By GEORGE SAINTSBURY

(A paper based on, but not identical with, a discourse delivered at what may be called the headquarters of the subject—the Pump Room, Bath, October 1st, 1919)

THE effect of convincing anyone against his will is sufficiently familiar, but it may be questioned whether there is not another state of mind which is still more insusceptible of real conviction, which it is still more of a labour of Sisyphus to convince. In this state there is too much mere inertia for the word "will" to come in. There is no intention of relapsing into the same opinion; there is indeed no need of any, for the opinion is never disturbed. The attempts at convincing need not be resisted or contemned; they may even be listened to and enjoyed like a very pleasant song, but they are at once forgotten.

Something of this sort, it may be feared, is the case with the subject of this present paper. People have made up their minds that there was no eighteenth-century poetry or, at best, that such as there was was not properly eighteenth-century poetry at all, but merely a survival or an anticipation. The present writer had a perhaps accidental but certainly curious illustration of the fact in reference to the origin of this very paper; for having expressed his intention of discussing "eighteenth-century poetry," he found the subject announced at first as "eighteenth-century verse." In face of such a popular attitude—let us be bold and give it its proper name: such a vulgar error—it may not be quite idle to make a fresh attempt against it. I am not sure that in some of the versions of the Pagan Apocrypha it is not recorded that Sisyphus did get that stone lodged at last. At any rate it is worth trying, even at the risk, which is almost a certainty, of the very illogical suspicion that if you like eighteenth-century poetry, you don't like—or don't sufficiently understand—seventeenth and nineteenth. On that point the present writer may, he thinks, slap his sword home and decline duello with any man. But he will take the liberty firstly, in order to confine the matter within reasonable limits, of leaving Pope almost entirely out. Obviously the famous and much-argued question, "Was Pope a poet?" can be answered, even in the negative, without deciding our general point here.

There is, of course—the fact has been already admitted by glance—a division of the poetry of 1700–1800 to which, in a more or less grudging way, the poetical franchise is generally granted. Scraps of Lady Winchilsea and Parnell quite early; Dyer and Thomson at the beginning of the second quarter; Collins and Gray in the middle; Blake and Burns and Chatterton if not also Cowper and Crabbe, in the last division are admitted, if only to a sort of provincial or proselyte membership. Gray, indeed, has always been granted special grace, even, as some think, to an unfair comparative extent, and perhaps Mr. Swinburne's exuberant championship was never less wasted than in the cases of Collins and Blake. But Blake really does belong to no time at all except in a few fragments, and most of the others are too well known for further comment. Let us in the very limited space here available, before passing to other aspects of the subject, take two poems, one of the earlier, one of the later time, as examples of pure poetry charged with special eighteenth-century difference—for that is the point at issue. They shall be Dyer's Grongar Hill and Mrs. Greville's Prayer for Indifference. The one is a picture of that external nature to which as a rule the century is supposed to have been blind, yet charged with an "inwardness" to which that century is equally supposed to have been callous. The other is a poem of mood, almost a pathological poem, possessing the same inwardness, but charged with a flutter of feeling, again supposed to be quite unknown to the age of prose and sense. Both are curious examples of what is called the conventional phraseology of the time, flushed and animated by something additional—a characteristic which also appears in Collins, but is more disputable in Gray, save perhaps in the remarkable "Vicissitude" ode. Grongar Hill ought to be given whole, but it is not difficult of access; the "Hymn" is not so easy to get at, but it suffers less from "sampling."

There is not the slightest extravagance, from any catholic point of view over poetry, in calling Grongar Hill simply beautiful. I think it deserves that term better than anything of Gray's, though not perhaps quite so well as some things of Collins's in the first half of the century; while nothing outside them can touch it, and it came before both. Its attractions, to a somewhat close student, are manifold, not the least of them being the fashion in which, for the first time since Milton, and in a way not directly imitated even from him, it moulds the couplet of mixed eight and seven syllable lines. But one need not neglect the late Mr. Lowell's remark that when Edgar Poe talked of iambs and pentameters he made other people d——n metres. The poem has plenty of other attractions for the most untechnical reader. Dyer, who was himself a painter, invokes the Muse of Painting as well as Her of Poetry, and it is really remarkable how, at this time when hardly anybody is supposed to have had his eye on nature except Thomson, and in the very year of Winter itself, full eighty, too, before Scott provoked from Pitt his famous surprise that verse should be able to express the effect of painting—how visual as well as audible effect is produced. The exordium to the

the following description of the landscape in general with its unusual and extraordinarily true conclusion:

in which everybody who has after climbing a hill turned round and seen the prospect must acknowledge the felicity of "swelling," though he may never have formulated the appearance before; the details of wood, and ruin, and river, with the sudden and just sufficient moral:

for the castle, and for the rivers:

the fillings in of various detail and the penultimate passage formed into a sort of roundel:

with the finale to Peace and Quiet, close allied to Pleasure—all these and all the rest of the 150 lines or so of the poem have their own appropriate agreeableness. And it will be very dangerous for anyone to try the usual sneer at eighteenth-century convention, lest haply he be thought to be blinded or hoodwinked by conventions of another sort. He has, for instance, been taught to think "wanton Zephyr" very bad. But has he quite realised the simplicity and perfection with which the single word "sings" distinctively characterises the rush of the wind aloft, and the next line brings before the mind's senses the flowers and crops and woods, from which the "perfume" is derived below? Is "unbounded," in the particular and yet fully legitimate sense, quite what Edmond de Goncourt used disdainfully to call "everybody's epithet" for the apparently limitless freedom of the birds' flight? Without quoting the whole piece it would be impossible to show the singular uniformity of pictorial and musical skill which distinguishes it; but this can be left, with complete security of mind, to anyone who gives it an impartial reading to discover for himself. Even the impartial reader is not recommended to proceed from Grongar Hill to The Ruins of Rome, as the poet in this latter piece most unwisely invites him to do—still less to The Fleece. But no attempt is being made here to prove that the eighteenth century never produced bad poetry: one merely endeavours to point out that it sometimes produced good.

The Prayer for Indifference is much less varied in kind, and much more limited in degree, of attraction, but it is perhaps subtler. The personal application of it can escape no reader of Fanny Burney's Diaries, but is not necessary to appreciation. The idea is that of an appeal to Oberon for a "balm" slightly different from that which plays so important a part in A Midsummer Night's Dream—a spell causing neither love nor hate, but only indifference. The metre is ordinary ballad or common measure; the language not very different from the ordinary poetic diction of the time. You are not, as in Grongar Hill, made to believe that you are not in the eighteenth century at all, or, if at all, as far from its usual and central ways and thoughts as Grongar itself was and is from London. But, by a quaint and pleasing paradox, the suppliant infuses into her prayer qualities which were the very opposite of that which she prays for, and which in a certain sense might be said to be the quality of the century itself at least on the common estimate. Indifference—in the sense of abstinence from enthusiasm—certainly was affected by many, and positively approved by some, in those days. But when the lady says:

there is a quiver in verse and phrase and sense alike which indicates and expresses very effectively aspirations quite different from indifference. And the quiver becomes a throb, emphasised by the repetition of that potent word "far," as she goes on:

And there is not much less real passion, though the expression has become ironic instead of direct, in the concluding stanza:

Now it is probably hopeless to expect readers who have been thoroughly broken to other styles of poetry themselves to be contented, to be even "half-pleased" with this. The metre will seem to them jog-trot, the language hopelessly prosaic, the expression, as Nietzsche says of John Stuart Mill, "offensively clear"; the absence of any attempt at elaborate ornament or elaborate ugliness almost more offensive still. And it may also seem idle boasting or sheer mendacity to observe that there are people who delight in intricate versification, who love even metaphysical ambiguousness and obscurity; people for whom Blake is not too uncommonplace or Rossetti too flamboyant, or—to come to more recent days, while keeping to the equal waters of the dead—Mary Coleridge too problematic, who yet can enjoy this verse very much indeed, and feel that, having known it, they could not do without it, which some have held to be the great test of poetry. Indeed, to them, not the least interesting point about it is that it does take the form and colour of the time to so large an extent and vindicates its indispensableness thereby. On the other hand, if anyone says, "But I do not perceive the quiver, or feel the throb of which you talk," why, of course, there is nothing more to be done or said. For that person Mrs. Greville's work is undoubtedly not poetry. But whether his or her state is the more gracious, because of the fact, is a further question, though one on which we need not enter. The whole purport of this paper is once more to make an effort to establish the old position that there are many mansions in the Heaven of Poetry, and that the mere fact that some one does not care to live in or to recognise the existence of this or that among them does not prove that they ought to be pulled down or that they do not exist at all.

It may, however, be admitted—in fact no admission or confession is required, no idea of contesting or denying having been entertained—that neither the qualities of Grongar Hill nor those of the Prayer, that still less the general characteristics of the group of romantic precursors from Collins to Blake distinguish eighteenth-century poetry generally. And it may in the same way be further allowed that some of the actual characteristics of this poetry in general are not strictly poetic at all. Its didacticism is perhaps the chief of these; but there are undoubtedly others. And we are busy not with what is not poetical in eighteenth-century verse, but with what is poetical in eighteenth-century poetry. There are two departments in which it is almost pre-eminent, in which it is certainly very distinguished. The strict poeticalness of both of them has indeed been denied by extremists. All of us probably have heard it said, perhaps some of us have said it ourselves, that rhetoric is not poetry; and (though here there may not have been so much agreement) that "light" verse, whether regularly satiric or not, is at best poetry by allowance and, short of the best, not poetry at all. Now undoubtedly some rhetoric is not poetry, and a good deal of light verse is poetry only by extremely generous allowance. But the complete ostracising of either kind from the poetical city involves two propositions which are contentious in the extreme, and which I and those who think with me hold to be abominable heresies. The one is that "All depends on the subject" in poetry, and the other is that "Verse is not an essential feature of poetry." We maintain that anything can be treated poetically, though some things are very rebellious to such treatment, and that though rhetoric is strictly a characteristic of prose, it cam be, so to speak, super-saturated with poetry when it adopts poetical form, the same contention extending to the subjects of satiric or of merely light verse. A great deal of the abundant rhetorical verse of the eighteenth century is no doubt not poetry, or not very poetical poetry, and a good deal of its abundant satire, not a very little of its vers de sociÉtÉ and trifles is not poetry or not very poetical. But, on the other hand, not a very little of both kinds is poetry, and the reason and origin of its poetical character are by no means uninteresting to trace. There is no room, and indeed not much occasion, to do this at length here. Suffice it to say that for its rhetorical verse the century was very much indebted to Dryden, and that for its light verse it was still more indebted to Prior.

The positions of the two were indeed different, for Dryden was a dead man when the century opened, though he had died on its very eve, while Prior was an actual member of its first great literary group. And, further, Dryden's influence, though it continued to some extent directly through the whole time, was largely exercised at second-hand through Pope, while Prior's was first-hand all through. For which reasons we need not say anything more here on Dryden himself, while we must say something on Prior. But the rhetorical influence which had produced such great poetry (for great it is, let who will gainsay) as the finest passages of Dryden's satires, the opening of Religio Laici, the "wandering fires" paragraph in The Hind and the Panther, and not a few things in the neglected plays, was well justified of its children in the following century. I have never seen any successful attempt to deny the name of poetry to such magnificent things as the close of The Dunciad and the close of The Vanity of Human Wishes. I have never seen any real fight at all made for this denial except the endeavour to turn them, as scapegoats, into the wilderness of rhetoric. And that, as I have said already, is really a begging of the question. Most certainly there is rhetoric which is not poetry—there is a very great deal of it—in fact most of it; as certainly there is rhetoric which is. And the passages which may claim that name in the eighteenth century, if never quite so great as the two just mentioned, are very numerous. There is that fine one in Tickell's epitaph on Cadogan which, after the eclipse of eighteenth-century verse in the earlier nineteenth, Thackeray was the first to rediscover:

with its later address to Fame herself:

There is Akenside's still finer Epistle to Curio, which Macaulay laughed at rather ignobly as unpractical. Well, Akenside, like Macaulay himself, was a Whig, and I am a Tory; nor are the ideals expressed in the following lines by any means mine. But if they are not fine lines, if they are not, though in one of the outer provinces no doubt, poetical, I will acknowledge that I know nothing at all about poetry:

Well, once more, Curio, alias Pulteney, was not true, but deserted Akenside's party and became Earl of Bath and possessor of no small part thereof. And private life and ardent youth were not reclaimed much in the days of the historic Charteris and the fictitious Lovelace. And the practical realisation of something like Akenside's undoubted principles and aspirations was the French Revolution fifty and the Russian Revolution nearer two hundred years later. But all this has nothing to do with the question whether in this passage also rhetoric, which hardly anybody will deny to it, has not passed under the influence and received the transforming force of poetry. I say it has, though I am perfectly willing to admit that it is not the best or the most poetical form of poetry, and that it is very far indeed from the forms that I myself like best. But one of the cries which the critic should never be tired of uttering, whether in the streets or in the wilderness, is that nothing is bad merely because it is different from another thing which is good, and that in this world there is no equality or fixed standard to which everything must be cut down or stretched out. The best rhetorical poetry of the eighteenth century is not the best poetry, but it is poetry in its own way, exhibiting the glow, the rush, the passion, which strict prose cannot, and which poetry can, give.

There is less specific prejudice against "light" poetry on the part of poetical highfliers than there is against poetical rhetoric, but there is some. Once more I venture to disallow this prejudice in toto as far as kind is concerned, though, of course, each individual specimen of that kind must pass its individual muster as a piece of intenser thought or feeling, expressed in appropriate language and inspired by the charm of verse-music. For that, though no one ever has defined or will define poetry, is one of the divers good approaches to a description of it. Now here, as was briefly said above, the eighteenth century possessed, for nearly the whole of its first quarter as an actual living practitioner, and for the whole of the rest of it as a past contemporary of still living persons, an unsurpassed general of light verse in Matthew Prior. On the whole I know few English poets who have so seldom had full justice done to them. No competent judge, indeed, has ever denied Prior's excellence in pure lightness, but there have been frequent failures to allow for that undercurrent of seriousness, sadness, and almost passion—that "feeling in earnest while thinking in jest," according to the best definition of humour—which characterises him. Thackeray has, indeed, equalled, but in obvious and even frank following, the great lines written (or not written) in MÉzeray's History of France; but hardly anyone else has come near them in irony and melancholy and music, blended as three appeals in one. There is even a touch, though more than a touch would have been out of place, in the famous Child of Quality, and a great deal more, not quite so perfectly expressed, in the Lines to Charles Montague. If the touch of sadness be for the moment unwelcome, there is Daphne and Apollo or the famous English Padlock, with a dozen or several dozen others ready to hand. And to go to yet another nuance, the recent discovery at Longleat of Jinny the Just, with its touches of sincere sorrow and the three unequalled stanzas of kindly irony:

especially with that last unsurpassable line; all these and many more exemplify and illustrate that indescribable raising of the expression—that making the common as if it were not common—which is the essence of poetry and the privilege of verse.

How this side of the matter was produced (in the mathematical sense) and maintained throughout the century would take many times the space of the present paper to show in anything but the briefest and barest epitome. Almost all Prior's own shorter later poems would have to be quoted; Swift, though so much greater in prose, and though best in verse on the severer side, especially in the magnificent and quite sufficiently authenticated Judgment Day verses, could not be left out; and it might be possible to make more fight than even lovers of the eighteenth century have recently made for Gray. But perhaps the scraps and orts of lesser men of letters—though sometimes not lesser men—show the strong point of the century even more convincingly. Where will you find more musical lightness of a certain easy but far from unpoetical kind than in those verses on Strawberry Hill in which Pulteney almost paid his rather heavy debts in more serious ways to the House of Walpole? Or than in the others in which he and Chesterfield combined to estimate "Hanover Bremen and Verden," that is to say, the whole continental dominions for which George the Second was making England fight, as worthless compared with the charms of Molly Lepell? Go lower still, take a professional littÉrateur and laureate like William Whitehead, to whom hardly anybody save Mr. Austin Dobson (and it is certainly no small exception) has been favourable, and read the piece on Celia, which is a more or less independent expansion of Ausonius on Crispa. It begins with a sort of pettish avowal of ignorance how the mischief of love came, and goes on with rather rude depreciations of the lady's face, figure, air, and even sense. Then it slides rapidly into a sort of grudging allowance:

and then capitulates headlong:

Trivial, of course, but then it ought to be trivial, and the trivial can be, and is, here super-trivialised.

One might go on, even in this skipping fashion, for a long time till one came to the great political satires of the close of the century, but once more time and space forbid. As it has been frivolously said:

(the standard ten volumes of eighteenth-century miscellaneous poetry) and you will find; though, of course, if you only look for bad things you will find them, too, in plenty. But even this collection is by no means exhaustive, and with some of the more famous verse-writers it does not deal at all; while we have in this survey confessedly left most of them alone. What has been intended is to show that making of the common uncommon by means of treatment in verse was not an unknown thing between 1700 and 1800; that it was attempted and achieved in various kinds. Finally, if the attempts were rarely and the achievements hardly ever in kinds that can be called the very highest, one may at least urge that there is not an absolute vacuum between the loftiest mountain-tops of poetry and the actual plain of prose—that Parnassus has lower slopes, some of which are not so very low