ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub
[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

SCOTTISH POETRY OF THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

IT has been the fashion since the time of Scott and Byron and Wordsworth to look with something of disdain upon the English poetry of the days of Queen Anne and the early Georges. Nor is this disdain altogether without good reason. The poetic splendours of the Stuart period, the most glorious in the annals of English letters, appear to have flushed and paled in curious unison with the fortunes of the Stuart kings.* The exuberant blaze of imagination which followed the accession of James I., and spread to its widest in the

* Curiously enough, the great period of English genius is always termed Elizabethan, though the only great literary reputations which belong strictly to the reign of the Tudor queen are those of Spenser and Marlowe. Shakespeare, it is true, the greatest spirit of all, produced his earlier plays in Elizabeth's time; but "Hamlet" appeared in the year of James First's accession, and more than a dozen of the plays came afterwards. The works of Bacon, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, Webster, and Shirley-all the Shakespearean dramatists and poets, in fact-belong to the days of James I. and Charles I.; while the metaphysical and cavalier poets, with the great names of Milton and Butler and Bunyan, all came later, also within Stuart times.

[ocr errors]

days of Charles, died down, strangely, as if extinguished, at the death of the latter monarch. Twelve years later, at the Stuart Restoration, the smouldering embers of national genius flashed again into fire-" Paradise Lost," "Hudibras," and the "Pilgrim's Progress appeared, and there was a rekindling of Shakespearean drama in the works of Wycherley and Congreve, Otway and Lee. All this, however, was finally quenched at the Revolution in 1688; and the death of Dryden in the year 1700 severed the last link with a greater age.

Towards the close of the seventeenth century the standard of poetic merit in England had become one of intellect rather than of emotion. Head, as in all periods of poetic decadence, had taken the place of heart, and manner had come to be of more esteem than matter. For the glow of passion was substituted the brilliance of wit, and instead of the fire of creative imagination there remained only the play of a keenly critical but cold fancy. Poetry, further, fell into a classic mode which was entirely artificial and affected. The poet's mistress was no longer a simple English girl, but, like the court beauties of the time, masquerading in patches and powder and paste, must figure as a make-believe Chloris or Chloe or Phillis. In the verse of the period, Wordsworth has noted,

there does not for several decades appear a single new simile drawn directly from nature; and some critics, like Professer Veitch, have been tempted to include the entire work of the "correct school," as it is called, in one sweeping condemnation of heartlessness and conventionalism. Whether such condemnation be wholly justified or not, one fact may be remarked. The poetic ideals of the early decades of the eighteenth century, the period in question, were wrought to their finest issue by the genius of Addison, Swift, and Pope, and the verse of these writers-"The Campaign and " Cato," "Baucis and Philemon" and "The Grand Question Debated," the "Essay on Criticism" and the "Essay on Man"-despite its brilliance of wit and rhetoric, and the high esteem in which it was held in its own day, is hardly now read except by students of literature.

It was to Scotland that the first inspiration of greater things was to be owed. There, an interesting succession of events had cleared the way for a new beginning. A hundred years earlier, in the end of the sixteenth century, the stern Calvinism of Knox and the Reformers had succeeded in choking the copious ancient stream of national poesy. Lyndsay and Maitland, James V. and Alexander Scot and

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »