew, and even when taking his plots from antiquity so modernizes them as to give them the traits the men and women of his England actually had. Morris is altogether romantic. His characters are dream- creatures. They generally profess to have come from afar and they use a language which no 'biuman being ever spoke. They have more EDMUND SPENSER 69 kinship with Spenser than with Chaucer. But while narrative poetry may thus be used for ro- mantic purposes rather than reahstic, the type as first estabhshed aimed at a representation of the actual world, though even then it was the temperament of the writer which gave to the narrative its poetic charm. In general it may be said that the maturity of our enjoyment of poetry can be fairly meas- ured by the degree of importance we attach to its emotional as contrasted with its realistic elements. Narrative poetry is elementary. With it poetic interest begins. Children and primitive people want a story and little else, except strongly marked rhythm. As artistic taste becomes refined, incident retreats and is regarded merely as a basis for emotional devel- opment. It is the same with our enjoyment of pictures. We at first prefer those that tell a story. Of each we ask what it is all about.? But by degrees we come to see that the anecdotic power of the painter has little to do with his art. As an artist, his mind is on other things — on color, on light and shade, on the harmony of lines, the balance of masses. He looks upon his figures as important only so far as they mirror a mood of mind, and the instruments 70 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY for conveying that mood are the technical matters I have mentioned. Curiously enough we have recently seen one of the fine arts move in the opposite direction. Up to our time music had aimed at pure beauty; "absolute music" we called it, the emotional concord and sequence of sounds. But it oc- curred to certain ingenious persons that they might by manipulating sounds suggest a story and represent facts. So program-music has been bewildering us all. Strange, that just when m painting we are coming to regard the story as a mere auxiliary of the picture, and notwithstanding the fact that the poets have long laiown something similar to be true in their art, the musicians are now endeavoring to tell us stories and are disparaging the aesthetic cadences which have pleased the world so long! If what I have been saying is sound and description, accordance with outward fact, is but a subordinate part of poetry, its mere starting-point, then we might expect a type of poetry to arise which should be the very opposite of Chaucer's. A poet might well desire to withdraw as far as possible from sub- jection to fact and find in verse a veritable EDMUND SPENSER 71 refuge from reality. For that real world, which Chaucer enjoyed so much, oppresses many. Its natural laws, governing inexorably physical change, often seem hostile to man. They ignore our ideals and conflict with our desires. Yet ideals and desires are all that lend life worth. It is no wonder, then, that in every hterature certain poets turn disdainfully away from reality and live in a region of ideal emotion. They allow themselves only so much contact with actual experience as will bring the creative impulse into play. The master of all these poetic idealists is Edmund Spenser. Spenser and Chaucer, so often coupled in our thought, have only the relation to one another of a complete and supplemental antithesis. Spenser, it is true, regarded Chaucer as his master, and no doubt gained from Chaucer much acquaintance with the metrical tools of his trade. But he understood the substance of Chaucer as little as Virgil understood Homer. His office it was to develop a type of poetry not hitherto known. Let us try to grasp the central thought of this new type and see how naturally the special qualities of Spenser's poetry result from it. We have already noticed his alienation from actual existence, and his 72 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY absorption in a world created by himself. This constant tendency is manifested in a variety of ways. I will examine a few of them. Spenser is busied with the abstract and gen- eral, nature with individuals. Nature knows John and Susan, not universal man; blades of grass, not grass. Everywhere we meet only particular existences. General objects, such as classes, laws, abstract ideas, are products of our minds, put upon multitudinous nature for our convenience of comprehension or memory. Similarity, and those connecting relationships from which generalization springs, belong to the beholding mind rather than to existing things. Chaucer understands this and in his naturalistic poetry gives us no picture of man as man nor, of what is more attractive, of woman as woman. Women abound, and all diverse — Criseyde, Emily, Blanche, Griselda, the wife of Bath — they are as vital creatures as those whom Shakspere knew. Spenser, on the other hand, turning ever away from reality, prefers the general to the specific. In none of his Books and Cantos shall we find a rounded, solid human being. All his figures are abstrac- tions, qualities, detached from particular per- sons and generalized. What shadowy creatures EDMUND SPENSER 73 are Britomart, Belphoebe, Florimell, Duessa, Phsedria! His frank personifications — Mam- mon, Mutabilitie — have more blood in them. And in all this Spenser is true to type. Con- crete individuals belong to that physical uni- verse from which he, as a good Platonist, turns away. His home is in a world of ideas. Spenser is moral, too, and lays great stress on distinctions of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. Nature knows no such values. What- ever of hers happens to fit our desires we rightly enough call good or valuable. Such classifica- tions belong, however, not to nature but to our judging minds. Good and bad, high and low, noble and ignoble are words that express the relations which things bear to us. They do not mark qualities in the things themselves or in relations between things. Parted from man nothing is good, nothing bad. Each object merely exists, that is all. To get moral or £Esthetic worth it must be studied with refer- ence to some human need. Chaucer, as a true naturalist, does not sit in judgment. He watches whatever conduct occurs and reports it vivaciously, whether men call it good or bad. Nobody is condemned. The coarse must be coarse, the refijied refined. That is the way 74 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY men are made, and so Chaucer lets them ap- pear. But such natural equality is shocking to Spenser. He is ever applying moral standards, discriminating those desires which ennoble from those which degrade. In his ideal world the struggle between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, is incessant. This contrast between the two poets is espe- cially striking in their estimate of womankind. Chaucer knew women well. He married early, early became a page at court, and was never shut off from women by keeping terms at a university. Through his long life as courtier, ambassador, civic officer, he met women of every rank and character. He made them interesting objects of study, precisely as he did men. He saw their beauty, gentle manners, and pretty caprices; their love of pleasure, praise, dress, change, intrigue; their piety, for- giving spirit, and hardy fidelity to those they love. Cool and dispassionate, he watched these dispositions and many more mingle in all degrees, shadings, and contrarieties, till each woman emerged on his pages as distinct a per- sonality as any man, and quite as amusing. On the other hand Spenser's acquaintance with women seems to have been slight and EDMUND SPENSER 75 artificial. After seven years at the university he spent a short time in the country, where he probably experienced a disappointment in love. During most of his remaining years he was either accompanying the army in Ireland or living in his castle there alone. To him, there- fore, woman is always something far away and ethereal, an exalted object of aspiration, the guiding spirit of us poor men. Few differential qualities are reported to distinguish one woman from another, but all alike conform to the angelic pattern — angehc or devilish; for when an angel falls, it becomes a devil. A perverted woman is consequently a fiercer power for evil than ever a man can be. She is as horrible as true woman is worshipful, and all are com- pletely the one or the other. How rightly fic- titious is all this! How suitable for him who flies reality, thinks only in abstractions, and feels hfe itself to be but a struggle of right and wrong The contrast between realist and idealist appears again in the poetic form employed. Spenser's is the allegory, Chaucer's the narra- tive, and each has chosen wisely. Chaucer, concerned as he was with noting things as they appear, perceived that everything is hnked 76 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY with everything, what now exists containing within itself the causes of what will be here- after. Nothing in the real world is stationary. All is in an orderly flux. To trace the fixed sequences and set them in orderly narration is the business of the good observer. But Spenser is something more than an observer. He is not content to stand smiling while the world runs its close-linked course, neglectful of ideals. That sorry scheme of things he will shatter and by allegory *' remould it nearer to the heart's desire." With him ideals control circumstances and laws of nature have little respect shown them. On his pages things happen which are grossly improbable, yet do not disturb us. The current of events is guided by personal agen- cies. The semblance of real life gives place to a glorious dream of what life should be, and rigid narrative yields to easeful allegory. Let us not condemn. A similar instinct is in us all. Worried by business, by the unkind word of a friend, by the illness of one we love, we turn if we are wise to the piano and for half an hour escape the jarrings of reality. Here we enter a realm of beauty where everything is harmoni- ous. Such is Spenser's conception of poetry. It is intentionally unreal, a refuge, a restorative. EDMUND SPENSER 77 This difference of mental attitude affects even the speech of the two poets. Chaucer employs the sturdy words of ordinary Ufe. It is true he had a wide range to choose from. Latin, Saxon, Norman-French were all current in his time, and his judicious choice among them largely helped to establish a distinctive English tongue. Hardly any other writer has had such wide linguistic influence. But that is because he sought words of clearness, weight, and dur- able significance. Whatever words were good for prose served Chaucer for poetry. But since for Spenser a great gulf is fixed between poetry and reality, the diction of the one is unfit for the other. He adopts a mode of expression which delights by its very unfamiliarity. He resuscitates old words, coins new ones, in short produces such a conglomerate of language as never proceeded from human lips, but which is exactly suited to beautiful allegories. He has an extraordinary sensitiveness to the carrying power of words and picks them with a view not merely to their central meaning, but to that penumbra of feeling which surrounds them. His delicious diction transports us to a fairy region whose inhabitants, we may imagine, eat cake instead of bread. The language of the streets is not for such unearthly beings. 78 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY In calling attention to these contrasts with the realistic Chaucer I hope I have not dwelt unduly on the quahties which the dreamy Spenser does not possess. His avoidance of all that is specific, his refusal to take part in a non-moral world, his allegorizing and slender regard for fact, his substitution of a poetic dic- tion for that of ordinary life are not defects, but essential elements of his power and charm. For he is aiming elsewhere than the observing or reflective mind. We should approach him primarily as a painter or a musician. The effect of his poetry is not unlike that of the splendid pageants much cultivated in his time. The eye is feasted with a succession of graceful forms and brilliant scenes, shadowing forth some moral truth. He inherits from the Moralities which the Church had patronized in the age preceding his, where the several vices and vir- tues were exhibited with just enough fantastic narrative to stick them together. In Spenser's own time Court pageants abounded. He had fed his eye on gorgeous drapery, stately bear- ing, equable motions. He was familiar with the blazonry of war. All this he transfers to his pages, informs it with a moral; and makes it yield us just such a thrill as a beholder EDMUND SPENSER 79 would feel. We may call Spenser the supreme showman, for he writes as the painter paints; only that he is occupied not so much with minute observation of single facts as with the exuberant glory reflected from the entire scene. Space and generality are essential elements of Spenser's power. He has fewer quotable lines than most poets, but more magnificent stanzas. Or shall we rather call him the supreme musi- cian? Certainly no other among our poets, unless his pupil Milton, has given to words such distributed harmony, so flexible are his lines, so smooth-slipping, so welcome as mere sound. Only in this field, too, as in that of scenery, his effects are broad and massive, even when most subtle. He uses much alliteration and abun- dant tone-color, but both are employed to link his passage and propel the reader on. They do not invite us to pause and admire the curi- ous art, as do inferior and tinkling poets. All the traditional metres of his predecessors are at his command, but he has distinct preferences among them. The octosyllabic couplet, a favor- ite before his time, he uses only in the Envoy to "The Shepherd's Calendar." There is not room in it for splendor. The decasyllabic coup- let, too, which Chaucer if he did not invent 80 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY at least domesticated, is used by Spenser but once or twice. Couplet measures have too short a flight. But he uses with extreme delicacy the more complex metres : — the six, seven, and eight lined stanzas of iambic decasyllabics. The special cadences appropriate to each he brings out with a sweetness never heard before. Especially delightful to my ear is his handling of the seven-lined stanza, Chaucer's Rhyme Royal. But these are all too weak for his ultimate and heaven-scaling purpose. For transporting us from our "too, too solid earth" to fairyland he builds the most magnificent structure Eng- lish poetry possesses. We name it from him the Spenserian stanza and almost demand its use whenever in our time voluminous emotion sways a poet's mind. The stanza is long, but its nine lines are lashed together by an ingenious rhyming system, ababbcbcc. So large a block is in danger of falling apart; to prevent which, the same sound is repeated over and over, two of the repetitions falling at critical points, the middle and end of the stanza. The summing-up to a culminating close is aided by this repeti- tion, but gains its supreme impressiveness through the simple device of two extra sylla- EDMUND SPENSER 81 bles in the last line. Instead of being con- structed with five iambics, like the rest, the concluding line has six, a form of line first used in a French poem celebrating the deeds of Alexander and hence known subsequently as an Alexandrine. What astonishing effects are worked by this long supplemental line, form- ing, as it does, a noticeable pause, summarizing its stanza, and at the same time supplying a link to bind stanza to stanza! Surveying the stanza as a whole, one must see that no other could so surely convey the splendors on which Spenser's heart is set. The needful magic is in the web of it. The Spenserian stanza, however, came slowly into general use. Whether on account of its novelty or because poets hesitated to rival Spenser's magnificence, only a few varieties of it appeared during the seventeenth century. The eighteenth had too little sensuous feeling to find it congenial; and while Thomson, Shen- stone, Beattie, and a few others made trial of it, their results are effortful and pretty remote from Spenser's. With the Romantic Move- ment at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- tury this stanza, like much else in the early poetry, was revived and once more " bards of 82 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY passion and of mirth " developed its riches. In it Byron, Shelley, Keats, Arnold have written their masterpieces. To-day there is no lack of honor for Spenser's great achievement. But we shall not lend an ear of just appreci- ation either to it or to Spenser's other poetry if we fail to observe that it is not to our intelli- gence that he primarily makes appeal. He does not rouse us to thought; he would turn us from it rather. It is no paradox to say that he dis- tinctly aims at monotony. At first it would seem a fatal aim for a poet. Many uncon- sciously attain it. Spenser persistently seeks it and uses it as one of his chief poetic resources. It is easy to see why. Like all musicians he desires not to instruct, but to throw us into an emotional mood. To accomplish this he must lull us, weave over us a hypnotic spell. When we hypnotize a person we take from him all diversity of interest, confining his attention to certain selected aspects of things. Then we can introduce whatever ideas we will. In some such way Spenser makes use of monotony. Listening to his magic music, we withdraw our thoughts largely from the specific statements made, receiving chiefly a soothing lull. As this overcomes us, the mood is induced which Spen- EDMUND SPENSER 83 ser predestined. How subtle he is in produc- ing this mood all know who have examined his stanza critically. With what delicacy the alliterative throb is introduced, so that while its effect is felt the means are hidden. The harmonizing vowel-color which he distributes throughout a stanza is exactly congruous with the mood he would induce. The same musical purpose directs his manipulations of the line. Somewhere near their middle all lines require a brief pause, known as the "caesura. " Placing the cjesura here or there will vary the music and modify the mood. So will halting the line at its close or giving it continuity with the next. Spenser uses both, but is more inclined to the latter, caring much for swing and flow in his stanza. Often he will sweep a stanza through its entire length with no full pause from first word to last. All these artifices, like those of the musician, are employed by Spenser with sure-handed skill to carry us away from inhar- monious reality to the shining regions of fairy- land. Spenser's life, 1552-1599, covers one of the supreme periods of English history, including, as it does, the Spanish wars with the defeat of the Armada, the struggle with Mary, Queen of 84 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY Scots, the exploration of a new world, and the establishment of a new faith. In certain re- spects there is a strange analogy between his life and Chaucer's. Each lived in the reign of a heroic sovereign who was felt to embody the aspirations of an awakening people. Glorious wars too were in progress; in Chaucer's time the Hundred Years' War with France, in the time of Spenser the Spanish and Irish wars. But there were no such desolating domestic conflicts as the Wars of the Roses, carried on in the barren interval between Chaucer and Spenser. Fortunate epochs those, for both poets ! In Spenser's life, however, we may find some grounds for his exaltation of a dream-world above the actual. The details of that life, it is true, are almost as few and doubtful as those in the case of Chaucer. But the dates of birth and death are fitted with some degree of cer- tainty, as well as those of the three periods into which Spenser's life may naturally be divided : (1) the years of education, 1552-1576, up to the time when Spenser left the University; (2) the Wanderjahre, or unsettled time, 1576- 1588; and the Meisterjahre, or time of consum- mate power, 1588-1599. Of the other known EDMUND SPENSER 85 events in the life of Spenser I touch on only those which illustrate the type of his poetry. (1) Like Chaucer he comes of commercial stock, his father being a London cloth mer- chant. Characteristically, and unlike Chaucer, he romances on his birth and imagines himself connected with the noble house of Spenser, a claim which has not been substantiated. But he early turned away from trade, was prepared for the University at the Merchant Tailors School in London, and entered Pembroke Col- lege, Cambridge, in 1569 as a sizar, or poor student — as we say, on a scholarship. Here he met three strong influences, all tending to draw him away from the world about him. The first was classicism. We all know how in the early Renaissance the discovery of classical art and literature brought to man a more intimate knowledge of himself and a closer acquaint- ance with nature. But as the Renaissance advanced, and especially in the later Renais- sance of Spenser's time, classical interests be- came an excuse for departure from the sim- plicity of nature and for magnifying the worth of ornament, a tendency always strong in Spenser. Classical studies of this artificial sort were much in vogue in the Cambridge of Spen- 86 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY ser's time and deeply affected him. A leader in the movement was Spenser's special friend, Gabriel Harvey. This thorough-going pedant, who had lost all sense of present reality through devotion to antiquity, was attempting to in- duce Englishmen to abandon their native mode of accentual verse for the quantitative classical measures. While Spenser did not permanently adopt this absurdity, the influence of Harvey and his circle soon appeared: disastrously in the artificial pastorahsm of " The Shepherd's Calendar," dedicated to Harvey, and bene- ficially in the experiments there undertaken for enlarging the range of English metres. A collateral gain from the acquaintance with Harvey is a series of letters between the friends which form a valuable source for our knowledge of Spenser's life at the time they were written. A still more powerful influence then at work in the University, and especially at Pembroke College, was the rising Puritanism which was teaching men to live for things eternal and fos- tering detachment from things temporal. Into this early and lofty Puritanism Spenser entered with ardor. We have seen how profoundly moral he always is. While his temperament is unmistakably rich and sensuous, while the EDMUND SPENSER 87 pageantry of the Roman Church and its mytho- logical history appealed strongly to him, still stronger was the appeal of morality, the call to organize our nature, putting certain sides of it down and others up. This conflict of flesh and spirit within us was the dominant note of Puri- tanism. It took an abiding hold on beauty- loving Spenser. So that Milton's adjectives do not go astray — as seldom do adjectives of Milton's — when he speaks of "sage and seri- ous Spenser." One more unworldly influence, perhaps underlying the other two, deserves mention. At the University Spenser became acquainted with Plato, the father of all idealists. The "Symposium," the "Phaedrus," the "Repub- lic," the "Timseus," were books which fed his imagination. He accepted whatever he found there. Plato removed him from our earth and taught him to believe that things of earth are illusory; a faint copy of "ideas" or "patterns'* of things eternal in the heavens. This Platon- ism pervades Spenser throughout and comes to a peculiarly beautiful expression in his "Hymns in Honor of Love and Beauty." (2) Leaving the University in 1576 without obtaining a fellowship or finding any secular 88 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY position, he went off to the country parts of Lancashire, from which section of England his family originally came. There he spent a year in farm life. One might expect such an experi- ence to bring Spenser back into close contact with earth. Instead, it intensified his idealism. His beloved ancients had a way of looking only on the pretty side of farm life, the shepherd and his flock becoming creatures of romance. Theocritus and Virgil set the fashion of pas- toral eclogues. Their Italian imitators just before Spenser's time followed on. The pas- toral idealizes the squalid facts of the country, and Spenser turned to it at once, almost as a matter of course, to it and to that which usu- ally professes to inspire it, love. For Spenser fell in love, he tells us, with the beautiful Rosalind who, hard-hearted and incapable of foreseeing the glory which awaited her lover, rejected him. He went back to the world dis- appointed. Disappointment is about as con- stant with Spenser as success with Chaucer. Gabriel Harvey wrote of a possible position in the train of the Earl of Leicester. Spenser returned and obtained it. And now begins for him that life of court and state to which he had always aspired. He parallels Chaucer once EDMUND SPENSER 89 more in this that, bom in the commercial class^ he spends his Hf e as a courtier. Yet the associa- tion with Leicester, promising as it seemed, planted permanent seeds of disaster. Burleigh, the Chief Councillor of Elizabeth, was hostile to Leicester. Consequently again and again when Spenser had hopes of court favor he found himself cut off as a dependent of Leices- ter's. During the years of his service with Leicester in London he felt the fascination of young Sir Philip Sidney whose character and powers, no less than his literary idealism, closely resembled his own. Spenser always re- tained for Sidney unbounded admiration, in verse lamenting more than once his early death. In his eyes, as in those of most men of the time, Sidney was the model of accom- plished knighthood. In 1580 the lord-lieutenancy of Ireland was given to the uncle of Sidney, Lord Grey of Wilton. Spenser had not succeeded in obtain- ing preferment at court and took service with Grey as his secretary. For the following nine- teen years, with the exception of two or three visits to England, disturbed Ireland was his home. The Irish were at the time in active re- bellion, intriguing with the Spanish, and Grey 90 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY was sent over to put them down. England has never been gentle in dealing with Ireland, but the methods of butchery and coloniza- tion employed for the next two years sur- passed all precedent. Spenser took part in all approvingly and no doubt was able to draw from the experience material for some of the con- tests with monsters in "The Faerie Queene"; for we happen to know from a letter of Harvey's that "The Faerie Queene" was begun in these years, and the building of its beauty must have been a welcome relief from the hideous scenes then met. When the rebelUon was officially ended in 1582 and Lord Grey retired, Spenser remained, holding clerkships in one part and another of the island during its settlement until (3) in 1588 Kilcolman Castle, with a tract of adjoining country, was granted him for his serv- ices. The castle, which had belonged to the Earl of Desmond, the leader of the rebellion, stood on the bank of the small river Mulla in a picturesque part of the county of Cork. Here Spenser lived alone in stately banishment, pressing his great poem steadily on. In 1689 Sir Walter Raleigh visited him and found three Books of the poem already finished. He per- suaded Spenser to accompany him back • to EDMUND SPENSER 91 England, to publish what he had written, and look for favor and place at court. These earliest Books were accordingly printed in London in 1590. They brought him praise from the Queen and from the whole intellectual world, with the small pension of fifty pounds. He returned dis- appointed to Ireland and wrote his account of how ** Colin Clout's Come Home Again." The fame, too, which he had now acquired in Lon- don made a market for other works written earlier. He put together two volumes of short pieces entitled "Complaints" and *'Proso- popoia" and published them in 1591. In 1594 he married, wrote his marvellous bridal song, "The Epithalamion," and pub- lished it with a series of love sonnets, called "Amoretti," the following year. From what family the lady came, or what were her cir- cumstances, we do not know. We only hear of her beauty and refi.ned womanliness. Her first name was the same as that of Spenser's mother, Elizabeth; her last name may have been Boyle. She brought him children and an apparently happy home during their few years together. Work on "The Faerie Queene" pro- gressed so rapidly that in 1596 three more Books — hardly equal in poetic power to the 92 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY first three — were ready for the press. These, too, were taken to London and again brought him praise without preferment. He returned once more to exile, this time to destruction. In 1598 the Irish rebellion broke out anew. No attempt had been made to appease the country by anything except force. Spenser himself was known to have written a paper defending the methods of Lord Grey. In the absence of an English army, he found himself alone among an infuriated people. Kilcolman Castle was attacked, plundered, and burned. One of Spenser's children perished in the flames. The rest of the family fled to London. What hap- pened there is uncertain. All we know is that in 1599 Spenser died in poverty, Ben Jonson says "for lack of bread." Though he had suf- fered in a public cause and was now recognized as the chief poetic glory of his age, in his ex- treme need he was left unhonored, deserted by the Crown. The Earl of Essex paid the ex- penses of his funeral, and at his own request he was laid beside Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. Spenser's life was one long disappointment. He was always poor. He received no scholarly honor from his University. He was crossed in love, and found no career immediately opening EDMUND SPENSER 93 before him. For a year or two afterwards he was happy in the most exalted and congenial society of London, then for twenty years was obliged to live remote from friends and almost from civilization. He saw in Ireland military glory attended by savagery. In return for public service he was rewarded with stately seclusion. He won enough literary fame to prove that he deserved royal favor which, through court intrigue, somehow missed him. For five years he had a happy marriage, for six the smallest of pensions. A catastrophe overwhelmed him; he turned to his own people and met neglect with early death. It is this afflicted man who drew from his creative imag- ination a new type of poetry, a poetry of ex- quisite unreality, a music so magical as to lure us from thought and satisfy us with easeful dreams of gorgeous pageantry. Perhaps the severities of his actual life and the high romance of his verse are not unconnected. Spenser probably formed his plan of "The Faerie Queene" early in life. We know that before he went to Ireland it was sufficiently started to receive Harvey's unfavorable criti- cism. According to "The Letter of the Author's" it was to consist of twelve Books. 94 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY But it was destined to be another instance of Spenserian disappointment. Only six Books were published during its author's life, and two Cantos of a seventh were found in manuscript after his death. Was a portion burned with his castle and child .^^ It is unlikely that in the three years' interval between the last publication and Spenser's death so prolific a writer should have advanced his plan by only about a thousand lines. There are lists of many other pieces by him, known to his contemporaries and un- known to us. But at least enough has come down to us to satisfy most readers. "The Faerie Queene" alone measures 39,000 lines, about four times "Paradise Lost," twice "The Ring and The Book," and half as long again as the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" together. Spenser's genius seems to require space. He liked the long line, the long stanza, the long Canto. Neatness and pithy sayings belong to a different type. His romantic verse, though called by himself "historical," has as little relation to orderly narrative as that of Ariosto or Tasso who, he says in his "Letter," were his models. His poetry is, like music, rather an affair of sound than of sense and contains within itself small provision for limitation, as EDMUND SPENSER 95 is also the case with the inordinate works of his two masters. Several English poets in whom this musical emphasis is strong, like Shelley and Swinburne, have shown a similarly dan- gerous fluency. Only rarely, as in Milton and Tennyson, has a highly sensitive ear been at- tended by intellectual insistence on compact form. Excellencies are not altogether com- patible. We are wise if we discern clearly the kind offered by each poet, if we accept it grate- fully, and uncomplainingly turn elsewhere for worthy qualities of a different type. SUGGESTIONS FOR READING In "The Faerie Queene," Bk. ii, C. 6, well illustrates Spenser's luxuriance, ease, and lulling power. Stanzas 2 and 32 of this canto contain no full stop. A beautiful employment of a single stop is in Stanza 15. Stanza 13 shows a species of link-verse, where the close of one line prompts the beginning of another. The fragmentary- cantos of Bk. VII, "Of Mutabilitie," especially the two stanzas of Canto viii, are among the weightiest ever written by Spenser. Good examples of personified Vices are Envy, Bk. i, C. 4, St. 30-33, and Mammon, Bk. ii, C. 7, St. 3. "The Epithalamion " should be read entire, and also the "Hymn in Honor of Beauty," expressing Spenser's Platonism. In "Muiopotmos," lines 145-208, there is a passage in ottava rima of peculiar grace. "Colin Clout's Come Home Again" has much bio- graphical material presented in pastoral form. As an example of Rhyme Royal a single magnificent stanza of "The Ruins of Time," lines 246-253, may serve. IV George Herbert IV GEORGE HERBERT We have now before us in clear outline two contrasted types of poetry, the realistic and the idealistic. All around us is a miscellaneous moving world, and it will be one of the offices of poetry to exliibit that world. The realist will therefore make accuracy and vividness his tests of excellence and will merely inquire how completely the men and women about him present themselves on his pages. The natural form of his art will be the narrative. On the other hand, the idealist will always feel that whatever is distinctive of poetry lies beyond the actual. The poet's work is not reproduc- tion. He should conceive a more spacious and noble world behind the one we know. In nature there are no moral standards. In her, too, everything is individual. A world of this irra- tional sort needs to be allegorized. The poet should deal with the general, especially with the worthy and unworthy. Let him not hesi- tate to speak of glorious dreams and stately impossibilities. Everything, in short, which 102 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY will help to remove us from our petty existence will be proper matter for poetry. Here then are two opposed ideals. But how- ever opposed, both really enter into all poetry. To some extent every poet is both a realist and an idealist. In offering a preliminary defini- tion of poetry, I called it a fragment of reality seen through a temperament. It has a realistic basis and an idealistic superstructure; and the farther it moves in the idealistic direction, the more poetic will it appear. Rightly is Spenser counted the poet's poet, for in him we see the extreme to which poetic idealism can be carried. We must not then discharge either of these ideals but may look to see them repeated, in varying degrees and combinations, throughout the long line of English poetry. But why cannot these two types be counted sufficient.? How did it happen that immediately after Spenser's exquisite work was completed, it appeared antiquated and was succeeded by a new and hostile type? It was because poetry, oddly enough, had hitherto overlooked an important factor of experience, namely the poet himself. Chaucer revealed himself only incidentally and was not primarily concerned with other persons as selves. He never dis- GEORGE HERBERT 103 sected motives, studied aspirations, laid bare the waywardness and contradictions which lurk in the interior of each of us. He merely set down on his pages what can be externally observed. Nor did Spenser in his musical pageant exhibit his own soul. Yet that, after all, is the subject which presses most closely for expression. Within himself the poet might well find the whole material of his verse, and to that material the new type of poetry addresses itself. To poetry of this subjective sort Dr. Johnson has blunderingly given the name "metaphysi- cal." He knew little of philosophy, particu- larly of metaphysics, and probably used the word metaphysical merely to indicate some- thing dark and mysterious. Still, he is on the right track, even if he does not put his finger on the precise point. These new writers are philosophic, that is they are studying the mind of man, the individual mind. They seek to examine their own moods and accurately to report them. Their true title would therefore be the psychological poets, inasmuch as they are occupied with the '^vxv or soul of man. But it is unwise for a single writer to try to change the usage of a century. Having made 104 FORI^IATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY this protest, I shall generally employ the estab- lished designation. It will be understood that the men we are now to consider are observers no less than Chaucer, but observers of their inner life. They watch the moods which in the soberest of us chase one another with bewilder- ing speed and they record them with insistent accuracy. That very accuracy it is, and not vagueness, which makes their poetry often difficult to comprehend. I believe we shall best understand their work, and mark its contrast with what had gone before, if we examine the importance they attach to love, religion, and the intellect. Of course love-poems have always been writ- ten. Love we might call the universal theme of poetry. Almost all the motives of life are summed up in the attempt to merge one's in- complete self with the admired object of one's desire. But the cool elaborate way in which such forthgoing was treated by the poets of this time deserves notice.. From Petrarch's Italy came the fashion of a serial study of the stages in the advance of the lover toward his lady. Neither she nor her lover's passion is shown to us as a whole, but rather in dissected details. Successive sonnets disclose the fii'st approach. GEORGE HERBERT 105 tlie survey of her face, the paralleling of her beauty with everything imaginable; what was the first blind impulse toward her and what the many subsequent vacillations, the slightly greater nearness from day to day, her general coldness and occasional kindness, the lover's sense of unworthiness, his abasement, despair, jealousy, desolation through absence, and his final unbelievable reward. No one of these phases of love is unusual. Poets before and since the sixteenth century have sung them all. But the systematization and conscious analysis of them became a set poetic theme for the first time in England dur- ing the last years of Elizabeth. We might name that theme the Lover's Progress and compare it with the standard theme of paint- ing, the Virgin and Child. Each new painter takes up the theme of the Nativity and works upon it, regardless of whether he has ever felt sympathy for motherhood or childhood. It is a set pattern which he, as an apprentice, must elaborate. Just so did the poets accept the theme of the Lover's Progress, which had trav- elled from Italy through France to a rather belated arrival in England. Of course it was not exactly the Petrarchan series of sonnets 106 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY that was reproduced in England; but it was at least "an echo of it in the north wind sung." Sidney first called attention to the great theme. In his magnificent series of sonnets to Stella all the stages of love's course are worked out in detail. The only point, as it seems to me, in which the Stella series differs from the many which followed it is its particularity. Sonnet after sonnet in this series strikes one as pro- ceeding from that individual person, Sir Philip Sidney, as relating to Penelope Devereux, and as inapplicable to any other pair. Now, that is not the case in the great mass of love-sonnets produced in England at this time. Between 1591 and 1597 Sir Sidney Lee calculates that more than two thousand ap- peared, usually in groups. But there is little in them that is specific. For the most part they show no ardent passion in him who writes. They are literary exercises on a conventional theme. We have seen how it is the tendency of all idealistic work which falls under the influ- ence of Spenser to deal with the general. But will men be contented to continue such an artificial method, to go on reporting the most vital of our passions in a standardized way? Will not some one arise to shatter the decorous GEORGE HERBERT 107 exhibit and set down the facts of his passionate experience in all their tumultuous reality? That was to be the work of John Donne, to tell of human moods as they veritably exist. He approaches love from a point of view op- posed to that of Spenser. For Spenser himself produced a sonnet sequence, the "Amoretti," of precisely the regular pattern. Smoothly and pleasingly the verses run, with no indica- tion of individual character or individual ardor. But Donne, not only in sonnets, but in lyrics of wide variety, pours forth his emotion with barbaric frankness. Naturally when one under- takes to paint passion in the precise color of individual experience he may be pushed far toward coarseness. Donne does not hesitate. His is a complex nature, involving all that characterized the later Renaissance — its au- dacity, its mystic piety, its forceful intellec- tualism, its love of adventure, and of all that is bizarre. Here then we see a conception of love antagonistic to the generalities of Spenser and the fashionable sonnetteers, one absorbed in individual experience. Such a change does not come on a sudden. The germs of it have long been working in England. The drama has 108 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY arisen, in which characters present themselves contrasted with one another, not in the Chau- cerian way by mere diversity of outward con- duct. In the drama is heard the clash of inner motives. We see one man stirred by influences which do not appeal to another. About the same time too a second influence appeared in England emphasizing still more strongly the worth of the personal life. A new religious spirit was abroad. We have seen how the Lollards under Wiclif shook the kingdom in the age of Chaucer. More penetrating still was the influence of Puritanism. We must not think of this as the doctrine of a group of sec- taries, split from the Established Church. At this time it affected the whole body of the peo- ple, appealing to men about in proportion as they were persons of large mind and devout spirit. The essence of Puritanism is this: it insists on the presence of the individual soul before its maker. To God alone I am respon- sible; to no one else. To the state .^^ It is some- thing external. My neighbor's welfare? Not primarily. Each is accountable for his own soul. By what I am in myself I stand or fall. Now, certainly religion was not born with Puritanism, nor has it ever been confined to GEOUGE HERBERT 109 these limits. The Cathohc Church in England was for ages the guardian of duty, devoutness, and learning. In Spenser we see how large a portion of the field of religion may be included within Protestant, but not Puritan, bounds. Spenser felt allegiance to the Queen, to his country, to chivalry, to his own honor. But has he ever expressed a sense of his personal tie with God.'^ No, for him religion was not so much an individual as a social affair, expressing the union of all God's people in common en- deavors, in arduous and beautiful aims. The Puritan conceives something different from this and something more fundamental, how- ever one-sided. His is a personal religion. He hears a call of God within his own soul. It is a strangely paradoxical call, for it summons us to lay aside our own will and let the will of God possess us. We are incomprehensibly to lose ourselves in Him. Yet only by doing so do we realize ourselves. When one first hears of that arrest of the individual will which Puritanism demands one might naturally suppose the Puritans would be a feeble folk, lacking in the energy necessary for practical life. Cromwell's Ironsides refute that fancy. The subordination of the individual will puts one on the path of 110 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY power. When I reflect on what I am, I see that I am I only in so far as I go forth to join what is beyond me. Then I become somewhat; otherwise, my life is fragmentary and feeble. Evidently then love and religion are hardly to be distinguished. Just as the lover wishes to empty himself of all that is his and merge him- self fully with the loved one, so the soul in the presence of God, feeling its smallness, seeks to detach itself from its own will and fill itself with the will of God. Rehgion is only love on a large scale. If comprehending these matters of inward experience is difficult for ourselves, how greatly the difficulty is increased when we try to ex- press them to others. Each of us is a unique personality. What is going on in me now is going on in none of my readers, probably has never gone on before. Could I then report my present mood with exactitude, it would not repeat itself in my reader's mind. To under- stand it, he would need to depart from his own experience and enter imaginatively into another Hfe. No wonder then the psychological poets are thought to express themselves darkly. Their task is a far harder one than that of those whose graceful verse offers a general beauty GEORGE HERBERT 111 to all who read. These men would get the mood of their unique souls transferred with utmost precision to other minds. But love and religion, their themes, are not fitted for such transfer. They are specific, individual, inca- pable of common report. To accomplish any- thing one must use comparisons, find analogies and, searching through all the world, piece out one partial illustration by another. He who would comprehend such verse must indeed be of an energetic tem.per. Naturally, then, a new attitude is taken by these psychological poets toward the intellect. We have seen how slight is Spenser's intellec- tual appeal. He would hypnotize us, throw us into a condition where we cease to think and are merely lulled into some general mood as appropriate to one man as to another. With him poetry goes far toward music, becoming inarticulate, unindividual. Donne and his fol- lowers revolt against all this. They are stout individualists and delight in snubbing this mystical view of verse with harsh sounds and crabbed intellectualities. They delight in thinking and force us to think. Novelty, fresh- ness, surprise — yes, difficulty itself — is val- ued by the psychological poet. He wanders far 112 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY in search of strange means for interpreting his strange soul. Such is the new type of poetry, a poetry of the inner Hfe, veracious, intellectual, individualistic, energetic. By it an important range of emotion is opened to English expression which had hith- erto passed unobserved. Rightly too does it choose its means and set them in antithesis to those of Spenser. His "linked sweetness long drawn out" it puts away. Music is felt to be dangerous. The new verse is rugged and jar- ring. Instead of Spenser's inwoven sentence, knitted together with antique words and per- fumed with magical associations, it uses a rough language of hints, ejaculations and irreg- ular constructions, where words of the day are brought into service, though often with novel meanings. A poem seems intended rather for the writer than the reader. Force is sought, not elegance. Precision is prized, but ingenuity also. If we attempt to run rapidly through half a dozen lines, some intellectual puzzle is pretty sure to block our way. Alliteration and tone color are not much regarded. They are sen- suous affairs, useful chiefly for impressing a reader. Puns, conceits, far fetched relation- ships of thought, unusual metres, indicate the GEORGE HERBERT 113 alertness of the writer's mind. And these char- acteristics of the metaphysical poets are by no means accidental. They spring directly from their realistic individual aim. Who are these men? Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Quarles, Traherne, per- haps Cowley. Each one of them varies the characteristics I have named, emphasizing some, subordinating others; but all, according to their several aptitudes, join in developing a type of poetry which ever since has been among the precious possessions of our literature and has been reproduced in almost every age. If I were quite free in bringing this new poetry before my readers, I should naturally choose John Donne as its representative. He is the originator of the school and its greatest genius. Through all its members we trace his influence. But I turn from him to his pupil, George Herbert, for two reasons: first, the per- sonal one, that, bearing Herbert's name, I have had him as a companion throughout my life and have studied him elaborately; and secondly^ that I despair of making Donne intelligible within any brief compass. He is probably the most difficult writer in the Eng- lish language. All the perplexing tendencies of 114 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY his group he shows in extreme form. His strange verses were not made to be listened to or hastily caught from an interpreter. They require at least three readings before they can be understood. To get their intimate charm we must brood over them, and even commit them to memory. Herbert's nature is less com- plicated and the range of his verse narrower. It deals exclusively with religious love and attacks the lower outbursts of passion so fre- quent in Donne. In one respect he differs from all the other members of his group. He is a conscious artist and has a strong sense of orderly poetic form. His small body of verse he revised continually, in order to bring it to that beauty which he loved and which he felt its subject to demand. Yet, notwithstanding superior technical excellence, he fully repre- sents most of the tendencies of the meta- physical school. He has their aggressive intel- lectualism, their audacity of diction, their absorption in the inner life, thorough-going individualism, wide-ranging allusion, candor, exactitude, and tenderness. With Donne his relations were close. A personal connection between them had been formed while Herbert was a mere boy, and the influence of the older GEORGE HERBERT 115 man attended Herbert throughout life. If we knew of no personal contact of the two, but, being acquainted with Donne's verse should open a volume of Herbert's, we should at once recognize the master's guiding hand. I select then the more readily accessible Herbert as my representative of this type. His life ran from 1593 to 1633; that is, he was born almost exactly a century after the discovery of America. His period is probably the most markedly transitional in all English poetry: he being born as the first Books of "The Faerie Queene" appeared, when Shak- spere was writing his poems and earliest plays, and dying in the year when Dryden, Locke, and Spinoza were bom. The brief span of his hfe, that is, extends from the days of the high- est romance our literature ever knew to the beginning of the era of common sense. His, too, was a contentious time. Individualism was coming in like a flood and pushing aside the earlier chivalric collectivism. The Puritan ascendancy was gaining every year and deeply affecting literature. We are apt to think of Herbert as an aged saint, who spent a lifetime in the courts of the Lord, and came to find every worldly thought 116 f UHMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY repulsive. This absurd estimate has largely been induced by Walton's charming romance. Biography was at that time in its infancy, and the few examples of it that occur aim at eulogy and stimulus rather than description. To com- prehend the man Herbert, all these romantic notions must be dismissed. He died compara- tively young, just under forty. Most of his life was spent in courts, universities, and among the most eminent and fashionable of his time. During only three years was he a priest. Unfortunately the romantic view of him has gained currency, too, through an adjective which early became attached to his name, *^holy George Herbert." That is exactly what Herbert was not. A holy man is a whole man, one who is altogether in harmony with himself and God. Herbert's was a divided nature. Opposing impulses tore him. It is these which bring him near to us and make him a true repre- sentative of psychological poetry. When he was dying, he handed over the meagre roll of his poems to a friend — for none were pub- lished during his life. All are private poems, stamped with that genuine sincerity which can be had only in writings not intended for the public eye — and said, "Here is a record GEORGE HERBERT 117 of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul. Let my friend Mr. Ferrar read it; and then if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it." Mr. Ferrar fortunately published it imme- diately, and it so exactly hit the taste of its time that a dozen editions were called for in half a century. We shall do it and its author much injustice if we withdraw our attention from those "Conflicts." The life of Herbert is most significantly divided into four periods: that of education, of hesitation, of crisis, and of consecration. The period of education covers the first twenty- six years of his life, from his birth in 1593 to his acceptance of the Oratorship at Cambridge in 1619. The second, the period of hesitation, covers his Oratorship; that is, eight years, up to the death of his mother in 1627. A crisis period follows, in which Herbert was surveying himself and asking whether his Kfe was to be wasted. This continued for three years, from 1627 to 1630. Then comes at last the glorious period of his consecration, his period as a priest. Obviously these periods are very unequal, yet each makes its special contribution to our understanding of him. 118 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY His family was one of the noblest in Eng- land. Three earldoms were in it, the head of the whole clan being that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who was one of the most influential nobles at the close of the reign of Elizabeth and during the reign of James. Herbert always prided himself on his aristo- cratic birth. The exquisite gentleman appears in him everywhere, both for strength and weak- ness. His father, belonging to the branch of the Herbert family which lived at Montgom- ery Castle in Wales, died when George was but four years old, and Lady Herbert became both father and mother to him. She was one of the masterful women of that age and one of the most admired. A dozen years after the death of her husband, though she had already ten children, she married Sir John Danvers, a man twenty years her junior. Nor was the marriage unhappy. Sir John Danvers was accordingly the only father Herbert ever knew, except his spiritual father, Donne. Donne and his large family had been assisted by Lady Herbert at a critical period of his life. Grati- tude and Idndred tastes drew him to her subse- quently, and at least three poems of his ad- dressed to her have come down to us. Her GEORGE HERBERT 119 poetic son thus early felt Donne's influence. To George Herbert Donne bequeathed his seal ring. Herbert's position in life put him in the way of meeting many others who were then emi- nent in literature and the State. William Her- bert, the head of his house, has been believed by many to be the mysterious "Mr. W. H." to whom Shakspere's Sonnets are inscribed. Cer- tainly it is to him that the first folio of Shak- spere's plays is dedicated. Possibly, therefore, Herbert may have seen Shakspere. While he was Orator at the University Milton was a student there. When Lord Bacon in 1625 published certain Psalms which he had trans- lated into verse, he dedicated them to Herbert as the first of his time "in respect of divinity and poesy met." Leaving Westminster School in London in 1610, Herbert entered Trinity College, Cam- bridge. The same year, he being at the time seventeen, he addressed two sonnets to his mother which are of extreme significance. In them and an accompanying letter he lays down a programme for his life. He will become a poet, a poet of love. That is the only worthy theme, he declares. But he will be nothing like the fashionable poets. They have de- 120 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY graded the sacred passion, "parcelling it out" to one and another person. That is to empty love of all meaning. The only way in which it can be understood is to view it in full scale, drawing God and the human soul together. Herbert will therefore write nothing but reli- gious verse and so will manifest love unlimited. With this purpose Herbert went up to the Uni- versity. To that purpose he remained true, becoming — if we except Robert Southwell — our first purely religious poet. One other aim Herbert had for shaping his life, and long was the shaping deferred. From birth he was physically weak, with a tendency to consumption. His brothers were martial men, and this was the general inheritance of the family. His eldest brother, Edward, was that Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the founder of English deism, the eccentric soldier, ambas- sador, duellist, egotist, who wrote one of the most entertaining of autobiographies. Two other brothers were ofiicers in the army and navy; Henry, nearest in age to George, and perhaps his favorite, was Master of Revels at the Court. One born in such station found few employments open. He could not engage in trade. He must enter either the army, the GEORGE HERBERT 121 Church, or the Civil Service. Herbert's mother early saw that he was of too feeble a frame to serve in the army or probably in the State. She dedicated him, therefore, to the Church. Herbert accepted the proposed career without question, and soon an association of ideas be- came fixed in his mind, uniting the thought of being a priest with that of being an upright man. Whenever secular affairs interested him, as they naturally did through most of his life, he counted himself cut off from God. When- ever higher moods were on, he was all eager for the priesthood. He took his Bachelor's degree when he was twenty and remained at the University to study divinity. Being, however, already noted as something of a connoisseur in words, and skilled in Latin and Greek as well as English, he undertook also some teaching in rhetoric. In these pleasant employments and agreeable surroundings year by year went by and brought him no nearer to the priesthood. Finally the Oratorship of the University fell vacant. In it Herbert saw something much to his liking. He aspired to it. Fortunately we have a letter from him replying to a question a friend had asked, whether the Oratorship was quite com- 122 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY patible with aiming at the priesthood. He thinks it is, for it only defers that purpose a httle; and besides, the Oratorship is the finest post in the University. The Orator sits above everybody at table, receives all distinguished visitors, writes the letters of the University, and has in addition a very pretty salary. He received the appointment in 1619 and held the office for eight years. The suspended section of Herbert's life which follows I have called his period of hesitation. In it his double- mindedness is striking. Certainly he will be a priest. He has never intended anything else, a priest and a poet. But hurry .f* Why should one hasten such a career .f* There are many good things by the way. Even Walton records that during his oratorship *'he was seldom at Cambridge unless the King was there, and then he never missed." Herbert loves stately cere- monials, fine clothes and manners, whatever of beauty the world can show. That is one side of him. He is a man of the Renaissance, sensi- tive to all the glories of earth and exulting in them. But there is another side, just as genu- ine. When we notice the strength of one of these two sides of Herbert, we are apt to imag- ine the other feeble or unreal. That is not the GEORGE HERBERT 123 case. It is to misunderstand Herbert as a man, and quite to miss the type of his poetry of the inner life, if we fail vo give credit to discordant elements in him. His purpose of allegiance to God, taking the form of entering the priest- hood, is a positive passion, however long he loiters by the way. In 1625 King James died. Herbert had hoped to climb, like the preceding Orator, into some public office. He dreamed of becoming Assistant Secretary of State. The King's death destroyed these hopes. A year later Bacon died. Worse still, in 1627 died that mother who had never ceased to guide him, who had fixed the plan of his life, and had not seen that plan fulfilled. Herbert was overwhelmed. His health was poor at the time, and mental con- flicts made it v/orse. He resigned the Orator- ship, left the University where he had lived for seventeen years, retired to his brother Henry's country home, and there passed through what I have called his "crisis." A record of this crisis he has left us. Life was slipping away, with nothing accomplished. How was it all to end.? In a single section of my edition of his poems I have brought together the pathetic group of those that paint this 124 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY struggle. We hear him now expressing delight in the world and asking how he can possibly leave it, now pouring forth eager longings to be fully a child of God, now doubting his fit- ness for that exalted life. After two or three years of this self-scrutiny, search for health, and efforts to reinstate his early resolve, he met Jane Danvers and married her, Walton says, three days after their fijst meeting. I question the tale, for she was a near relative of Herbert's stepfather and lived but a few miles from his brother's house. Yet even if the story is in- exact, it well illustrates Herbert's headlong temper. He says himself that people "think me eager, hot, and undertaking. But in my prosecutions slack and small." We may per- haps say that he was of so hesitating a disposi- tion, so prone to delay, that finally he would act on some small impulse, and suddenly im- portant issues would be closed. It was in this way that at last he entered the priesthood. The Earl of Pembroke invited him to Wilton House to meet Archbishop Laud, who was at the time a visitor there. Laud remonstrated with him over his long delay. Walton says Herbert sent for a tailor the next day and was measured for his canonical clothes. GEORGE HERBERT . 125 Herbert entered the priesthood in 1630, at the age of thirty-seven, and spent in it the last three years of his brief life. At first he found great happiness in it. He had at length made a reality of a lifelong dream. There could be no more discontent. He might now possess a united mind. But the little parish which the Earl of Pembroke gave him at Bemerton, be- tween Wilton and Salisbury, contained only a hundred and twenty people, men, women and children. For many years Herbert had been living in the full tide of the bustling world, with the most intellectual men of that world as his companions. Now he found himself shut up to a small group of illiterate rustics. He tried to develop all the possibilities of his office, and in his beautiful notebook, "A Priest to the Temple," has left an elaborate study of what the country parson can do and be. He kept his intellectual interests alive with this book, with writing far more verse than formerly, and with frequent visits to the organ in Salis- bury Cathedral. But after all, he could not help wondering whether such a life was what God and he had intended. This disposition to doubt was much increased as consumption pressed him harder. Of this disease he died in 126 FORAL\TIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY 1633. Had he died three years earlier, we should never have known him, or at most should have found his name mentioned some- where as that of an elegant dilettante from whom contemporaries expected much, but who left only a dozen or more Latin and Greek pieces of slender merit and a few English verses on ecclesiastical subjects. It is chiefly Bemer- ton with its enforced loneliness, questionings, revolts, and visions of completed love which made Herbert an example of all that is best in the metaphysical poetry of the inner hfe. In three poems — the long "Affliction," *'Love Unknown," and "The Pilgrimage" — Herbert traces at different periods the course of his infirm and disappointed life. The shortest of them, and perhaps the obscurest, \\Titten near its end, is the most fully confessional and poignant. It will be seen how truly such a divided and introspective life typifi.es the age which pro- duced it. Donne and his followers are no acci- dent. They sum up in artistic form the ques- tioning tendencies of their time. In few other periods of Enghsh history has the English people believed, acted, enjoyed and aspired so nearly like a single person as during the first GEORGE HERBERT 127 three quarters of the reign of Elizabeth, For- eign dangers welded the nation together. The Queen, her great ministers, and the historical plays of Shakspere, set forth its ideals of orderly government. Spenser's poem consummated its ideals of orderly beauty, as did Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" those of an orderly Church. Men in those days marched together. Dissenters, either of a religious, political, or artistic sort, were few and despised. But with the Stuart line a change, long preparing, mani- fested itself. In science, Bacon questioned established authority and sent men to nature to observe for themselves. In government, the King's prerogative was questioned, and Parliament became so rebellious that they were often dismissed. A revolution in poetic taste was under way. Spenser's smooth strains and bloodless heroes were being replaced by the jolting and passionate realism of Donne. The field of human interest, in short, was be- coming more and more an internal one; the individual soul and its analysis calling for much attention from its anxious possessor. In choosing Herbert to represent this intro- spective poetry we must acknowledge that he stands outside his school in one important 128 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY respect, in orderliness and brevity. No other member of his group has his artistic feeling. Their poems are usually a tangled growth, developed rather to ease the unrest of the writer than to convey objects of beauty to a reader. Some promising situation attracts the poet's attention and he begins to write, wan- dering wherever thought or a good phrase leads, playing about his subject till he and his readers have had enough. Beginning any- where, he ends nowhere. Where, too, no plan controls, there is likely to be excessive length. From such formless composition Herbert turns away. All his work has structural unity. He knows when to stop. Each poem presents a single mood, relation, or problem of divine love, and ends with its clear exposition. His poems are at once short and adequate. Out of his hundred and sixty-nine nearly a hundred have less than twenty-five lines each; only four exceed one hundred and fifty. Within these narrow bounds the theme is fully and economic- ally developed. We feel it is not he who directs its course; he is merely responsive to the shap- ing subject. Accordingly any set of Herbert's verses conveys such singleness of impression as is rarely found among his contemporaries. GEORGE HERBERT 129 But while he thus lacks one common, though undesirable, trait of his school, he may well serve as its representative. Like the rest of them, he fixes his gaze on himself alone and introspects the working of a single soul. Like them he finds complications and paradoxes there and amuses himself with them, while still retaining our belief in his sincerity'' and earnest- ness. With him as with them energetic and unusual thought is a delight, and nothing pleases him more than to stuff words with a little more meaning than they can bear. And lilie them he surprises his reader with sudden turns of sweet and tender simplicity, imbedded in a crabbed context. In technical matters, too, he is substantially in accord with them. While all his lines are rhymed, he employs imperfect rhymes freely, alliteration and vowel color rarely. His work- ing foot is the iambic, in which rhythm all but eleven of his poems are written, these eleven being trochaic. He has no blank verse, Alex- andrine, or "fourteener." He has seventeen sonnets, but confines himself to the Shak- sperean form or to one peculiar to himself. He does not use Spenser's stanza nor Chaucer's Rhyme Royal. His feeling for the texture of a 130 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY line is much finer than that of his master, of whom Ben Jonson said to Drummond that "for not keeping of accent Donne deserved hanging." For each lyrical situation he in- vents exactly the rhythmic setting which befits it. Each set of emotions he clothes in individual garb, and only when what is beneath is similar is the same clothing used a second time. One hundred and sixteen of his poems are written in metres which are not repeated. In his verse matter and form are bound together with exceptional closeness. So much has been said in this chapter about Herbert as a poet of the personal life and of his agreement with his group in analyzing indi- vidual experience, that perhaps in closing a few words of caution are needed. These subtle longings, dejections, and vacillations of the lover of God, like similar moods reported by the poets of human love, are not mere state- ments of autobiographic fact. Undoubtedly they start with fact, and how large is the measure of that fact in Herbert's verse I have shown in my account of his life. But though seven eighths of his poems employ the word *'I," they do not confine themselves to per- sonal record. What Herbert gives us of inner GEORGE HERBERT 131 experience, no less than what Chaucer gave of outer, is colored by the temperament through which it passes. Starting with a veritable fact, Herbert allows this to dictate congenial cir- cumstances, to color all details with its influ- ence, to eliminate the belittlements of reality, and so to exhibit an emotional completeness which may not have been found in his actual life. This is the work of the artist everywhere, to idealize reality. Herbert thus idealizes. But he is no mere sentimentalist, living in shifting feelings, and fancying that to-day God has withdrawn his love from him whom he yester- day favored. Nor yet are the poems fictitious which so declare him. Herbert's own experi- ence warrants fears which he knows are not peculiar to himself. They belong to love every- where. In them he finds subjects of sad pleas- ure which his empty days, disciplined mind, and artistic skill fashioned into forms of per- manent beauty. SUGGESTIONS FOR READING Herbert's two sonnets to his mother, showing in their style the strong influence of Donne and announcing his resolve to devote himself to religious love-p>oetry, are quoted by Walton in his "Life" of Herbert, and I have included them in my edition of Herbert's Works. Herbert's ability to pack much matter into few words and, like his friend Bacon, to coin proverbial sayings, may be seen in any stanza of "The Church Porch." His piety utters itself in such poems as "The Elixer," "Clasping of Hands," "The Pearl," "The Glance," "The Second Jordan." "Aaron," "The Priesthood," "An Oflfermg," "Para- dise," "Gratefulness" "Love," show the attractions of the priesthood. One sees his divided mind in the long "Affliction," "The Collar," "The Answer," "The Second Temper," "Submission," "The Flower." Poems of power, which well illustrate the style and the man, are "Sunday," " Constancie," "Man," "Virtue," "Sinne," "The Method," "The Forerunners." Good examples of his playful intellectualism are "The Pulley," "Peace," "Sinnes Round," "A Wreath," "Mortification." V Alexander Pope V ALEXANDER POPE In speaking of the different philosophical atti- tudes of John Stuart Mill and Frederic Denison Maurice, an acute English critic once said that whenever a new idea was presented to Mill his immediate question was, Is it true? When presented to Maurice, his was, What does it mean? The second of these inquiries was on the whole, the critic thought, the more pro- found. A somewhat similar question attends the devotee of poetry. Approaching poetry in our youth, we are contented to ask, "Do I like it, does it accord with my present modes of feeling, do I find in it a reflection of my own face?" But soon such interest is discovered to be sentimental and enfeebling. As we grow older, we either discard poetry altogether or we approach it from a different side; that is, we now ask, what does it signify, what phase of human nature finds expression here? All the better if it is some phase which as yet has not been fully developed in ourselves. The important work of poetry is to broaden our 138 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY sympathies, to enlarge our imagination, to lead us to view humanity in the total extent of its range. I hope this book may impel its readers in these energetic directions. Already my demands have been considerable. We have found poetry reflecting the outer world. We have looked upon it as a dreamland, closely associated with music. We have seen it as introspection, the individual soul standing soli- tary before its Maker endeavoring to compre- hend its varying moods as it now approaches and now falls away from its mighty love. Many of my readers will find it diflScult to conceive religion in the fervently individualistic way in which Herbert exhibits it. • In this chapter we consider a poet still farther removed from our natural sympathies. Here, I congratulate myself, my reader will be forced to exercise his imagination in a field he instinctively dislikes. In most of us, at least, Pope meets a strong adverse prejudice. We know that he was once a mighty sovereign, but believe that long ago he was rightly dethroned and proved to be the wearer of a tinsel crown. To-day he is out of fashion; and while his pregnant sentences still serve as proverbs, few think of reading him. He accordingly offers ALEXANDER POPE 139 the best of opportunities for the exercise of that imagination on which I have been insist- ing. Let my readers try to bring themselves into the strange and somewhat repellent con- ditions under which Pope wrote. I will not call Pope one of the greatest of poets, but he is an essential one. Modern poetry could not have come into existence until he had shown us a section of what its work was to be. Call it but a section, say that much of it is trivial, still it is important. We cannot comprehend how the later poetry is derived from the earlier unless we have com- prehended his. How, then, can we bring ourselves into a cordial attitude toward a writer at once so necessary yet so frequently distasteful.'^ I be- lieve we shall do it best by giving clear utter- ance to the half-conscious hostile thoughts which are in the minds of most of us. In order to set Pope on high, as ultimately I hope to do, I will for the moment attempt to pull him down. I will indicate at least where his shortcomings lie. For these are grave and so obtrusive that until we have put them out of the way we can hardly perceive his merits. 140 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY In disparaging Pope, then, let me first call attention to the narrow range of his subjects. His sympathies are meagre and do not extend to outward nature. One of his longer poems is entitled "Windsor Forest," and in that forest Pope grew up. Binfield, his home, is only a few miles distant from the village which in- spired Milton's "Allegro" and "Penseroso." But Pope is occupied in Windsor Forest less with trees than with men. Wordsworth thought there were one or two adjectives in the poem which show that Pope had had his eye on a natural object. But the poem is a human docu- ment, as are all Pope's. This need be no dis- paragement. Pope is essentially a humanist, and a humanist is nothing in itself disgraceful. But Pope's interest in men — men and women — hardly extends beyond that of a single time and place; the London of his day. Never in his life was he a hundred miles away from Lon- don, and all his thought is bounded by its streets. Even within it he regards only a sec- tion of its people. Of the so-called lower classes he never speaks. His concern is entirely with two small groups, the courtiers or politicians, and the literary men, the two classes in every community most artificial and remote from ALEXANDER POPE 141 common life. And even in his dealings with these we must reduce his scope still more; for it is not their elemental passions which he shows, but rather their manners, spites, and superficialities. Nowhere in Pope do we find the profound hopes, loves, longings, and de- spairs which Herbert offers. These are cast away as unfit for verse. The outside of people, persons as they appear at an evening party, make up the stuff of his pages. In all his writing, too, a certain lack of originality is generally felt. Independent intel- lectual grasp we do not find. He is ever lean- ing on others. In early life it is Trumbull, Wycherley, Walsh, to whom he looks and whom he makes his guides. In his middle period it is Swift. In his later and greatest time he is in close intellectual dependence on Bolingbroke. During the last half-dozen years of his life, he formed a less worthy connection and Warbur- ton controls. He must always see himself through the eyes of somebody else and, per- haps by consequence, has little freshness of vision. The substance of his poetry is common- place and rarely discloses any such insight into life as makes us aware of what we are and whither the world is tending. Pope's thoughts 142 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY are our own, merely given back to us in more polished form. In estimating, too, the degree of Pope's dependence on others one must remember how all his life was spent under the shadow of Dryden. Dryden had been the literary dictator of the previous generation, and to rival him in each of his many styles was the perpetual ambition of Pope. Dryden modernized Chau- cer; so did Pope. Dryden translated Virgil; Pope, Homer. Dryden criticized tragedy ; Pope poetry in general. Dryden gave us the portrait of Eleonora and Mrs. Kjlligrew; Pope that of an Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa. Dryden wrote a long theological plea for Protestantism and later one for Catholicism; Pope, one no less long in defence of optimistic Deism. Dry- den satirized MacFlecknoe; Pope, Cibber and Theobald. Dryden sang of Alexander's Feast; Pope, of St. Cecilia's Day. Once Pope ven- tured, in collaboration with Gay, on writing a play, for which he was singularly unfit. Both he and Dryden, though Catholics, aspired to the very first place in the literature of a Protes- tant land, and the standard verse-form of both is the heroic couplet, developed into its highest unity by Pope. There is a legend that Pope in ALEXANDER POPE 143 his earlier years was taken to view the great Dryden, sitting enthroned in Will's Coffee House. At any rate, Dryden's robust hand never left the stooping shoulders of his sensi- tive little successor. But we must not omit one further limitation of Pope's poetry which holds back many of his readers, his lack of continuity and his monot- ony. Both connect themselves with the use of that poetic instrument of which I was just speaking, the closed couplet or ten-syllabled iambic stanza. This is the music to which nine tenths of his poetry is set, and it is the music of the bagpipes or accordion. Remember how almost every poem of Herbert's had its special measure, one springing from its subject, and then consider the almost mechanical form imposed on pretty much everything Pope offers us. No wonder we find such pages monotonous and after reading three or four of them lose something of our hold on the meaning. The brief little sections easily fall apart. No Eng- lish measure has less staying power, and Pope's couplets are beyond all others in lack of coher- ence. He straps together bundles of them into connected poems; but one of these poems, say the "Essay on Criticism," might about as well 144 FORIVIATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY be read backwards as forwards. Usually if we study a poem of Pope's sufficiently, we can find a kind of plan in it; but that plan is not tight and obligatory. The couplets, each exquisite in itseK, straggle out upon the page about as disjointedly as they first struck the mind of the writer. These are grave indictments. When we have judged a poet to be petty in subject, com- monplace in thought, loose and monotonous in treatment, we have left small room for merits. Yet I believe I have not exaggerated nor said anything novel. Whoever has read Pope at all has felt these faults. But besides objections to Pope's art, others are justly brought against his character. Un- pleasing personal peculiarities obtrude them- selves through all his writings. He is the vain- est of English poets, continually talking about himself. Not content with giving us abundant autobiographical details, he insists that these show him to be a marvel of virtue and superior to every one else. Such talk is tiresome. At first we excuse it by supposing that in such passages Pope may be presenting ideals of what he would be rather than statements of what he thinks he is. But when we look up the ALEXANDER POPE 145 records of his life we find that vanity filled it with envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness. His years and writings abound in quarrels. Many of the persons assailed we do not other- wise know, and they may be said to have acquired a certain sort of immortality by his very attack. But we at least know enough of his feuds to be sure that most of them were un- necessary and that a character so ready to take offence had serious flaws. Probably, too, most persons will feel a cer- tain insincerity in the verse and will call it artificial, if nothing worse. It is striking that about in proportion as English poetry becomes clear and simple, it becomes doubtfully sincere. Nobody questions the veracity of Donne and his followers. If we should take Herbert aside and say what a puzzling phrase that was "in your poem on Man. Did you mean it.^*" would he not answer, "Yes, and I am sorry that in order to state my meaning exactly, I was obliged to be a trifle obscure." The metaphysi- cal poets, in short, do not write for display, but for relief of their own minds. This cannot be said of the Queen-Anne's Men. While it is their special office to rationalize poetry and convey clear thought which may be read with 146 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY ease, they seldom escape the suspicion of osten- tatious performance, Pope least of all. The critical studies of Dilke, Elwin, and others have shown conclusively that Pope's statements about himself cannot be trusted. He claims a nobler ancestry than he had; dates his poems earlier than they were written, in order to seem precocious; and when he would publish his letters, and yet is half ashamed to do so, he resorts to elaborate intrigue, pretending that others are surreptitiously publishing and so he is obliged to put them out himself. Collect- ing letters from his many correspondents, he improves their quahty by rewriting, changes their dates and sometimes their addresses, re- ferring them to a different person from the one to whom they were sent. Then he issues them as veritable originals. Pope's mind was tortu- ous. In his own time it was well said of him that he could not drink a cup of tea without a stratagem. This is the man for whom I now ask admira- tion. While I believe all I have said in his dis- praise is true, I would also recall the warning of an earlier chapter: we must not base our judgment of a poet on what is not in him, but on what is. When we turn, our attention away ALEXANDER POPE 147 from the defects of Pope and fix it on his posi- tive merits, we quickly see how precious has been his contribution to our verse. This is De Quincey's estimate: "Alexander Pope, the most brilliant of all wits who have at any period applied themselves to the poetic treatment of human manners, to the selecting from the play of human character what is picturesque, or the arresting what is fugitive." Byron calls Pope "a poet of a thousand years," and many of us are under such obligations to him that we be- lieve he will have a rightful eminence so long as the English language endures. Let me ac- knowledge my own debt. My grandfather had a good copy of his poems. So while still a boy and knowing little of Pope's repute, I fell to reading that volume. It fascinated me. I turned to it again and again until I had ab- sorbed it into my very structure, where it has remained a blessing through all subsequent years. But how can all this be? How can one so repellent to many in work and character ex- cite also such enthusiasm? To solve the para- dox we must turn from his weaknesses and consider his strengths, at the same time keep- ing clearly in mind the type of English poetry for which he stands. 148 FORIVIATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY Yet before fixing that type, I suppose I must in some degree clear his character; for so long as he is morally objectionable, his poetic worth is likely to be granted grudgingly. My first claim for him then shall be that he showed a marvellous heroism in accepting his limita- tions. We all have these. Each knows well how firmly some circumstance hems him in, cutting him off from doing what he would. With one of us it is bad health, with one poverty, with one lack of early training or — worse — just native dullness. Whatever form it takes, it hedges us about and prevents the full pattern which we feel within us from coming out. Thus we become soured and rebellious. Looking at myself in comparison with others, I feel that the Creator has not been fair. Had he given me such chances as that other man has, I certainly should have used them wisely, winning happi- ness for myself and blessing for humanity. Now I am small, and my littleness is not my fault. So most of us say when limitations press. Some of the wiser sort accept the facts quietly, go about their daily work dutifully, and try to be cheerful in spite of disadvantages. Occa- sionally a Stevenson thrills the world by show- ing how a man may in himself be superior to ALEXANDER POPE 149 fate and defy misfortune. But of all the men I know, Pope, I think, met his limitations best, better even than Stevenson; for in Stevenson there is always something of the Stoic. He knows how bad his conditions are, but will not let them crush him. Magnificent! Yet Pope shows a wisdom higher still; he turns his very limitations into sources of power. It seems incredible that this can be done, especially where limitations are so enormous as those which beset Pope. He was the only son of a London linen- merchant who by middle life had acquired a fair competence — not a fortune, but a compe- tence — and so retired from business, moved out a little way from London, and took a house at Binfield, in the forest adjoining Windsor. The boy was born of parents already advanced in years — the mother forty-eight — and born a cripple. There was curvature of the spine and with it came subsequently almost every ailment that flesh is heir to. His face, notwith- standing the brilliant eye, showed marks of constant pain. Headaches were frequent and prevented his working for any long connected time. There was a disposition to asthma, and nervous disease in all its distressing forms was 150 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY on him from childhood, much intensified by the severe studies of his youth. His distorted figure never attained a height of more than four feet. What prospect in fife was there for such a crippled child.^ Of course any active employ- ment was out of the question. Only one career lay open, a life with books. He might become a scholar, or rather a scholar at intervals. Persistence might bring learning even if con- tinuous study was impossible. But here the barbarous laws of his country intervened. His parents were Cathohcs, and Pope himself was intensely loyal. His nature was not a religious one. He cared little for doctrine. To be a Protestant would have been throughout life greatly to his interest, and not much against his inchnation. But it was not in him to desert an oppressed cause, nor would he put a barrier between himself and those he loved. In conse- quence he was shut out from all the great schools and universities of his country. Why not, then, join those of the Continent .'^ He was too frail. His health would not permit it. For the same reason, too, he was cut off from that which for many men well supplies the loss of university training, travel. No, Pope was ALEXANDER POPE 151 hemmed in. Both nature and man forbade him opportunities. Most men finding themselves in such a case would think they did well if they amused themselves with books and talk from day to day without bringing discomfort on others. Who of us would have set a con- scious task before ourselves, one, too, so diffi- cult that in it the best equipped seldom suc- ceed, and then by the time we were twenty- one have arrived at acknowledged eminence? That is what Pope did. Obscure in birth, feeble in frame, forbidden education, before he is twelve he resolves that the world shall hear him and so compensate for that which he after- wards called "this long disease, my life." He did not let his limitations fret him into idle- ness, but used them as helps, indications of the paths through which he might reach power. Of course under such difficulties he must sys- tematically manage himself, think all out beforehand, and make up with brain what was lacking in physical advantage. His is a verit- able dedication of himself to poetry. He consulted friends to learn what portion of the poetic field was as yet unoccupied, and fortunately got from the admirable critic Walsh a magic word. Walsh told him that 152 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY English poetry had accomplished pretty much everything else except "correctness," Who- ever could introduce that would find a place. We need not puzzle ourselves over the precise meaning of the word. Enough that, remember- ing how at some lucky moment a golden saying has enriched our life, we perceive that correct- ness must at least have suggested the idea of correcting. The metaphysical poets, the men of Donne's school, poured forth in profusion whatever came into their heads, regardless for the most part of lucidity, order or rule. Her- bert is about the only one among them who revised his text, and he did not do it in the interest of clearness. Little they cared whether they were comprehended. Their first thoughts Were their only ones. But lasting literature is best built out of second thoughts. If after set- ting down what in our first heat we think we have to say, we go over and correct it subse- quently, we may reach what Wordsworth de- manded of poetry, "emotion recalled in tran- quillity." Walsh was right in saying there had been little of this hitherto in English verse, and to it the eager boy at once addressed him- self. By the time he was twelve Pope had produced a little masterpiece in his lines on ALEXANDER POPE 153 "The Quiet Life"; a translation of Horace's "Beatusille": "Happy the man whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound. Content to breathe his native air. In his own ground. Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread. Whose flocks supply him with attire. Whose trees in summer yield him shade In winter fire. Blest who can unconcernedly find Hours, days, and years slide soft away, In health of body, peace of mind, Quiet by day, Sound sleep by night, study and ease Together mixed, sweet recreation. And innocence, which most does please With meditation. Thus let me live, unseen, unknown Thus unlamented let me die. Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lie." That could hardly be improved, either in sense or sound. Let any one try to change a word, and he will discover how near its sim- plicity comes to perfection. Each line takes just the course it must take; and yet there is 154 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY good reason to believe it was written in Pope's twelfth year. Of course he retouched it later, as he did all his writing. But here it stands, an early proof that Pope could accomplish his aim in spite of his limitations — yes, by their aid. Soon recognizing, too, that continuous intel- lectual labor was impossible for him, instead of rebelling he turned to that which may well be discontinuous. The couplet is the form of Eng- lish verse which can best be taken up piecemeal and by piecemeal polished. Pope devoted him- seK to it. He distributed scraps of paper about his house, had bits even at his bedside — for his sleep was never more than intermittent — and whenever a clever couplet occurred to him, down it went on paper. These papers were then gathered, the coherences among them noted, and they were gradually fashioned into a poem. There is something pathetic in what I urged a while ago to his disparagement, that most of his poems are not closely knit. Nature forbade that. But Pope, instead of resenting it, made fragments to shine. He carried the closed couplet to the utmost point of refinement it was ever to reach in England. He regarded it as a veritable stanza and accordingly thought ALEXANDER POPE 155 that, as in any stanza, the sense should be tolerably complete within its bounds. Already this tendency to shut up the couplet within itself had appeared in Dryden and Waller; but it is Pope who gave that final touch which made the couplet really adequate to itself. In com- pacting it thus, he clearly understood the dan- gers it would meet. The verse might easily become monotonous, just one repeated beat. But what subtlety he has used for avoiding this! Reading his verses carelessly, we often fail to notice how neatly he has shifted his pause — the pause, I mean, midway in the line, the csesura — sometimes drawing it nearer the beginning, sometimes delaying it till toward the end, readjusting it with every refinement so that successive lines may not be too similar. In this way he introduces a delicate music into his verse and brings out all the limited capac- ity of the closed couplet. No wonder that such a man who in early life saw so clearly the literary tendencies of his age, soon attracted the attention of notable men of letters. He speedily became recognized as the prince of them all. This cripple, this tradesman's son, this youth hampered by feeble health and fragmentary education, 156 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY makes English literary and political life bow down to him as a great power. What a feat to accomplish in earliest manhood! Well might he afterwards exultingly say, "Yes, I am proud, I must be proud to see Men not afraid of God afraid of me." If now Pope's character is partially cleared, if we see that he is entitled to respect as a man, that his energetic life has in it much which is pathetic, and stimulating to ourselves, we may perhaps be prepared to examine dispassion- ately Ihe special contribution he made to our poetry. We shall best begin to do so by ob- serving that he is our first man of pure letters, our first professional poet. Every writer before Pope had taken poetry as a collateral employment, in connection with days devoted to something else. Chaucer, as we have seen, was a man of the court, a soldier, a foreign envoy. Spenser was one of the con- querors of Ireland. Herbert was a courtier, a teacher at the University, a country minister. These all found time for poetry also; but they did not devote themselves to it. One greater than they all attempted this, Milton. From earliest years he had consecrated himself to poetry as to a holy calling, but the exigencies ALEXANDER POPE 157 of his country combined with a faltering pur- pose to check him. During thirty of the middle years of his Hfe, suspending poetic employ- ment, Milton became a political pamphleteer and Secretary to the Commonwealth. No, it is not incorrect to say that Pope is the first among our literary men to give himself up through an entire life whole-heartedly to poetry. This is what the musician, the painter, the sculptor do as a matter of course with their exacting arts. But perhaps some of my readers will not approve such a method in poetry. They may call it artificial, think the poet had better re- main something of an amateur. If he engages only in his art he may not feel the full tides of life. Probably Pope never felt them fully. Under the conditions in which he found him- self it was impossible to do so. But one thing he knew well and loved ardently, pure litera- ture, perfect expression. For this he was ready to endure hardship. And we cannot under- stand, certainly not enjoy, him unless we too know how difficult smooth-slipping sentences are to fashion, and so feel a corresponding pleasure wherever they appear. Before we can care for Pope we must hate all that is awk- ward, extravagant, or fantastic in writing, and 158 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY highly prize lucidity, ease and lightness of touch. These latter difficult excellencies we are apt to rate as subordinate or even trivial. Pope gives up a life to them with entire serious- ness and consummately attains them. Of him might be said what Tennyson said of his Edmund, that "lucky rhymes to him were scrip and share, and mellow metre more than cent for cent." Thus I am led at once to point out wherein I regard Pope as typical and why it seemed to me that in presenting half a dozen types of poetry, that is, the work of men who were really discoverers, opening to English poetry emotional tracts which before were closed, I ought to include Pope. The ideal he followed is ordinarily spoken of as the "classical ideal" and his school the "Classical School." No label is accurate. One man covered by it swings to the right, another to the left of its meaning, and much that interests Pope stands outside classicism altogether. Still, the word may guide us to his type, only we must not suppose that the English Classicists imitate Greek writers. The word has passed through France, and French standards were now be- coming those of England too. Dry den had felt ALEXANDER POPE 159 their attraction. Pope felt it still more and found it still nearer akin to his own genius. For how neat the French mind is! How it abhors the "too much" and keeps itself within bounds. The ancient Greek in his inscription on Apol- lo's temple — fi-q^kv dyav "not too much" — taught respect for the limit. The finite is the field for man, not the infinite. The Gothic, Northern, or German spirit, on the contrary, aspires gropingly after the infinite. It never grasps it, of course, but we admire its mighty reach. It may be that those who restrict them- selves to the finite are in danger of remaining small, but some are content to be so if only they may be precise. Just before Pope's time the need had been felt of such sober, rational, and corrective influ- ences as the neo-Classicists upheld. In all the countries of western Europe an era of social good sense was following one of enthusiasm and turbulent egotism. It affected politics no less than literature. Pope was born in 1688, the child of a revolution which was worked out by sensible constitutional means, following at a distance of only forty years one of the most tumultuous outbreaks which the world had at that time known. Good sense and compromise 160 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY were in Pope's blood. He led a much needed literary reaction against the disorderly writers who preceded him. The Metaphysical School had cared little for good taste, for social stand- ards, for neat expression. Their far-fetched analogies, their wild conceits, their introspec- tive personal gaze, their fondness for specula- tion and inaptitude for facts, rendered poetry almost unintelligible. English literature was overrun with a jungle growth, and some one was needed to cut paths through. This is the work of the Classicists with their engine of rationality. The metaphysical poets are irrational. They utter merely what the moment brings and the individual feels. But reason requires social adjustment. The feeling which springs hot from the heart of the poet must be tempered to meet the conditions of a receiving mind. That social tempering is the very essence of art, a difficult business, in which, however, we are not left without aid. Through all the ages men have been studying the best modes of approach of man to man, and the results of that experience are summed up in those laws of good taste which are embodied in the work of great poets and critics of the past. These teach us how futile a being ALEXANDER POPE 161 the obscure, redundant, awkward, self-centred poet is. He has been unwilling to take trouble on himself in behalf of his neighbor. He should be socialized, rationalized. Most of the seven- teenth century was a time of extreme individ- ualism. Pope's age of reason lays insistence on social proprieties. Who will say that they were not needed.'* Yet such standards of social propriety nar- row in some respects the sympathies of him who adopts them. Enthusiasm, for example, is soon looked upon with suspicion, because it cannot be exactly explained nor fully shared. It isolates him who feels it, and should have consequently no place in literature, which deals with what is comprehensible by all. That sen- sible clarity which Addison was exhibiting in the essay and Locke in philosophy, it was the office of Pope to bring over into poetry. All three, purged of blind enthusiasm, move among such subjects and employ such language as cultivated gentlemen might use at a casual meeting. They avoid pedantry and hot emo- tion. They keep clear of whatever is heavy, obtrusive, or personal. Of course while using simple language, one would be glad to have his language shine. A clever epigram is always in 162 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY point. It must not sprawl or show effort, as did those of the generation before. A brilhant flash will please our neighbor, without burden- ing him with too much thought. In Pope, then, perhaps we may see a sys- tematization of that society-verse which in loose and lyric fashion began with Lovelace, Sedley, Carew, and Rochester and has ever since been a valued type in our poetry. It is artificial, of course, and intentionally insincere, that is, untrue to the entire mind of the writer, but we should be poor indeed without it. Pope has written much in a more serious vein. Per- haps his masterpiece in this sort of Dresden china is his airy "Rape of the Lock." To what parts of life will such a method in its graver use be applicable.? Certainly not to the human interior, the soul of man. For this it is totally inadequate. There we are much swayed by irrational passions. Chiefly to the outside of life a poetry is confined which sets much store on a standard language and insists on what is rational in our dealings with one another. Poets who have been most influenced by conceptions of this kind incline to call them- selves "moral" poets, making the word refer chiefly to our mores or manners, the way in ALEXANDER POPE 163 which personal character displays itself in out- ward behavior. Thus Pope writes, "Not in fancy's ways I wandered long, But stooi>ed to truth and moralized my song." In his early years through a wide variety of subjects Pope sought to entertain his readers with pleasing sentimentalities. But after the interval following his work on Homer and Shakspere, the great world of human conduct in all its picturesqueness, folly, and whimsical- ity opened before him, and he set himself to study it and teach it propriety. Yet neither Pope nor the later poets of man- ners offer us the sharply differentiated indi- vidual life. They deal with typical character, expressive of some universal principle, not with particular persons. Accordingly they easily pass over into moralizing and are not afraid of a stock expression. How far we have travelled since Pope's day! How eagerly do our young poets, shunning his simplicity and dreading a commonplace phrase, tie up their uncertain thoughts in knots hard to unravel. Pope's con- trasted aims are well expressed in one of his letters to Walsh: "It seems to me not so much the perfection of sense to say those things that have never been said before" — in that en- 164 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY deavor at surprise so valued by previous poets ■ — "as to say those things best that have been said oftenest." Or as he versifies the same thought : "True wit is nature to advantage dressed; What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." We have no right then to demand profound thought from Pope. That is not what he sought, nor what his special circumstances fitted him to give. He aims at perfect expres- sion. He takes the ordinary thoughts of aver- age men and puts them with a neatness, vivac- ity, fullness, and terseness combined, which had never been seen before. Occasionally his desire for compact simplicity prevents the instantaneous seizure of his meaning. But this is rare. Usually he gives us the perfection of rhetorical verse, something between prose and poetry. That this was his proper sphere he well understood. "Verse-man or prose-man, term me which you will," he writes. It was to working within such narrow limits that all his industrious life was given; and it was because he accepted those limits that he rose to fame. Against them, though they are the strength of his poetry, we are inclined to rebel. As we turn his page, we probably say, "This is not ALEXANDER POPE 165 what I care for most in poetry." No, indeed, it is not. But is it not a precious, entertaining, instructive ingredient of poetry .^^ Would we not wish to write with such brilhant simpHcity.'^ Could English poetry have progressed without these lessons on style .^^ And would not our literature have missed something if it had never been embellished with these striking pictures of the conduct of our ancestors.'^ I should an- swer all these questions in the affirmative and should say that any one too indolent to enter imaginatively into the restricted world of Pope will be cutting himself off from a powerful means of intellectual enlargement. Hitherto I have laid exclusive stress on the classical side of Pope. It is his adhesion to established standards of hterature and conduct, his valuation of criticism above spontaneity, his substitution of second thoughts for first, in short his insistence on an unclouded rational diction, and his skill in bringing a single im- portant metre to perfection, which marks his type and makes him a turning point in English poetry. But he has many collateral excellencies. One capable of such pithy utterance can in a sentence confer an immortality of honor or shame. And what a historian he is! Where 166 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY else can we bring ourselves so fully into that strife between Whig and Tory through which the Protestant line of Hanover was fixed on the Enghsh throne and the Catholic Stuarts held in exile? Pope's party was defeated, but his comments and criticisms are the more inter- esting on that account. And then just because his attention was confined to London, and to its wits, fashionable ladies, and litterateurs, he makes us acquainted with those streets and people as if we too had been born among them. Every dozen lines of Pope brings before us some notable person, animated scene, or pecu- liar custom, long since gone. We may at first incline to compare his gallery of striking por- traits with Chaucer's variety, or with the groups of delightful nobodies sketched in a subsequent age by Crabbe and Jane Austen. But on reflection we see that the methods of painting are contrasted. The Classicist Pope starts with what is general in man ; these other writers with what is peculiar. His is an intel- lectual apprehension of fundamental principles of conduct, which his figures merely illustrate. His characterizations are accordingly brief though deep-going. The other writers I have named proceed by minute observation of facts. ALEXANDER POPE 167 Undoubtedly their people are more vivid. I cannot count them more memorable, varied, or instructive. They suit our taste better, as Shakspere suits us better than Ben Jonson. The charge is often brought against Pope that he employed a poetic diction and is re- sponsible for the artificial phrases used by those who came after him. I believe this to be unjust. In the tentative efforts of his early period, and also in his translation of the Iliad, the language is often bookish, ornamented, and unlike that of the man on the street. And this is natural. Poets do not like to call a spade a spade, for they see something more in every object than does the passing beholder. This heightened dignity they sometimes try to convey by the use of conventional words, such as the casual beholder would never use; or else out of the language of that common man they select words with a sensitiveness to their precise sig- nificance and emotional value such as he him- self never possessed. The former method, as the easier, is apt to be followed by half-made poets. It was followed to some extent by Pope himself when learning his art, and afterwards by such imitators of his defects as Young, Blair, and Pollok. But when in his third period Pope 168 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY has attained mastery, he uses the plainest of speech. Any one reading the "Moral Essays," "The Dunciad," the "Epistles," and "Satires" of Pope may well wonder not only at the plain- ness, solidity, and effectiveness of the diction, but at Pope's instinct for words that were destined to survive. Little in these pieces has become antiquated. Pope instructs us well how to talk strongly to-day. Several times in this chapter I have men- tioned successive sections of Pope's life. They are three. Taking that life as extending from 1688 to 1744, its first period may be reckoned as ending with the beginning of his work on the "Iliad " in 1715, with the publication of his Collected Works in 1717, and the death of his father in that year, or with his settlement at Twickenham a year later. This is his period of experiment and miscellaneous verse. His period as a translator and editor follows; when be- tween 1715 and 1726 Homer and Shakspere put him above financial need for the rest of his life. His third period running from 1726 to his death — his "Moral" period — shows him in the easy command of his wealth, time, and powers, aphorizing on manners, criticizing conduct, and indulging his taste for gardening and quarrels. ALEXANDER POPE 169 These roughly outhned periods, it will be seen, mark off literary stages rather than stages of personal life. Pope's life contains few events distinct from literature. All is subordinated to that great end. But those few events I may as well bring into connection with his literary development. I have said that his father moved to Binfield when Pope was but a child. Attempts were made in these early years to procure him edu- cation. From one small school or unimportant priest he moved each year to another. Before he was twelve he found the best teacher he ever knew, himself. A boy at home, he set himself to serious study of the Latin writers, a few of the French, and several of those of Eng- land, especially Dry den. The Latin Statins he translated into verse, often with felicity. He spent much time on Virgil, ever afterwards a favorite. Many of the Greek and Latin poets he read in translation, and he himself wrote four thousand lines of an epic on Alexander the Great. Early, too, he gained the acquaintance of several cultivated Catholic families of his neighborhood, and brought himself into cor- respondence with some of the eminent writers, of the generation which was just passing away. 170 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY From them he obtained much valuable criti- cism and practised himself also in giving it. By overstraining that feeble health of his, Pope was able, before he was twenty-one, to put together a volume of Pastorals which was published in 1709. It fixed the attention of the literary world on the youth and made men understand that a new leader had appeared. But with growing fame came interference with study. For the next half-dozen years Pope was much in London literary society. He be- came acquainted with Addison, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, and with smaller men like Tickell, Philhps, and Dennis, over whose supposed iniquities his pen was to be long busy. Litera- ture was at this time largely the handmaid of pohtics; partisanship and strife were regular adjuncts of the trade. Great writers, like Swift, did not hesitate to accept political pay. When a single issue so dominated the life of the nation as did that of the English Crown, literature and politics could not be kept apart. In 1714 Queen Anne died. In 1715 England was invaded by the Pretender. From that time till the death of Pope and the second Stuart rising party spirit ran high. Other influences, too, cooper- ated to disorganize literature. Literary prop- ALEXANDER POPE 171 erty was imperfectly guarded and unscrupu- lous publishers were common. While an author usually sold his manuscript outright, his largest gain often came from the great men to whom he dedicated or from recognition by the govern- ment itself. On the whole, through such adverse circum- stances Pope moved forward in his career with singular independence and success. He put forth in these years his "Pastorals," "The Messiah," "Windsor Forest," the "Essay on Criticism," the "Rape of the Lock," "Elo- isa," the "Unfortunate Lady," and nearly as much more miscellaneous verse — a prodigious amount, considering its quality, his health and his distractions — received good pay for it, put himself under no patron, and refused pen- sions proffered by the Government. But he was not so successful in keeping clear of petty squabbles. In these years quarrels were begun which grew steadily wider and more bitter till they blossomed into superb amphtude in the gardens of "The Dunciad." Pope's ner- vous constitution made him irritable, quick to resent a fancied slight, disparagement, or rivalry. He was greedy of praise, yet, like most of us, ashamed to acknowledge it. We 172 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY cannot truly grant him what he claimed for himself, "That if he pleased, he pleased in manly ways." His temper was rather feminine than masculine, highly sensitive both for good and ill, not too scrupulous about petty false- hoods, and inclining rather to covert than to open agencies for accomplishing what he de- sired. But he had feminine affections also, tenderness and tenacity, a knack for knowing lovable people, like Gay, Garth, and Berkeley, or for dealing tactfully with crabbed ones Hke Swift. In later years he refused an honorary degree from Cambridge University — a proud distinction for one who had been kept from education as a boy — because no degree was offered also to his friend Warburton. His devo- tion to his indulgent father, and especially to his mother during her sixteen years of aged widowhood, was extreme. Servants lived long with him. When Dennis, his bitterest enemy, grew old and poor, friends offered him a benefit at Drury Lane, for which Pope wrote the pro- logue. Several of his quarrels were envenomed by scandalous attacks on his parents. While cases of reprehensible animosity are not diffi- cult to find in Pope's stormy career, on the whole in most of his warfare with Grub Street ALEXANDER POPE 173 our sympathies go with him. He stood for lit- erature pure and simple, as contrasted with that fostered by the Government, aristocratic society, or mercenary booksellers. But I anticipate. Much of the independence I have been describing was deliberately planned and secured during the eleven years' drudgery of his second period, 1715-1726. It is amazing that a young man, httle more than twenty-five years old, and known to have but a slender acquaintance with Greek, should already have gained such repute as to secure him six hundred subscribers to a six-volume translation of the "Iliad," costing a guinea a volume. Counting what the publishers also paid, he took in about £5000 from the "Iliad" alone. For the "Odyssey" he received nearly £4000 more, though in this he did only half the work, letting out the remainder to his assistants, Broome and Fenton. And what a masterpiece he pro- duced ! Though its magniloquent sentences are somewhat out of the taste of our time, what translation of the "Iliad" shows such sustained poetic charm .'^ If any of us were sentenced to read an entire Book of the "Iliad" at a sitting, to what translation would we turn so soon as to Pope's.'* Knowledge of the language from which 174 FORMATI\^ TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY a translation is made is immeasurably less im- portant tlian a knowledge of that into which. Bentley might well complain that Pope did not understand the meaning of certain words and phrases of Homer's, but he understood — what only a poet could — how to write a page that would carry his reader into the thick of the fight. When we consider the greater value of money in Pope's time, it is evident that the amount received from his Greek labors, and from the less important editing of Shakspere, made him a man of means. He was at least afl3uent enough to write henceforth what he pleased, to entertain friends agreeably, to amuse himself with gardening or grotto-building at Twicken- ham, and to be able to place a stone seat or obelisk wherever it gave dignity to the view. The charming villa where Pope spent the last half of his life lay on the bank of the Thames a dozen miles from London. Though he only hired it, every reader of his verse or letters has shared his enjoyment of it. It is from this third period of Pope's life, 1726-1744, and from the gardens of Twicken- ham, that what is most characteristic and valu- able in his poetry proceeds. That is not a com- mon case with poets. The writing of their early ALEXANDER POPE 175 and middle years is ordinarily their best. With advancing age imagination is apt to decay and their work to lack freshness. Pope's poetic powers developed early and were recognized early, but they continued, and he did not find the true field for his genius until his fame was well established. During this third period he devoted himself almost entirely to a species of writing which before his Homeric days he had practised but slightly. It is the satiric delinea- tion of character — that of others and his own — not realistically, but ever as illustrative of some fundamental principle. Beginning with a classification of all the tribe of fools in "The Dunciad," advancing in the "Essay on Man" to an analysis of the conditions under which humanity everywhere finds itself and then, after showing in the " Moral Essays" the pecu- liar temptations to which men, women, riches, and learning expose us, he advances to those delicious Horatian pieces where audacious satire shows an ease, compactness, and incisive form hardly paralleled elsewhere in English verse. "At every word a reputation dies," or a graceful compliment is fastened on a friend. Here Pope's power of expression reaches its height. The pretty banter of the Rape of the 176 FORMiVTIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY Lock has gone on to force and pungency, with no loss of ease. Throughout the whole period we detect the influence of BoUngbroke, the philosophic statesman, who in 1626 had settled at Dawley, ten miles from Twickenham, and who now, after the departure of Swift to Ire- land, became for a dozen years Pope's guiding mind. He it was who first taught Pope that "the proper study of mankind is man," and it was his suggestion which prompted the Hora- tian Satires. With the ending of the "Satires," in 1738, Bolingbroke left Dawley and Pope wrote no more poetry except a fourth Book of "TheDunciad"in 1739. Of the remaining years of Pope when, under the guidance of the scheming and pompous Bishop Warburton, he busied himself with the disgraceful editing of his letters and the revision of his works, it is fortunately unnecessary to speak. Pope had matured early and early the restless mind, like that of Dry den's "Achi- tophel," ''Fretted the pigmy body to decay And o'erinformed its tenement of clay." He died in his fifty-sixth year at Twicken- ham, unmarried, leaving most of his property to Martha Blount, who had been his friend for thirty years. SUGGESTIONS FOR READING "The Messiah" shows the artificial diction with which Pope's work began. A couple of pages should be read from the "Essay on Criticism," in order to see Pope's early epigrammatic style in its extreme form. Read also " The Rape of the Lock," especially Part III, and Book I of the "Essay on Man," with the "Universal Prayer." Among the "Moral Essays," that on "The Characters of Men," and among the "Satires" the "Epis- tle to Arbuthnot" and that to Augustus. But Pope is not seen to best advantage in his continu- ous writing. He is dimmed by his own brilliancy. I sub- join, therefore, a group of fragments, chosen almost at random, to show how he can make common truth shine: Fragments from Pope *T is with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own. Horace still charms with graceful negligence And without method talks us into sense. Behold the child by nature's kindly law Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw; Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight, A little louder, but as empty quite; Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage. And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age; Pleased with this bauble still, as that before. Till tired he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er. 178 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY Heaven first taught letters for some wretch's aid. Some banished lover and some captive maid. 'T is education forms the common mind. Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined. Who shames a scribbler? Break one cobweb through. He spins the slight self-pleasing thread anew. Destroy his fib or sophistry — in vain! The creature's at his dirty work again. Throned in the centre of his thin designs. Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines. You beat your pate and fancy wit will come. Knock as you please, there's nobody at home. 'T is use alone that sanctifies expense. And splendor borrows all her rays from sense. All the distant din the world can keep Rolls o'er my grotto, and but soothes my sleep. Let humble Allen, with an awkward shame. Do good by stealth and blush to find it fame. Feign what I will, and paint it e'er so strong. Some rising genius sins up to my song. My head and heart thus flowing thro' my quill, Verse-man or prose-man, term me which you will. Papist or Protestant, or both between. Like good Erasmus, in an honest mean. In moderation placing all my glory. While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory. ALEXANDER POPE 179 Index-learning turns no student pale. Yet holds the eel of science by the tail. The Muse shall sing, and what she sings shall last. Codrus writes on, and will forever write. Even copious Dryden wanted or forgot The last and greatest art, the art to blot. The gods, to curse Pamela with her prayers. Gave the gay coach and dappled Flanders mares. The shining robes, rich jewels, beds of state. And, to complete her bliss, a fool for mate; She glares in balls, front boxes, and the ring, A vain, unquiet, glittering, wretched thing. Eternal smiles his emptiness betray. As shallow streams rim dimpling all the way. If to her share some female errors fall, Look in her face, and you '11 forgive them all. Ask you why Wharton broke through every rule? 'T was all for fear the knaves would call him fool. For forms of government let fools contest, Whate'er is best administered is best. From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part. And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art. Me let the tender office long engage To rock the cradle of reposing age, 180 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY With lenient arts extend a mother's breath, Make languor smile and smooth the bed of death. Explore the thought, explain the asking eye. And keep awhile one parent from the sky. On Sir Isaac Newton — Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night. God said, "Let Newton be!" and all was light. VI William Wordsworth VI WILLIAM WORDSWORTH In this chapter we enter a new world. We have left the age of reason, the orderly, well-planned w^orld of the Classicists, and turn to one which has no fear of disorder, the world of the Romanticists. We have seen how the men who followed Spenser became dissatisfied with his witcheries. His verse was too sweet; they wanted a taste of the bitter. Rousing them- selves from Spenser's hypnotic spell, they eagerly turned to mental exertion. Just so a reaction set in against Pope and wrought an entire overturn of the classical theory. The revolution, however, was longer delayed in the case of Pope and was more fundamental. Dur- ing his life Pope's sway was little contested. Indeed if we include his entire life, we may say that Pope ruled English literature for nearly a century. When at last the revolt came, under Wordsworth, that innovator was obliged to spend half his years and nearly all his powers before the worth of what he was doing was recognized. It would be no exaggeration to 184 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY say that it took two political revolutions to bring about the new Romanticism: the Amer- ican Revolution in which the dignity of the individual was asserted, and the earth-shaking French Revolution where under the teaching of Rousseau the common instincts of our nature were championed as precious and safe. Words- worth's work it was to present imaginatively the results of these two revolutions. To understand the large scope of that work it will be well to bring before our minds some general traits of romantic poetry as contrasted with classical. Not that these traits appear alike in all; there are many varieties. We must not be misled by lazy labels — romantic, clas- sical. Characteristics of the one occur blended in varying degrees with those of the other. Yet it remains true that the Classicists as a school averted their gaze from half of human ken, and that men grew discontented with their narrow outlook, believing that in reality the half which they refused to see was the more important. I will then sum up in a few successive sections the chief characteristics of the romantic poetry as it diverges from the classical. (1) The obvious one, which immediately strikes the attention even of a careless reader, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 185 is the different fields from which their subjects are drawn. The Classicist deals with mankind, especially with the intellectual men and women of society. He enjoys the strife of tongues and lilvcs to observe the oddities and inconsisten- cies of his species. He is a social being and therefore finds his dwelling-place in the city. Exactly the opposite is the case with the Romanticist. His field is the country. He cares less for man, at least for man apart from nature. Only in the union of man and nature does he count either comprehensible. Accord- ingly nature pervades the whole of his poetry. No matter if he professes to deal with men and women in their most personal relations, he pro- jects them against a background of the coun- try. It will be objected that this is no inven- tion of the Romanticists. Nature was known long before the eighteenth century; and even during that century, while the rationality of man was exalted, there were nature poets too. There certainly were through all the eight- eenth century. But when examined closely they will be seen to resemble the Romanticists only slightly. These men, no doubt, prepared the coming change but did not in themselves show what it was to be. Certain poets wrote 186 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY of nature prompted not so much by the scenery around them as by their recollections of Virgil. Virgil had loved the country and in his masterly "Georgics" described the scenes and labors of country life. His great name sanctified country poetry, particularly in England where Latin authors moulded the minds of the young in school and university. Shenstone and Thomson show much of this tendency, though both had also a genuine love of nature. Then too the English have always lived largely out of doors and outside cities, and their literature might therefore be expected to make frequent men- tion of the plain facts of the country — soil, crops, cattle, sports, storms, sunshine — even when the writers have little poetic vision. Dyer, Somerville, Falconer, are such reporters of natural fact, and to a considerable extent Cowper too. But there is poetry nearer to the romantic than this. No movement bursts forth on a sudden. There is always a prepara- tion, and in the conditions which precede we can usually detect its germs. So underneath the established poetry of man a poetry is grad- ually forming which looks rather in a Gothic than in a classical direction and feels man to be so mysteriously allied with nature that in WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 187 nature the moods of man find themselves somehow reflected. We are all familiar with such anticipative poetry in the writings of Gray, Collins, Burns, Blake. All these men know no sharp partition between the worlds of nature and of spirit. Man Hves in the midst of that which is not alien to him. (2) It is this view of nature, scantily repre- sented in the eighteenth century while Pope ruled, which the Romanticists took up and carried to a completeness unknown before. For not only do the Romanticists feel themselves gladdened through contact with nature, but a certain personal presence seems ever to meet them there. The country is therefore holy ground. There God abides. Men have driven him from the cities. In woods and hills we hear a voice which answers to our own. The Classi- cist conceives of God as the Great Artificer, " the great first cause, least understood," who ages ago set the world running, gave it fixed laws and then withdrew from interference, let- ting it thereafter care for itself. And certainly if a skilful workman could construct a per- petual-motion machine, he might thenceforth wisely retire from business. The Romanticist knows nothing of such a retired God. To his 188 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY mind God is immanent in nature, not sundered from it. To-day he is as genuinely working there as ever he was. So closely involved is he that we can speak of him as if he were nature itself, of nature as if it were he. (3) This reverential way of approaching na- ture is pretty fundamental in romantic poetry and gives to it another special mark, mystery, the sense of wonder. Wonder was hardlj known to the Classicists, for their world is a place of well-defined bounds. They touch only those sides of life which can be rationally veri- fied, and consequently inhabit a world as clear as day. But what they look on with annoyance and distrust is the delight and place of abode of the Romanticist. As he goes forth into na- ture he finds everywhere more than he can com- prehend. A half -understood friend seems to be calling and to find an answer in the depths of his own being. He does not refuse to listen to the appealing voice because it is indistinct, but joyously acknowledges that mystery encom- passes all that is clear. (4) Naturally enough where such a sense of wonder is at work enthusiastic utterance will follow. The Romanticist honors enthusiasm, which Pope and his companions scorn. To WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 189 their eye it shows bad breeding and would be unpleasant at an evening party. The Romanti- cist, however, dimly perceiving a reality greater than his fragmentary understanding can grasp, is stirred to enthusiasm by the wonder it ex- cites. At the very time when the literary and intellectual classes of England never mentioned enthusiasm without contempt, other classes were shaping by its use some of the greatest forces of the age. It was in 1739 that John Wesley opened his chapel in London, from which went forth a band of religious enthusiasts who brought a new dignity into daily life and lowered that of those hitherto accounted lead- ers. Through them religion acquired a reality of significance for the personal life which the fashionable deism of the Established Church had lacked. The age was starved for mystery and enthusiasm. It knew it was starved and it rewarded, perhaps unduly, whoever could supply its need. Ossian's strange poetry (1762) resounded throughout Europe. And about the time of the coming of Wordsworth there ap- peared a fantastic literature of wonder in the novels of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Monk Lewis. When, too, we disparage that sober sense to which the Classicist had held 190 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY and react in favor of feeling and a sense of mystery, we are in danger of such sentimen- talism as uttered itself in Sterne's "Senti- mental Journey" and Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling." (5) In whatever direction we turn, we see a momentous revolution preparing. Its outward manifestations I have just traced. Its central principle appears in the new place it gives to the feelings in contrast to the intellect. Clear consciousness, it urged, does not cover the whole of life, not even the major part of it. The half -conscious instincts of mankind have always been his surest directors. We see this on a broad scale in the great popular movements which have revolutionized the world. These have not been the working out of precise plans of action; they have been for the most part blind motions, little understood by those who led them. Yet how vastly significant! Just so in private life the common man who follows his fundamental instincts is a more significant subject for poetry than the merely intellectual man. Classicism, because it insisted on the supremacy of reason was interested only in superior persons. It was aristocratic. Roman- ticism is the embodiment of democracy. We WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 191 shall hardly discover an intellectual figure in the poetry of Wordsworth. Perhaps we may instance "The Happy Warrior," or Protesilaus, the husband of Laodameia. But Wordsworth usually deals with plain men and women, such as Michael, Margaret, Matthew, or the Leech Gatherer, people who are swayed less by reason than by instincts and half-conscious impulses. It is the elemental side of human nature, almost ignored by the aristocratic Classicists, which now attracts reverence. In 1765 Bishop Percy published his "Reliques of English Poetry," collecting in its three volumes the folk-songs, ballads, and half-instinctive rhymes through which popular feeling had been expressing itself for several centuries. In general the writ- ers were unknown. Ballads, it is said, have no single author. They voice the spirit of a com- munity. And even if this spirit acquires occa- sionally a single mouthpiece, he is of conse- quence only in so far as he embodies the thoughts and aspirations of a multitude. Lit- erary men had hitherto looked down on such verse, as lacking in art, but Bishop Percy's volumes came at a fortunate moment and were warmly acclaimed. Men saw here another source of poetry than the Classicists had used. 192 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY The book was the herald of the romantic move- ment. (6) Such a changed attitude of mind re- quires enlarged and liberated modes of ex- pression. The poetic medium which the Classi- cists had carefully constructed was inadequate for the new needs. Pope had shaped for him- self a perfect instrument in his couplet of ten- syllabled iambic lines, rhyming together and rarely running over into the next couplet. His diction, too, had had the light touch, was swift and easy, in short was the language of culti- vated life. His followers could not be expected to equal Pope's delicacy. His heroic couplet became mechanically rigid. His occasionally heightened language was turned into poetic diction. The narrow bounds within which eighteenth-century emotion was content to express itself seem strange to us. Perhaps in aiming at perfection one must accept narrow bounds. But the Romanticist aims at nothing so small as perfection. He seeks the infinite, which never can be perfected. Accordingly a poetic instrument less constrained in compass is needed by him. The couplet, when used, is allowed to run over; blank verse is coaxed into many a new cadence; the sonnet, which honors WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 193 a special mood, is revived; and free lyrical forms spring up in almost as great variety as among the followers of Donne. On tlie whole, we may say of the Romanti- cists what Wordsworth said of himself, that they "live by admiration, hope, and love." The Classicists, on the contrary, live by reason, epigram, and strife. Yet we may easily do them injustice. We must by no means imagine their work to have been futile. They represent our social side and guard the standards our race has set up. It is through their prized quali- ties of reason, clearness, and precision that man is able to live with man. Their great office it is to deal with the organic functions of society; they merely leave out of account the individual human being, who certainly had become some- what self-absorbed among their immediate predecessors. He it is who is now restored to his rights under Wordsworth. Not that so great a change could be effected by any single man. I have shown how throughout the eight- eenth century, especially during its latter half, converging forces were moving toward what was afterwards known as Romanticism. But Wordsworth was the first to know fully their meaning. He completely embodied them, illus- 194 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY trating them in his poems and expounding them in his Prefaces. He was a serious scholar, too, in English poetry, acquainted with its whole extent and devoting a long life to its practice. Above all, men felt behind his novel lines a weighty personality, which ultimately compelled their admiration, and a distaste for the thin and artificial verse which preceded his. He may well be taken then as the prophet of the new movement. The circumstances of his life were favorable to a fresh poetic vision. That life extended from 1770 to 1850 and falls into four periods: (1) the period of his training, up to 1798; (2) his mastery, 1798- 1815; (3) his dechne, 1815-1842; (4) the failure of his powers, 1842-1850. Obviously these periods were not so sharply separated in his life as on my pages. But they are natural dates, true turning-points in his career. The first ends with the publication of the "Lyrical Bal- lads," the second with his two volumes of *' Collected Poems," the third with his appoint- ment as Poet Laureate. Only the first two have importance here. Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, a small town on the west side of the English Lake District, a section of country only twenty-five WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 195 miles square, yet possessing a diversified beauty not easily matched elsewhere. While its hills never rise above three thousand feet, they are strikingly precipitous and majestic on account of their slate formation. In the green valleys at their feet lie lakes both small and large, sometimes long so as almost to give the im- pression of a stream; while those that Words- worth says he loves best are so completely round as to forbid the thought of the passage of water. This round effect is sometimes empha- sized by an island. While the lowlands are luxuriant with trees and flowers, the hillsides are bare and the mountain moors, with their occasional rocky tarns, have a solemn savagery. For some time each day mists float about the peaks, down whose sides rush the many ghylls, or small streams, whose happy voices echo throughout Wordsworth's pages. One who lives in these valleys is seldom without the sound of falling water. In this beautiful land Wordsworth was born and here lived for nine tenths of his life. He was born in the common ranks, neither in poverty nor in riches, but in that happy middle condition where the worth of man is most apparent. His father was the business agent 196 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY of the Earl of Lonsdale. Wordsworth's mother died when he was eight years old, his father five years later. At the death of his mother he was sent to the village of Hawkshead on Esth- wait Lake, a spot even more impressive than Cockermouth, the mountains being higher and the lake of peculiar splendor. Here two centu- ries earlier had been founded what the English call a Grammar School and we an Academy, or place of preparation for the University. Though not large, seldom having so many as a hundred pupils, it had excellent teachers and was one of the best schools of Northern England. All was plain in school and village. Wordsworth, a boy of eight, lived in the cottage of a motherly woman of the working class. All his life there- after was shared with the common people of this district. But these common people were not insignificant. In the Lake Country the land is generally owned by him who works it, an exceptional thing in England. Most English land is owned by gentlemen, from whom the farmer hires. In the Lake Country, thi'ough some curious tradition, it has come about that the land is largely owned by the cultivators themselves, who proudly call themselves "Statesmen," that is, owners of estates. While, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 197 then, they are peasantry, living in humble thatched cottages rarely two stories high, they are also men of property and self-respect. With this independent class, who had formed no habits of cringing subservience, Wordsworth grew up. Nine years he spent at Hawkshead, and in the first Book of that wonderful poem, "The Prelude," he shows us the growth of his mind there. He describes how nature laid hold of and gradually shaped him, until he came to reverence the scenes around him as if they were personal beings. There was little ready money in the Words- worth family at this time. The father's prop- erty was tied up in a lawsuit. The Earl of Lons- dale owed the estate a considerable sum for loans and arrears of wages, but the payment was evaded through excuse and postponement until Wordsworth was thirty years old. His uncles, however, advanced the means for his education and he resided at St. John's College, Cambridge, from 1787 to 1791. He always dis- parages the English University training and says he obtained little from it. But such state- ments require qualification. He certainly ac- quired a good acquaintance with Latin and English literature, learned to use books, and to 198 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY mingle freely with men. These are not incon- siderable gains. No doubt, coming as he did a solitary boy from the country, accustomed to brood over the meaning of nature and having deeper sympathies with it than with mankind, he remained a good deal detaphed. The spirit of the place was alien to him, but not the less beneficial. The vacations, too, of an English University, being as long as the term time, gave him opportunity to return to his loved mountains and there renew the experiences of his early years. In 1790, the year before he left the University, he spent the summer vacation on a pedestrian tour through France to Swit- zerland, having as his companion a fellow collegian, Robert Jones. The two young men had little money, but eager hearts and sturdy legs. They were good observers. Wordsworth had early fixed his mind on poetry. When he returned he brought with him the ma- terial for a long poem entitled *' Descriptive Sketches." This poem, however, cannot be called his first. Another had been begun earlier, of sim- ilar character and about equal length. During two of his University vacations he attempted to picture in verse the scenes which moved him. WILLL4M WORDSWORTH 199 and the completed poem he printed in the same year as the "Descriptive Sketches " under the title of "An Evening Walk." The two in their early form are of extreme interest for the stu- dent of English poetry, for they stand at a parting of the ways. Youthful they are in many respects, lacking in structure, and often feeble in execution; they show their writer in transition from the ideals of Classicism to those of Romanticism. Their verse is the closed couplet; their language, the artificial poetic diction of the followers of Pope. But their substance is purely realistic. Nature, not man, is their theme. The poet's eye is continually on its object. Everything is specific, the gener- alizing epigram seldom used. Indeed so far do they go in accurate observation that poetry is often overlooked. The marks, abundant here of the type of poetry which Wordsworth was to spend his life in combating, are the more striking because so speedily outgrown. Five years later, when the "Lyrical Ballads" were published, no trace of the earlier manner re- mained. Unfortunately most readers are un- able to observe the change. Later editions of both poems are thoroughly revised. Two poems of quite ordinary merit have taken the 200 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY place of two whose historic importance was exceptional. "An Evening Walk" was dedicated to his sister, Dorothy. Of all the circumstances in Wordsworth's life fitting him for his diflBcult task, the influence of that remarkable woman must be counted the most fortunate. A year and a half younger than her brother, she shared his thoughts and hopes from childhood. Out- ward intercourse was interrupted for a time by his life in Hawkshead, Cambridge, and France. Yet even then letters kept them united. When he settled in England his sister joined him and was not again parted from him for more than fifty years. Many who knew them both thought her the more original poetic genius. She had more ardor than her brother, was more swiftly observant, and no less sure in her choice of words. But she was content to merge her tal- ents in his. She criticized all he wrote, often suggested subjects, discussed plans of develop- ment, and frequently furnished admirable lines for his poems. I have her copy of "An Evening Walk." Many passages are rewritten in her hand, and in later editions Wordsworth adopted most of the changes there proposed. He was never tired of acknowledging his obligations to her. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 201 "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears. And humble cares and delicate fears, A heart the fountain of sweet tears. And love and thought and joy." For one naturally so solitary as he, and ren- dered still more so by his aggressive task, her stimulating sympathy was of inestimable worth. Immediately on leaving the University, Wordsworth went abroad again. A vagrant element was ever deep in him. He was way- ward and did not like to live by plan. "This one day" he was ever ready to "give to idle- ness." For books he never greatly cared, but thought his mind fed best "in a wise pas- si veness." Frequent journey ings were really his books, journeyings mostly on foot. So for half a dozen years after graduation, poor though he was, he chose no definite career. His uncles pressed him to enter the Church. He neither did so nor refused, but with other dreams in mind turned back to France. And here once more his usual good fortune attended him, permitting him personal experience of that tremendous awakening of a people. He tells us in "The Prelude" how now for the first time he felt the worth of man. Unlike most 202 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY of us, lie had known nature and lived in com- munion with her long before he discovered man. The year which Wordsworth now spent in France was a momentous one in the life of the French nation. Instructed by a young French lieutenant, Beaupuis, Wordsworth heartily, accepted the principles of the Revolution and seriously considered joining the Club of the Gironde. The influence of Rousseau was keenly felt and has left its permanent mark on his poetry. As he seemed to see a new race of man- kind arising around him, generous, free from institutional control, bent on giving equal opportunities to all, with warm mystic aspira- tions substituted for doctrinal beliefs, his heart burned to work a similar democratic revolution in poetry. For one brought up among the inde- pendent population of Cumberland there was nothing absurd in French ideals of equality. But easy too it became under these laxer ideals to let self-expression triumph over moral re- straint. Professor Harper has shown on in- dubitable evidence that during this year of mancipation a French girl bore him a daughter. Those who think of Wordsworth as cold and formal are misled, I think, by his lack of humor WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 203 and his ability to live alone. At any rate the democratic fervor which burst into full con- sciousness during this year in France, repre- sents most of what distinguishes Wordsworth. As that democratic sentiment decayed in later years, most of his powers went with it. During his second period it was helpfully attended, but not suppressed, by other interests. Funds failing, Wordsworth was obliged to return to England. He came home enthusiastic for popular sovereignty and found his country preparing to declare war on it. The shock was severe. He tells us that for some time he could not hear of a victory of the French over his own people without a throb of exultation. Worst of all, the Revolution itself began to disappoint him. Wild excesses broke out. Chaotic liberty set free the brute in man. Yet the repressive measures of his own government disturbed him hardly less. In this season of perplexity he came under the influence of William Godwin, the doctrinaire socialist, who would reconstruct society according to a ra- tional plan. Popular instincts, which Words- worth had hitherto honored, were to be cast away and replaced by calculations of pleasure and pain. Teachings so at issue with Words- 204 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY worth's natural beliefs induced in him a sort of pessimism which lasted, it is true, but a few years. It is traceable in such poems as "Guilt and Sorrow," the strange tragedy of "The Borderers," and in the denunciations so fre- quent afterwards of the analyzing intellect. To win peace and hope once more he set himself to a serious study of society and the sources from which happiness springs. Happiness had been somehow missed in France. Wordsworth came to believe that it cannot be attained through legislation or by changes in social forms. These lie outside m.an, while the grounds of happiness are within. Inventions do not necessarily bring happiness, though adding to the comfort and ease of ordinary life. Intellect does not insure it, nor wealth, nor any of the things the vulgar follow. It springs from a different soil, the soil of a pre- pared heart. When we train those fundamen- tal instincts which ally us with God, with nature, with our fellowmen, to be simple, strong, responsive, we shall be happy and the State prosperous. In the years 1795-1798 Wordsworth fash- ioned his gospel and dedicated himself to pro- claim it. By purification of the emotions he WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 205 will bring men such joy and freedom as they have never known before. The poet's office is now seen to be divine. Into it Wordsworth pours all the enthusiasm of the revolutionary time but adds to it judgment, poise, and con- secration. Hardly in any other poet has so penetrating an expression been given to the familiar aspects of nature, the homeliness of domestic life, and the sense of an encompassing power always attending us with its love. A response to that love, expressed in joyous acceptance of nature and human life, is open to all. To the proclamation of these doctrines in poetry, their only fit medium, Wordsworth at once addressed himself. His sister gave him hearty sympathy and a friend provided the means. For a year or two after returning from France, Wordsworth had seen much of a young Cumberland man, Raisley Calvert, who, dying in 1795, left Wordsworth nine hundred pounds. To Calvert lovers of Wordsworth owe a monu- ment, for he it was who made this soul-renew- ing poetry possible. The little income from the Wordsworth estate which had hitherto enabled him to live without occupation was now exhausted. Had it not been for Calvert's 206 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY opportune bounty the poet, just when he had discovered his sacred calhng, must have been forced into some bread- winning profession. Calvert saved him for us. The sum was small; but it made a poetic career possible for one who could live as peasants live. In 1795 he hired a house in Dorsetshire on the south coast of England, and there his sister joined him. By close economy, Calvert's gift met all their needs till the settlement of the Lonsdale claim, six years later. At their home in Dorsetshire the pair were visited in 1796 by Coleridge, and a lifelong and mutually advantageous friendship was begun. No one else except his sister ever brought Wordsworth such intellectual stimu- lus as this learned, original, ill-ordered, and lovable fellow poet; and to Coleridge Words- worth's sanity was a constant protection. In order to be near the new friend the Words- worths moved the following year to Alfoxden on Bristol Channel, where Coleridge was then living. Here the three planned the momentous volume destined to bring a new poetic hope to mankind. In remembrance of Bishop Percy's revelation of the precious poetry growing up unnoticed among the common people, it was WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 207 to be called a book of Ballads; while in con- trast with the formal didactic verse of the eighteenth century it was to be Lyrical. Its aim was to exhibit our humdrum world as filled with sources of wonder, the supernatural penetrating it more richly and usually than unheeding men suppose. This aim was to be effected in two ways. Coleridge, by the witch- ery and simplicity of his language, was to give an air of probability to the marvellous; Words- worth was to show the presence of the mysteri- ous in occurrences of daily life. Both alike would break through the benumbing influence of custom, would restore the lost sense of won- der, and so give back to grown men and women the freshness of interest which the child feels in everything he sees. With large assistance from Dorothy Wordsworth the friends set to work, and by 1798 the volume was ready for publication. It may well be called the Magna Charta of modern poetry. In it the modern mind at last finds itself. Here every one may read the Wordsworthian gospel of "joy in widest commonalty spread." The tentative period of Wordsworth's life was now over. Henceforth he knew clearly what he wished to do, and for the next fifteen 208 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY years felt himself possessed of power to do it. As soon as the epoch-making volume was out, Wordsworth sought retirement. Writing al- ways exhausted him, and he now needed time for mental brooding after so much production. He spent the winter at the small town of Goslar in Germany, producing there little beside the Lucy series of poems. Returning, he sought to establish himself with his sister in some eco- nomical spot where the country around should be beautiful and the people persons of worth. For his purposes nothing could be better than Dove Cottage at Grasmere, in the centre of the Lake Country. Here he lived for the nine years, 1799-1808, and here much of his best poetry was written. The cottage still stands, hardly superior to its neighbors, with its small rooms, stone floors, thatched roof, and small hillside garden in the rear; though now modern houses on the opposite side of the road cut off its former view of Grasmere Water. It has been bought by friends of Wordsworth and turned into an admirable memorial of him, his household furnishings replaced, and collec- tions of his books, pictures, and letters suitably displayed. In 1801 the lawsuit with the Earl of Lonsdale WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 209 was settled and Wordsworth received £8500. When one remembers that money at that time was worth several times what it is to-day, it is evident that Wordsworth had now a compe- tence for life. Hitherto only by the strictest economy could he maintain himself and his sister. Now, just as his means were about ex- hausted, this large sum became his. The follow- ing year he married Mary Hutchinson, a friend of his sister's and a former schoolmate of his own at Hawkshead. A happy marriage it proved. She was an intellectual companion of her husband, quiet, patient and believing. Companionship with two admiring women, each endowed with more earnestness than humor, profoundly affected Wordsworth's life for good and for ill. The family's means were increased in 1813 by Wordsworth's appoint- ment as distributor of stamps for Westmor- land, and in this year he moved from Grasmere to the neighboring village and to the stately residence of Rydal Mount, where he remained till his death. Here in 1814 he published "The Excursion," and in 1815 issued the collected edition of his poems, with its elaborate Preface in defense of his poetic theories. With these publications Wordsworth's sec- 210 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY ond period, his period of Mastery, comes to an end. Of most poets it may be said that half of their work is more than the whole. But of none is this more true than of Wordsworth and Browning. Both are burdened with a mass of indifferent verse which seriously obscures the excellence of the remainder. While Words- worth occasionally produced good poetry after 1815, especially in sonnet form, one who would estimate his importance may wisely pass it by and accept only the earlier. Were half of all Wordsworth wrote destroyed, he would be generally acknowledged to be one of the three or four most original poets of our language. Several causes combined to lessen his poetic power at a time when life was only half spent. The first splendor of a poet's work is apt to grow dim with time, and Wordsworth matured early. Even in 1798 when writing "Tintern Abbey" he noticed that his youthful intoxica- tion with the sensuous beauty of nature was giving way to reflection : "I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood. Their colors and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 211 That had no need of a remoter charm By thought supphed, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past." He continued to speak of this half-regretted change during the next dozen years. His inter- est was turning more and more from the emo- tion excited by concrete objects to abstract thought about them. Nor was this altogether loss. The vividness of his poetry suffered, but there came a breadth of view, a sobriety of judgment, an ability to meet men and writers of unlike kinds, and a certain statesmanship in dealing with public questions beyond the range of his restricted youth. In many respects Wordsworth was developing as a man while declining as a poet. But on the contrary, many admirers of Wordsworth think that a certain moral decline in the man attended that in the poet and was largely responsible for it. We have seen how ardent was the democratic fervor of his early years. The September Massacres occurred while he was in France. He excused them and kept his enthusiasm for the Revolution. As late as 1798 he was an object of suspicion to the English Government on account of his French sympathies and radical associates. In 212 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY that year he, Coleridge, and Southey seriously planned leaving England for America and establishing a socialist colony there. The companions of his youth were mostly children of humble parentage and for many years his home was Dove Cottage. The ordinary lan- guage of common people he thought had more poetry in it than that of the learned and refined. In short his sympathies and poetry were given to the multitude. When the liberal statesman Fox died in 1806 Wordsworth wrote an an- guished lament: " Sad was I, even to pain deprest, — Importunate and heavy load." Yet during the latter half of his life he was a Tory of the most extreme sort. He held govern- ment oflSces, accepted a pension, issued elec- tion manifestoes in behalf of Tory candidates, and opposed all attempts at popular education. No wonder that with such a changed mind came a transformation of his poetry. While its technical excellence remained as high as ever, its life was gone. "Ecclesiastical Son- nets" took the place of "Peter Ball" and "Lucy Gray." Such is the indictment which Browning has poetized in his "Lost Leader." Most lovers of WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 213 Wordsworth will regretfully confess that it has some justification. Yet even so, it is well to examine the honorable influences in Words- worth's character and in the condition of the time which might draw him in the aristocratic direction. Suggestions of corrupt influence are not even plausible. No favor, office, or pension could make a man so austere swerve from what he approved. His danger lay in an opposite direction. Throughout life he was too insistent on his own ways and too obstinate in holding to beliefs once fixed. Coleridge's opinions underwent as great a change as those of his friend, though he received no such govern- mental favor. Wordsworth's change from a group of democratic ideas to an aristocratic requires an explanation more subtle than Browning has offered. As regards the shifting of his sympathies in the great war, from the French side to the English, it may be said that the Revolution abandoned him rather than he the Revolution. During his stay in France he belonged to the party of the Girondists. This was overthrown by the Jacobins and most of its members were guillotined. The Jacobins in turn became dis- organized; and after a period approaching anar- 214 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY chy power was seized by Napoleon. While the early Revolution followed the dream of a world to be set free, the later sought to impose the will of one man on all Europe. The incompet- ence of French radicalism to organize itself, without falling into the hands of a dictator, naturally bred distrust over radicalism in general. Wordsworth expressed his detestation of Napoleon in powerful fashion, and most men to-day will agree with him in thinking England the champion of true freedom during the Napoleonic wars. But those wars were fought by the Tory party, the party of order, which gained in approval among sensible men as chaotic liberalism became discredited. It is true that Wordsworth, always a passionate lover of order, endured with too little indigna- tion, like most of his countrymen, the harsh, repressive measures of the Government. Eng- land was in a not unreasonable panic. Many good men suffered in it. It damaged Words- worth permanently. To such damage Wordsworth was constitu- tionally predisposed, not merely by his love of order, but by his distrust of knowledge and human reason. He who holds our half conscious instincts to be our most precious possession WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 215 will not be zealous for popular education, espe- cially in a country where it has never been tried. Wordsworth, it must be remembered, came to acquaintance with the world of nature long before he knew that of man. To institu- tions, therefore, those huge agencies of social life most nearly resembling powers of nature, he always attached more importance as guides than he granted to individual initiative. It is not strange then that in studying the welfare of the poor and humble, in whom he never lost interest, he doubted whether their happiness would be promoted by starting the questioning spirit. He had always set great value on the blind affections connected with the home, the land, the sheep, the hills; and with advancing years he came to distrust whatever brought personal ambition among the working classes into conflict with these. The Church itself. Professor Harper thinks, he valued more as an institution and a social force than as a stimulus to personal piety. Whether we approve these tendencies in Wordsworth or condemn them, it is only fair to notice that they imply no sudden change of sentiment, but are to a large degree developments of much that was present in his early beliefs. 216 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY Unfortunate developments I call them, espe- cially as occurring at a time when with advanc- ing years his mind was stiffening, concrete imagination and delight in natural beauty growing less, inclination to abstract thought increasing, and an established position in soci- ety, property, and poetic fame removing some- thing of the stimulus to creative work. It is sad to notice how in Wordsworth's case his reputation as a poet advanced about in propor- tion as his powers declined. Through most of his second period, the period of Byron's domi- nance, he was laughed at or comprehended merely by local coteries. But in his third and declining period his reputation had so far ad- vanced that Oxford crowned him with her highest degree. When four years later the Laureateship became vacant, it was pressed upon him. He at first refused it, on the ground of failing powers; but being urged as the acknowledged head of English poetry and as the natural successor to his friend Southey, he accepted. Curiously enough in the previous year a young poet, Alfred Tennyson, published two volumes which absorbed the attention of England and made other poetry seem for a time insipid. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 217 A few closing words are needed to meet a current misconception of Wordsworth. Be- cause the poor and ignorant appear so fre- quently in his pages, he is often supposed to be the poet of a single class. And this impression is strengthened by his insistence that the proper diction for poetry is a selection from the lan- guage of common life. As well, however, might Christ be understood as addressing his Gospel to the poor man alone. The aim in both cases is the same. The restrictions of circumstance are counted unimportant and man is addressed merely as man. But it is held that manhood is more apt to appear in its simplicity among the poor and lowly than among those entangled in the conventionalities of artificial society. Yet it is manhood, after all, not poverty that is valued. A striking evidence that Wordsworth was unwilling to confine himself to any class is seen in his avoidance of dialect. Dialect poetry he admired when used by Burns, whose book was published twelve years before the "Lyrical Ballads." With the beautiful dialect of the Lake Country he was familiar from childhood. But dialect is the mark of a special community and a special class; and while according well 218 FORMATIVE TYPES IN ENGLISH POETRY with the character of the Scotch ploughman, would have obscured the broader aims of Wordsworth. Unlike the Romanticists, he is interested in those traits which draw men together rather than in those which bring per- sonal distinction. His figures, therefore, like those of the Classicists, are typical, and char- acters of marked individuality do not appear. Too little attention, in my judgment, has been paid to the avoidance of dialect by one whose interest in the plain man is so manifest. With the development of romantic poetry under Tennyson and Browning the number of Wordsworth's readers grew steadily less, and he has never regained the favor of the multi- tude. But that is largely because his work, like that of Pope, was so fully accomplished that its results have been taken up into the uncon- scious mind of our race. In every community, too, single silent devotees may still be found who make of him their spiritual guide. Like his loved master, Milton, he is a poet for our maturity, to whom we turn when the heedless and disappointing exuberance of youth is passed. Then his calm tones of wise optimism renew for us the sources of joy. We catch in them echoes of Rousseau and of Marcus WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 219 Aurelius. Or rather, going back farther still, in his summons to the simple life and to rever- ence for the lowly we hear much of the message of Jesus. SUGGESTIONS FOR READING Matthew Arnold's "Selections from the Poems of Wordsworth" in the "Golden Treasury" series are so excellent that no better advice can be given to one who seeks acquaintance with this poet than to bid him open the little volume anywhere and begin to read. But there is no harm in mentioning a few of the poems which have given Wordsworth a permanent hold on English and American minds. (The "Lyrical Ballads" were reprinte