transcendentalism-often so artificial and affected-of later poets and painters. But the mysticism of his lyrics has very little that is really terrible, although much that is merely eccentric. They are delicate pieces of work, the worst of them marred by Ossianic frenzy, the best of them extremely perfect and simple. That their simplicity is bizarre and unusual, that they are full of the quality which has in more recent years been known as symbolism, that their concrete subjects are always pregnant with a mystery struggling into shape this is merely the distinctive feature of Blake's art. He lived in exaltation amid the unseen; his life was passed in a haze, as it were, of solemn fancy; and his lyrics were the principal link between himself and a world which was to his mind a shadowy projection of hidden and unfathomable secrets. BURNS § 13. That delight in the external aspect of nature, in the sights and sounds of the material world which had so abstract a meaning for Blake, ran riot in ROBERT BURNS, the greatest, beyond all comparison, of Scottish 4 ROBERT poets. He was the son of a small farmer of the (1759-1796). yeoman class, and was born at Alloway, about two miles south of Ayr. The state of popular education in Scotland was then in striking contrast to the general dulness and sleepiness of education in the rest of Europe; and Burns, partly by his father's wisdom, partly by his own zeal for knowledge, acquired a degree of learning which would have been surprising in any other country. He had a good general acquaintance with English literature; and, although he became essentially the poet of the Lowland vernacular, he could use the English of the Southron, and cultivated it not only in several poems but in his prose letters. His passions and instincts were unusually strong. The pastoral country which surrounded his birth-place was part of him from the very first, and filled him with poetry. While he laboured on his father's farm he was writing the lyrics which were the tangible expression of his whole nature, into which the fields and moors and the song of the northern birds had entered so early. Farming did not prove a very successful occupation. A joint venture with his brothers failed; and he had serious thoughts of leaving Scotland for the West Indies. It was in order to raise funds for his emigration that he published his poems in the Kilmarnock edition of 1786. They had a great local popularity, which spread to Edinburgh. He did not emigrate, but went to Edinburgh to publish a second edition, which brought him fame and made him the fashionable idol of the Scottish capital. Success was certainly bad for him. His misfortunes already had tempted him to drink and other vices, which, it is only fair to add, were thought very little of then, and have been as much exaggerated by later moralists; his popularity in Edinburgh proved a further snare, and unfitted him for returning to country life. His excesses, however, were the blemishes of a character which had far more independence and dignity than we are accustomed to think. At Edinburgh he fell into fresh embarrassments, and, after a happy and irregular winter, went to Ellisland in Dumfriesshire, married a girl called Jean Armour, and became partly farmer, partly exciseman. His duties in the Excise were arduous and badly paid, and, as may be imagined, did not tend to promote temperance. Moreover, he was so incautious in his praise of the French Revolution that he got into serious trouble with the Government and his admirers. His strong constitution was completely undermined; he lost money and became extremely poor, and died of a fever at Dumfries in 1796, while he was still in his thirty-eighth year. Burns' natural lyric genius: its relation to Scotland. Burns is, without qualification or exception, a Scottish poet; his verses in formal and uninspired English do not concern us. He could not write, like Milton, in one language as well as in another. Moreover, his connection with previous English poetry is absolutely non-existent ; his influence south of the Tweed is very slender. It was of Scotland and for Scotland that he wrote; and, so far as his work affected England, it was in teaching the lesson of sympathy with a race which the ordinary Englishman, separated from it by a thousand old rancours and differences, hitherto had misunderstood. Again, it is hardly necessary to say that there is nothing Ossianic in Burns. The Scottish element in Ossian, which is eminently superficial, comes from the far North and has nothing to do with Burns' part of the country. But Burns' genius, great as it is, is not altogether isolated; his deeply-rooted kinship with nature had precedent in that line of Lowland singers which had "kept the lamp of Doric song alight" all through the obscuring artificialities of the century, from the days of Francis Sempill to those of Robert Fergusson. Burns marks the point at which this slender but impetuous lyric stream, dashing in its narrow bed through far moorlands, broadens into a wider channel in Marmion and The Lady of the Lake, until it finds its escape into the great river of English poetry. For Burns, writing in a dialect unintelligible to Southern ears, is, in the first place, a parochial poet, a poet who can, perhaps, be fully understood and appreciated only by his own countrymen. Its wider relationships. We must not conclude, however, that he stands upon the ordinary level of local poets. The parish with which he identified himself was wide; it was a famous country, not so wild or romantic as the distant Highlands, but picturesque in no common degree. And every thing that is typically Scottish, from the Carse of Stirling to the Tweed, from Ayr and the Firth of Clyde to Leith and the coasts of Fife, is embodied and enshrined in Burns' lyrics. Shakespeare is no more the typical poet of England than Burns is of the Scottish Lowlands; and, just as one may find running through all Shakespeare's poetry the thread of Its humour: etc. his early impressions of Warwickshire and the vale of Avon, so, in Burns, the dominant note sounds from Ayrshire and its rural solitudes. To institute any comparison between Shakespeare and Burns would be ridiculous. But the touchstone of great poetry is its kinship to the Shakespearean spirit, the degree in which it approaches that rare and unrivalled grasp of nature, that criterion of true humour. In this respect few poets stand the test like Burns. His humour is of the broadest and, at the same time, of the most refined; "Tam-ohe has a perception of natural beauty which is most Shanter," delicate and yet most powerful; his style, with its negligence and fluency, is supremely finished. In these things, and, above all, in the complete harmony of robust merriment with tender pathos and in the human interest with which he invests material objects, Burns stands in the closest relation to Shakespeare. As a rule his poems are occasional lyrics, chiefly songs; he never wrote any long work; his most continuous pieces are his narratives and satires. Chief among his narratives is the famous Tam o' Shanter, the scene of which is his native place of Alloway. Tam, a drunken ne'er-do-weel of a horse-couper, traversing a dreary moor at that hour of night when, according to ancient tradition, all demons and witches have power, passes near the old ruined kirk of Alloway, and to his surprise finds it lighted up. He has taken, as we say, more than is good for him, and, under the influence of Dutch courage, steals close to the window, looks in, and sees the witches' sabbath in full swing. Unable to conceal his delight at the agility of one of the dancers, he attracts their attention and is pursued by the whole band until he can cross a running stream and so defeat their power of enchantment. He is just in time to escape, and the tail of his grey mare remains as a trophy in the hands of his pursuers. As a masterpiece of description and humour this jeu d'esprit stands first of Burns' longer poems. Another admirable piece, narrative in its general framework but set thick with glorious songs, is The Folly Beggars. Careless vagabond jollity, roaring mirth, and gipsy merriment have never been so well expressed; while, in spite of his disreputable subject, Burns never sinks to the vulgarity of artificial and unreal pieces like The Beggar's Opera; his ragged bacchanals are perfectly natural and even graceful. In his way, Burns was a moralist, and mixed up his humour with a good deal of easy religious speculation and more serious social philosophy. The Twa Dogs, for instance, discusses and compares elaborately the relative degree of virtue and happiness granted to the rich and the poor, and decides, with considerable justice, that the balance is fairly even. His description in this poem of the joys and consolations of the poor man's lot is repeated in the more generally popular Cotter's Saturday Night, which is written in stanzas and in a language less provincial. But just as in his native Doric Burns is always better than in his adopted English, so The Cotter's Saturday Night, much the best of his anglicised pieces, is inferior in broad accent and native pathos to The Twa Dogs. Certainly no nobler tribute than these two poems has ever been given to the virtues of the peasant class. Again, his singular command of pathos and humour can nowhere be better seen than in his poem dealing with rustic fortune-telling on Hallowe'en; in The Vision of Liberty, where he confides his early ambitions; in the wailing sorrow of the Lament for Glencairn; in Scotch Drink, the Haggis, the lines on Captain Grose, the Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson; in the description of the old ewe Mailie's death, and in the poet's address to his old mare. Examples of this same humour and truth to nature are seen in every page of Burns, and, from his shorter lyrics and songs, the famous lines, On Turning up a Mouse's Nest with the Plough, and the similar piece on the Mountain Daisy, must always remain the chief instances of his lyric tenderness and beauty. Burns' natural use of metre. The metrical form of Burns' songs, so various and so unconstrained, was admirably adapted to the spirit of his poetry. In verses like Duncan Gray there is absolutely no trace of forced or artificial feeling; the song lilts its way along to the simplest of tunes, without roulades or practised shakes; the form is exactly appropriate to the everyday subject; the lyric is direct, colloquial, and graceful. We could hardly expect that all the songs should reach this level, this intensity of feeling, this condensed force of picturesque expression, this admirable melody of flow. As has been said, when Burns wrote in English, he wrote as tamely as a school-boy at a Latin exercise. But the great bulk of his Scottish lyric verse gives little room for unfavourable discrimination. The song-writer has a very limited range of subject; he cannot go far beyond love, patriotism, and pleasure. Burns succeeded in the very difficult task of giving a practically limitless variety to this narrow repertory. The whole essence of a thousand love-poems is concentrated in the passionate song Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; the heroic outburst of patriotism in Scots wha hae wi Wallace bled is a lyric of true Tyrtæan force; while, in calmer moments of sadness and reminiscence, songs like Ye Banks and Braes form the bond of union between personal sentiment and the beauties of external nature. От again, in those old songs which he worked up or rewrote, fitting them to their traditional melodies, there is a power and freshness altogether new. If we look for defects we shall find them, not in his perfect command of natural form, but in such a coarseness of satire as we see in the personalities of Holy Willie's Prayer and The Holy Fair, in his artificial and at the same time very innocent republicanism, and, now and then-this is especially the case with the English poems-in a vulgar and misplaced ornament which stands in tawdry contrast to the general simplicity of his style, § 14. While these new forces were asserting themselves in poetry, the English drama, so far as any question of evolution is concerned, was at a standstill. Tragedy simply 1750-1800. died out. The fatal correctness of Addison's Cato Drama is a cheering and lively quality compared with the from ineptitude of Thomson's tragedies, the dreariness of Johnson's Irene, and the tame heroics of Home's once famous Douglas. But the century produced four great comedies. Of these Goldsmith's pair, to which we already have alluded, were by far the most original. Sheridan's, of which we are going to speak, were, in a great measure, brilliant and ingenious adaptations. However, apart from these, the century showed some talent for farce - writing. DAVID DAVID GARRICK GARRICK, the greatest actor since the days of (1717-1779). Burbage and Alleyn, was not himself without some talent of this kind, and, while he sedulously kept alive the great memories of the Elizabethan theatre, wrote or freely adapted comic pieces like The Lying Valet (1741) and Miss in her Teens (1747), and put on the stage plays like The Suspicious Husband (1747) of Benjamin Hoadly (a son of the latitudinarian bishop) and the High Life below Stairs (1759) of James Townley. Many of these amusing pieces were seen on the English stage until the modern growth of comedy crowded them out, while Garrick's adaptation (1766) of Wycherley's Country Wife still makes a periodical appearance. FOOTE The pedigree of eighteenth century farce is to be traced back to Vanbrugh through the intermediate stage of Colley Cibber, who was not precisely a genius, but nevertheless has been very badly slighted, and certainly managed to adapt and imitate the boisterous master of roaring comedy with considerable success. From Cibber there is a considerable descent to SAMUEL FOOTE, the merry-andrew who pleased his SAMUEL day with atrocious puns and immoderate caricature. One of his farces, The Mayor of Garratt (1763), lived longer than himself; but the majority of them rest in badlyprinted little books on the shelves of old libraries. Foote had very little sense of decency, and his humour is a poor vampedup edition of Vanbrugh's. Meanwhile, the moral tone of the stage had improved. Steele's comedies had shown that it was possible to be amusing without being indecent; Garrick's plays were a proof of the same thing. The age would not have tolerated The Country Wife, but it was pleased by The Country Girl. When Garrick joined GEORGE COLMAN, the elder, in The Clandestine Marriage (1766), they produced a play which certainly deserves an honourable place. Indeed, Mr. Gosse, a critic of eminent judgment in these matters, puts it above The Good-Natur'd Man. At the same time, while pieces like this and Goldsmith's comedies were a distinct and pleasant echo of the great postRestoration dramatists, the vogue of another kind of drama George COLMAN (1732-1794). |