The Scottish Augustans
A. M. Oliver
SOURCE: "The Scottish Augustans," in Scottish Poetry: A Critical Survey, edited by James Kinsley, Cassell and Company Ltd., 1955, pp. 119-49.[In the following essay, Oliver discusses eighteenth-century Scottish poetry written in English, faulting its didacticism and conventionality, and praising its original treatment of supernatural themes.]
The eighteenth-century Scots who wrote English verse, but little or no verse in Scots, are described conveniently by the title of this [essay]—conveniently, but inaccurately. In the sense in which Horace or Pope was Augustan, in poise, clear self-knowledge and serene self-esteem, in mastery of technique and consummate propriety of expression, in a word, in classical perfection, there are no Scottish Augustans. Nor are there many English. The eighteenth-century critics were the first to note the unsatisfactory character of eighteenth-century poetry:
Johnson voices Gray's lament more temperately, but no less decisively [in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1904)]: 'There was no poetry, nothing that towered above the common mark.' The nineteenth century, reacting violently, disliked its predecessor without much discrimination. The more dispassionate and painstaking studies of our own time modify the familiar picture, here and there, in detail, but leave it essentially unchanged. One emerges from an open-minded reading of [The Works of English Poets (1810), edited by Alexander Chalmers,] with a confirmed impression of immense copiousness and limited inspiration—'Though few can write, yet fewer can refrain'. Trivial themes were handled without urgency. Turning a copy of verses was a social accomplishment, and if the verses had a recognizable origin in Latin poetry, so much the better. Classical authority sanctioned the 'kinds'—epic, didactic, pastoral—which were cultivated side by side with the more congenial and adaptable satire and epistle. The authority of the classics was supported by the immense weight and prestige of Pope. Beside his splendid achievement the efforts of the 'rebels'—Lady Winchilsea, Akenside, even Collins—are slight and fragmentary. Devitalized and mechanical classicism, abortive and spurious romanticism—to how much verse of the period do these discouraging terms apply! They apply to verse by both Scots and English; but the Scots had, in addition, disadvantages peculiar to themselves.
Augustan poetry is central and metropolitan. The Scottish writers of the eighteenth century, drawn along that 'no-blest prospect' by the centripetal force of London, were drawn too late; they had spent their formative and impressionable years far from the circumference of wit. Their origins lay in another country, and this marks their verse both for good and bad.
Geography, common sense and expediency triumphed, in the Union of 1707, over history and sentiment. Sentiment had been more accurately reflected in the Act of Security and the Alien Act, passed, by Scotland and by England respectively, not three years before they became, in law but not in love, a United Kingdom. Swift greeted the Act of Union with contempt:
Blest revolution! which creates
Divided hearts, united states!
See how the double nation lies;
Like a rich coat with skirts of frize.
Poverty was indeed the chief Scottish motive for union, and Thomson, in so frequently celebrating British wealth and commerce, is sensibly enjoying the mess of pottage for which a birthright had been paid. The Scots had little else with which to pay. Their blend of poverty with pride had long been disliked by the English, but Skelton, in attacking it, had the advantage of detesting an enemy. The eighteenth-century Englishman, beholding it on nearer view, was not less repelled. Poverty had prevented travel and intercourse in the early, impressionable years. It had not, as would have been the case in England, prevented formal education. Had it done so, the Scots might have stayed at home, or filtered quietly south to fulfil humble and unassuming rôles in the rigidly stratified society of eighteenth-century England. In fact, the Scots who crossed the Border tended to be able men of sound education and narrow culture and experience, whose blend of pride and poverty, self-assurance and self-distrust, was unfamiliar and disconcerting. They were regarded as foreigners, and, in their mutual support and admiration, their haunting of the 'Breetish' coffeehouse, as foreigners they acted. The London Scottish displayed a team spirit which was natural but tactless. Their speech was not English, but it was close enough to it to irritate rather than to endear.
They felt their identity, and unluckily they showed it. The feeling of separateness was intensified by regret. Arbuthnot's A Sermon preach'd to the people at the Mercat-Cross of Edinburgh; on the subject of the Union is cool and rational. It explains succinctly to the Scots what solid advantages they will reap, what illusory shadows they sacrifice. Arbuthnot himself is consistently pleased. His family history, his success and popularity, his happy and adaptable nature ensured this. But throughout the century there is audible an undertone of sadness. It is more than an undertone in John Ramsay's final words on Dundas of Arniston. 'He left it to younger men to bow to the Dagon of English taste. Though Scotland had lost its rank among the nations, he could say, as the Trojan did of his country after the fall, "Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens gloria Teucrorum.'" The least sentimental were moved, at times, to mourn the end of an auld sang. Smollett refers unemotionally in his prose to North Britain, but, when facit indignatio versum, he names his verse The Tears of Scotland. 'Butcher' Cumberland on the one hand, Bute and his placemen on the other, helped to increase the strain of which Churchill's satire and Johnson's obiter dicta are merely the most amusing and celebrated evidences. Of course, there were personal friendships; no one was more charming to individual Scots than Johnson was. But one can love a sinner while not ceasing to hate the sin. Before Walter Scott made of the national marriage of convenience a friendly, tolerant and civilized companionship, a century of uneasy adjustment and hearty dislike was to elapse.
This was an unfavourable atmosphere for poetry, especially for Augustan poetry, which is so largely a social growth, depending on and addressed to an audience of equals. The Scot, writing in this atmosphere, was further handicapped by writing in a language which was not his mother-tongue. To say so is easy; fully to realize the fact, and its implications, is not so easy. To the educated Scot of the early and mid-century, who used the dialect in all his familiar relationships, who lectured in and listened to Latin on formal occasions, English was not even a second but actually a third language. It was deliberately learned, chiefly by study of the Tatler, the Spectator and the Guardian. 'Those admirable papers prepared the minds of our countrymen for the study of the best English authors, without a competent knowledge of which no man was accounted a polite scholar'. Ramsay goes on to say [in Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century (1888)] that to render the dialect 'polished and correct would have been a Herculean labour, not likely to procure them much renown. Nothing, therefore, remained but to write classical English, which, though exceedingly difficult to men who spoke their mother-tongue without disguise, was greatly facilitated by the enthusiastic ardour with which they studied the best English authors.' The distinction drawn between classical English and the mother-tongue is vital to an understanding of the Scottish Augustans. They acquired English as Wordsworth acquired Greek and Latin. His view of the process, and its results, is relevant and illuminating:
In fine,
I was a better judge of thoughts than words,
Misled in estimating words, not only
By common inexperience of youth,
But by the trade in classic niceties,
The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
From languages that want the living voice
To carry meaning to the natural heart;
To tell us what is passion, what is truth,
What reason, what simplicity and sense.
[The Prelude]
Their prose models were excellent, and the Scots learned to write good English prose. 'The Scotch write English wonderfully well,' Johnson commented in sending thanks to Dr. Blair for his sermons. One need look no further than Burns's letters (not, of course, his stilted and pretentious letters to Clarinda) for proof of this. But it was the result of constant vigilance. 'In all their essays at composition, it behoved them to avoid everything that could be called a Scotticism or solecism.' Intelligence, care and enthusiasm did much, but they could not defeat nature. Lord Mansfield told Alexander Carlyle that when he read Hume and Robertson 'he did not think he was reading English.'
One cannot doubt that the effort to attain an English prose style was right and necessary. The 'literature of knowledge' must be expressed with as little obstruction as possible, as much lucidity. The eighteenth-century Scots were responding, as the English had done in the sixties of the seventeenth century—and for much the same reasons—to 'the imperious need of a fit prose'. But constant watchfulness, nervous fear of the instinctive and spontaneous phrase, uneasy unfamiliarity and reference to the dictionary (Boswell even consults it in writing his love letters!) make an atmosphere unpropitious to poetry. The living word of 'race' and character is struck out in favour of the safe one. The temptation to write about it and about is overwhelming: many words will surely include the right one. Sometimes they do so, but the result is usually tiresome and distracting over-painting. The writing of familiar verse is impossible in an unfamiliar tongue, and the Scots poets give us little corresponding to the easy, natural verse of Swift or Prior. Burns in his verse epistles, even Beattie in 'To Mr. Alexander Ross', show how admirably they could do it in dialect. Their native fun and humour, so characteristic of their native verse, is paralysed by the strain of writing English. [Burns writes in the letter to G. Thomson of October 19, 1794]: 'These English Songs gravel me to death.—I have not that command of the language that I have of my native tongue.' Burns does not merely state the problem; he illustrates the strangling effect in his passages of English verse—'A Winter Night' might have been specially written to display the contrast between the quick and the dead. What is bad in Burns is worse in Beattie, Smollett, Wilkie—all his many compatriots so incomparably less gifted with poetic power. To neglect the mother-tongue is to attain frigidity, or rhetoric, or dull tameness. The appropriate criterion of the Scottish Augustan verse is not, perhaps, the English verse of contemporary Englishmen, but their poemata.
In a study on this scale it would be pointless to resurrect what is dead, and what indeed never had genuine life, whether it be conventional inanity, like the mechanical lyrics which so strangely contrast, in Smollett's novels, with the vital prose of their context, or whether it be the painful effort of misdirected zeal, like Wilkie's classical epic on the siege of Thebes. Nothing would be easier or more entertaining—at least for the writer—than to poke fun at Wilkie's Epigoniad—and nothing could be more useless. It is bad, and everyone has always thought so, except for the Dundas clique who seized it as a stick to beat John Home, and for David Hume, who largely confines himself to retelling the story more clearly than Wilkie does, and whose description of it as 'a performance which may, perhaps, be regarded as one of the ornaments of our language' is remarkable for its judicious qualifying word. The writer devoid of poetic gift, who nevertheless wrote verse for exercise or amusement, offers only the interest of curiosity—and this will be sufficient notice of Boswell's verse output, such as 'The Cub, at Newmarket: a Tale', the undergraduate wit of his metrical effusions to Andrew Erskine, or his nightly five couplets in Holland. But the Scottish Augustans include not merely poetasters. Some were poets, and this preliminary view of the common predicament may help towards an understanding of the imperfect and unsatisfactory nature of much of their work.
Most of the defects and virtues of these Scottish poets are apparent in Thomson. His 'outset', to borrow one of Ramsay's favourite terms, was typical—a son of the manse, a manse set in the austere and beautiful Border countryside, he found
Caledonia stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child.
He was fifteen before he left Southdean for Edinburgh University, to study classics and theology, and almost twenty-five before he left Scotland for London. In Edinburgh he had belonged to a club for the study of English. In London he was helped by friendly Scots. The pattern of education, poverty, courage, ambition, emigration and success is familiar, although Macpherson and Beattie visit England after achieving success, and Blair, Wilkie and Blacklock remain in Scotland. But, in intention and aspiration at least,
Frae the cottar to the laird
We a' rin South.
[Beattie, "To Mr. Alexander Ross"]
Thomson met with immediate recognition (there were four editions of Winter in 1726) and a widespread popularity which lasted throughout the century and beyond. This popularity sprang from his tactful blending of the familiar with the strange. The themes which Wordsworth was to present in their own right are served by Thomson as dressings rather than as main dishes. His autobiographical references, for example, are rare and brief. We read of his cheerful morn of youth by the banks of Jed, and wish he had told us more. It is possible to feel that Wordsworth has told us more than we desire or deserve. The contemporary reader who opened The Seasons found nothing to startle or repel. He found a descriptive and meditative poem which acknowledged its debt to the Georgics and to 'Pomona's bard' (and was indeed written, like Philips's Cider, in blank verse, which, being 'English Heroic Verse without Rime', was clearly appropriate where the ultimate model was in hexameters). He found, too, something not unlike Coopers Hill, Claremont and Windsor Forest, majestically defined by Johnson [in his Lives of the Poets (1779-81)] as 'local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection, or incidental meditation.' Thomson's 'particular landscapes' are many, his survey is global rather than local, but the rest of the definition beautifully covers The Seasons. The 'embellishments' are added with a hand so ungrudging that the poem becomes a miscellany—and the eighteenth century loved miscellanies.
The groundwork is of course natural description, and in the context of Wordsworth's undisputed dictum that 'excepting the nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and the "Seasons" does not contain a single new image of external nature' [Wordsworth, "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface"], one may realize the novelty and attraction of the poem. The familiar—the revolution of the year, the effects of the changing seasons on every form of life—is presented with fidelity. The truth of Thomson's descriptions is a critical truism. His memory was stored with closely observed images; his familiar scenes are full of life and movement. Imagination supplements these with others which are sometimes, as in the incident of Sir Hugh Willoughby's ship icebound in the Arctic seas (Winter, 11. 925-35), powerfully rendered.
This incident is a very favourable specimen of another ingredient of Thomson's mixture, the inserted tales. Like the narrative papers which diversified the contemporary periodical essay, these gratified the universal love of a story. Thomson's tales, diffuse and sentimental, are in the sharpest contrast with Pope's. The story of Sir Balaam is merum sal; only the reader who knows the Book of Job will fully realize its point and power, and the implication of its climax, 'sad Sir Balaam curses God'. Thomson's stories can be read with relaxed attention, and their point—such as it is—is obvious. Easy and undemanding reading, they gave mild and widespread pleasure for a time. They appeared in anthologies. The story of Palemon and Lavinia, for example (Autumn, 11. 177-310), was one of Goldsmith's Beauties of English Poesy, though Goldsmith claims little responsibility for this: 'It is rather given here for being much esteemed by the public, than the editor.' Wordsworth attributes much of Thomson's popularity to these tales. 'In any wellused copy of the "Seasons" the book generally opens of itself with the rhapsody on love, or with one of the stories (perhaps "Damon and Musidora").' If the celebrated copy found in the inn at Linton thus opened of itself, there may have been some irony in Coleridge's exclamation, 'That is true fame!'
The sugary flavour of the tales is offset by the more solid fare of Thomson's learning. His interest in Newtonian physics is deep and genuine, he knows how natural appearances are created, and he loves to instruct his reader. 'The swain' wonders at the bright enchantment of the rainbow, but Thomson knows its woof, its texture:
Here, awful Newton, the dissolving clouds
Form, fronting on the sun, thy showery prism;
And to the sage-instructed eye unfold
The various twine of light, by thee disclosed
From the white mingling maze.
Thomson had already treated the subject in A Poem, Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, where thirty lines of accurate description of the composition of the rainbow reach a climax in 'How just, how beauteous, the refractive law.' The catalogue of spring flowers contains a botanical note:
From family diffused
To family, as flies the father-dust,
The varied colours run.
To the cause of instruction Thomson sacrifices much—too much. With
Sudden the fields
Put on their winter-robe of purest white
he had evoked a visual image of the swift transformation wrought by snow; it was the simple, the inspired stroke of an artist. But it gave no information about the function of snow, so the image was blurred in favour of 'The cherished fields'. In the description of the hunted hare he spoils a passage of simple and vivid writing by one didactic touch:
The fallow ground laid open to the sun Concoctive.
The poet had fixed our attention on the plight of the hare; we can only resent the interference of the scientist.
Thomson is a preacher as well as a teacher:
These, as they change, Almighty Father! these
Are but the varied God. The rolling year
Is full of Thee.
His religious feeling is related rather to the dignity and gentlemanliness of Addison than to the emotionalism of Isaac Watts. But Thomson is impressed not only by the spacious firmament on high. He notes
where gloomily retired
The villain spider lives, cunning and fierce,
Mixture abhorred!
He watches the sleeping dogs, and guesses their dreams.
Nor shall the muse disdain
To let the little noisy summer-race
Live in her lay and flutter through her song;
Not mean though simple.
He accepts them all with affection and appreciation, and is quite unstirred by them to 'thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears'. His train of thought is easy enough to follow:
Behold, fond man!
See here thy pictured life: pass some few years,
Thy flowering Spring, thy Summer's ardent strength,
Thy sober Autumn fading into age,—
And pale concluding Winter comes at last
And shuts the scene.
Such thinking is neither original nor profound. It has the qualities which Johnson noted in Gray's Elegy, and it helps to explain Thomson's popularity. Beside the awful universality of 'Man that is born of a woman', and the piercing, immediate particularity of 'It is Margaret you mourn for' [G.M. Hopkins, "Spring and Fall"], Thomson's moralizing is conventional and trite. It is politely in keeping with a general poem addressed to the general reader, dedicated to a patron and nicely blended to suit all tastes.
In his choice of theme for his first considerable poem Thomson draws on Scottish tradition. Henryson's description of winter in 'The Preiching of the Swallow', the opening of his Testament of Cresseid and Douglas's Prologues are unforgettable in their intensity. They point forward to Burns,
While winds frae aff Ben Lomond blaw,
And bar the doors wi' driving snaw,
And hing us owre the ingle;
and Thomson, though he has (alas!) denied himself their unfettered expression of elemental feeling, yet writes as one having authority. Winter in Scotland can still be harsh and paralysing; in the eighteenth century 'in the more remote parts of the country, for five or six months in the year, social intercourse was almost impossible'. Smollett comments that 'there is no such convenience as a waggon in this country'—because there was scarcely a road fit to bear wheeled traffic. The effect of winter's rigour was to isolate its victims in small, self-contained groups, thrown each upon itself for mutual comfort and support. The sorrows of each member were shared, in sympathy, by all. Thomson's picture of the shepherd lost in the snow, of his family awaiting him in vain, is based on knowledge and is full of feeling, as are his studies of the sufferings inflicted by winter upon birds and animals. Within the isolated groups an intense social intercourse flourished, all the more precious for the misery without. Beside the brilliance and hilarity of 'The Farmer's Ingle', 'The Jolly Beggars' and 'Tam o' Shanter', Thomson's description of village night-life in winter is decorous, yet it suggests what that life meant to the people, and how rich it must have been in inspiration to the young poet, with its jests and games, its traditional music and dancing, and the 'goblin story' arousing superstitious horror. There is vitality here, in contrast to the preachifying and abstract passage, immediately following, on the city's night life. Thomson's studies of peasant life, slight as they are in bulk, and given neither local habitation nor name, initiate a tradition which includes Gray, Goldsmith and Cowper, and culminates in Wordsworth. With the peasants he associates the supernatural, obviously too crude an element to be presented directly in the Age of Reason. It is a shepherd of the Hebrid Isles who sees the miraculous vision.
Winter brought an intensified and concentrated social life. Further, it threw each man upon his own resources. Thomson's response [in Testament and Winter] to the fierce and isolating season recalls Henryson's:
The contrast between them is more significant than the superficial resemblance. Henryson writes in the confidence and power of a native tradition; his 'Quair', moreover, is the mainspring and inspiration of his poem. But Thomson's 'high converse with the mighty dead' is but an excuse for a catalogue of Greek and Roman worthies, a hundred lines long, in the manner of Liberty. It is as creditable to the author's reading and general knowledge as it is otiose and irrelevant to his poem.
Summer, Spring and Autumn resulted from the success of Winter, which is unique in its Scottish character and in the fact that Thomson wrote it with no thought of making up a set. The others are sequels, assembled, if not constructed, after the manner of the prototype. Summer, for example, includes an excursion to the tropics, as Winter has one to the far North. The poem suffers from its length; matter which in a single 'season' might have passed as relevant is instantly seen to be padding. How far from organic much of it is is clear from Thomson's transferring sections from one 'season' to another. Winter is a fair specimen of The Seasons, in the variety of its content, its accurate natural description, humanitarian exhortation, anecdotal spicings, classical references, contemporary ideas, moralizing reflections and piety. There is something for everyone, and Thomson fed the appetite he created. For Winter may finally be taken as representative in the fact that Thomson revised it unceasingly. The first edition (1726) contained 405 lines; in the first complete edition of The Seasons (1730), Winter had 781 lines, and in Thomson's final edition (1746) it had 1069. The figures are striking, but only a first-hand comparison of the many editions can give any idea of the nature and extent of Thomson's rewriting. The Seasons was a different poem at different times, as Wordsworth found to his satisfaction when he maintained that 'the true characteristics of Thomson's genius as an imaginative poet' were by no means those which were earliest or most widely recognized.
Thomson's fundamental weakness, both in content and in style, is his inability to discriminate. A true Augustan, he is alive to the poet's responsibility to teach, to exhort, to be actively a man of his time. Thus he loads his Muse with luggage so heavy and so awkward that movement is difficult and soaring impossible. The Castle of Indolence, which relates the destruction of sensuous pleasure by respectable industry, is a convenient symbol of his whole poetic output. The reader swallows—or skips—the didactic passages of The Seasons for the sake of the descriptive; but Liberty is a purely didactic poem with narrative illustrations. In the tradition of Addison's A Letter from Italy, the first three parts provide a condensed classical education, a synopsis of the history and culture of Greece, with a sermon on the reasons for its decay and fall, an approving précis of early Roman history with moralizings on Patience, Hope, Moderation and Independence. The history of Britain, with its extremely unfavourable view of the Stuarts and its adulation of William III—'Than hero more, the patriot of mankind!'—makes the reader feel that it was lucky for Thomson that Johnson so early desisted from his perusal of Liberty.
Part V is a summary and restatement of Thomson's purpose, a lecture on the excellence of the British constitution:
Then was the full, the perfect plan disclos'd
Of Britain's matchless constitution, mixt
Of mutual checking and supporting powers,
King, lords and commons.
Only luxury can hurt it:
Britons! be firm!—nor let corruption sly
Twine round your heart indissoluble chains!
For luxury, 'Rapacious, cruel, mean, Mother of vice', caused the fall of Rome and its 'softer shackles' destroyed Venice. Like the preacher on sin, Thomson is 'agin' luxury. It is the peroration of Britannia,
Oh, let not then waste Luxury impair
That manly soul of toil,
and the burden (in every sense) of Liberty, whom he invokes at the close of Part I:
While I, to nobler than poetic fame
Aspiring, thy commands to Britons bear.
This is an explicit admission that Thomson has served two masters, and has preferred one of them to poetry. Poetry has taken its revenge.
Thomson's patriotic zeal for industry and commerce, which fills such vast tracts of his work, has one permanent memorial. Britons may no longer read his injunction to venerate the plough, or gratify themselves with the thought that the Knight of Arts and Industry chose their island as his favourite spot, in which, having approved the soil, the climate and the genius of the land, he 'Bade social commerce raise renownèd marts', and to which he then called the drooping muses. But more than two centuries after the publication of Alfred, a Masque they can still sing 'Rule, Britannia' with a vigour and feeling before which 'criticism is suspended.'
Thomson has always been the poet of The Seasons. This is unfortunate, for, despite the abiding worth of some parts of that monumental miscellany, The Castle of Indolence is finer and more sustained poetry. Thomson wrote it at leisure over the last years of his life, when he was no longer a writer on his probation; he wrote it when he was relatively at ease with English, and in any case his model is Spenser's 'no language'. Here he has spared himself the effort of striving after a grand style in an idiom partly contemporary and partly Miltonic. The first canto reads like Spenser himself, or like Keats:
The rooms with costly tapestry were hung,
Where was inwoven many a gentle tale,
Such as of old the rural poets sung
Or of Arcadian or Sicilian vale.
Sometimes he anticipates one of Coleridge's lovelier effects:
He ceased. But still their trembling ears retained
The deep vibrations of his 'witching song.
Some vibrations of The Castle of Indolence, with its bickering streams and woods in summer moonlight, may be audible in The Ancient Mariner.
The Seasons tends to exhaustiveness. It would be a captious reader who complained that some aspect of any season, dear and familiar to him, had been ignored in Thomson's survey. In Spring, the list of 'the tuneful nations' includes ten different kinds of bird in sixteen lines. Thomson has indeed been 'prodigal of harmony'. In The Castle of Indolence he mentions only two bird-songs among the natural sounds which bring sleep:
And now and then sweet Philomel would wail,
Or stockdoves 'plain amid the forest deep,
That drowsy rustled to the sighing gale.
He has learned to select. He is no longer straining every nerve, and his poem in consequence has free and spontaneous life. The memories of boyhood—
What transport to retrace our boyish plays,
Our easy bliss, when each thing joy supplied,—
The woods, the mountains, and the warbling maze
Of the wild brooks!
—and the personal references to his friends, emphasize the poem's informality. With infectious gaiety he celebrates that indolence which was his natural bent and of which he officially disapproved. In the first canto he neither teaches nor preaches. He is as far removed from his didactic and edifying self as is the shepherd of the Hebrid Isles in the astonishing thirtieth stanza which moved Joseph Warton to rapture and can surely never be read without emotion. He is on holiday, but holidays must end. He pulls himself together and reassumes the familiar rôle of moralist and sage. The Knight of Arts and Industry triumphs, the colour and light are extinguished, the enchantment disappears, 'Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show'.
Eighteenth-century verse as a whole suffers from the habit of deliberately clothing thought with style. The clothes are often ill-chosen and ill-fitting, despite Pope's warning that they are 'more decent, as more suitable' ["An Essay on Criticism"]. Thomson is an outstanding example, and from the first his readers have drawn a clear distinction between what he says and how he says it. [In his "Epistle to Mr. Thomson"] Somervile considered his faults mere spots in the sun, but advised their removal:
Read Philips much, consider Milton more;
But from their dross extract the purer ore.
To coin new words, or to restore the old,
In southern bards is dangerous and bold;
But rarely, very rarely, will succeed,
When minted on the other side of Tweed.
Let perspicuity o'er all preside—
Soon shalt thou be the nation's joy and pride.
Joseph Warton called him 'a favourite author, and who would have been a first-rate poet, if his style had been equal to his conceptions'. Coleridge judged that 'Thomson was a great poet, rather than a good one; his style was as meretricious as his thoughts were natural', and Wordsworth that 'notwithstanding his high powers, he writes a vicious style.'
This formidable chorus, from which but a few voices have been selected, had been opened by the Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh who rebuked Thomson for the 'poetically splendid' language he used in explaining a psalm. He seems to have been incapable of effective self-criticism. His fault was not carelessness—far from it. He did not need Somervile's hint—
Why should thy Muse, born so divinely fair,
Want the reforming toilet's daily care?
—or, rather, he misapplied it, and added cosmetics where an astringent or a sponge would have met the case. His rhythms are monotonous. Even the notorious 'O Sophonisba! Sophonisba, O!' is paralleled by 'No, fair illusions! artful phantoms, no!' Too often he repeats the effect of
See where the winding vale its lavish stores,
Irriguous, spreads!
and
'Mid the bright group Sincerity his front,
Diffusive, rear'd.
These phrases illustrate his fondness for the Latin polysyllable, especially for opening the line, and for adjectives ending in -ive (effusive, amusive, afflictive, conjunctive) and -ous (sequacious, auriferous, umbrageous, ovarious). Thomson's respect for Latin—and for Milton—leads to some frigidity and obscurity in his English. If 'in cheerful error let us tread the maze', or 'the latent Damon', give nothing more than a moment's regretful amusement, 'inspect sage' has to be deliberately translated to 'wise insight'. 'Ceres void of pain' (crops produced without trouble) evokes memories of one of the tenderest passages of human feeling in Paradise Lost:
…. Which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world….
The grief of the bereaved mother is real to Milton, and Ceres is a living and suffering creature. She is real and alive, too, the triumphant embodiment of natural vitality, in Pope: 'laughing Ceres re-assume the land'. Thomson's phrase is mechanical, dead and literary.
He overloads his line with epithet—'Her full-assembled youth innumerous swarm'd'—and with compound words:
Foul ministers, dark-working by the force
Of secret-sapping gold.
There is too much rhetorical question, exclamation, exhortation and apostrophe: too much for the reader's patience, or to need illustration. Occasionally, and with an unintended comic effect, Thomson answers his rhetorical questions:
—was there no father, robbed
Of blooming youth to prop his withered age?
No son … no friend, forlorn?
…
No:—Sad o'er all profound dejection sat.
He closes Liberty V with a long series of Lo! See! Behold! Hark! as the prospect of future times unrolls before him. His poetic diction—'plumy people', 'finny race', 'glossy kind'—is notorious. But even into such conventionalities as these he can sometimes infuse feeling, as when he describes the sheep driven into the pool as 'the soft fearful people', or when, writing of the silkworm, he provides a kind of crossword-puzzle clue:
And let the little insect-artist form,
On higher life intent, its silken tomb.
This highly characteristic blend of periphrasis, accurate description and tenderness of heart is present also in his injunction to the fisherman to throw back into the stream 'the speckled infant.' The faults of Thomson's style—verbosity, declamation, the piling-up of epithet, insensitivity and monotony—are cruelly and conveniently obvious in his 'Paraphrase en the latter part of the sixth chapter of St. Matthew':
Say, does not life its nourishment exceed?
And the fair body its investing weed?
Behold! and look away your low despair—
See the light tenants of the barren air:
…
Observe the rising lily's snowy grace,
Observe the various vegetable race….
Even his variation on the theme in The Castle of Indolence (i. 73-90, where 'the merry minstrels of the morn' have a vitality denied 'the light tenants of the barren air') is long-winded and clumsy beside the simplicity of the original.
But Thomson is capable of felicities; he notes the redbreast's 'slender feet', and the 'many-twinkling leaves of aspen'. His wallflower is deservedly famous, and there is an equal precision in
auriculas, enrich'd
With shining meal o'er all their velvet leaves.
He is notably successful in rendering the sound and movement of water. The sea in all its moods resounds in his poetry, from 'The murmuring main was heard, and scarcely heard, to flow' to
Where the Northern Ocean in vast whirls
Boils round the naked melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.
The closing phrase, with its echo of 'Lycidas', suggests the poet to whom Thomson is indebted for some of his finest effects—including his splendid use of place-names—as well as some of his worst. Under the impact of grief he writes the language of the heart. His significantly named 'Verses. Occasion'd by the Death of Mr. Aikman, a particular friend of the Author's' may stand with Johnson's 'On the Death of Mr. Robert Levet' as an unaffected, deeply felt expression of sorrow:
As those we love decay, we die in part,
String after string is sever'd from the heart;
Till loosen'd life, at last, but breathing clay,
Without one pang is glad to fall away.
Unhappy he, who latest feels the blow,
Whose eyes have wept o'er every friend laid low,
Drag'd ling'ring on from partial death to death,
Till, dying, all he can resign is breath.
Among the earliest of the Scottish Augustans, Thomson is incomparably the most important. He showed his compatriots that success could be won, and how it could be won. His boldness in using blank verse and the Spenserian stanza encouraged others. His themes were taken up by other writers, and it would be difficult to name any notable Scottish contribution to eighteenth-century English poetry which does not owe its hint to Thomson. True, he writes few genuine epistles, but there is little that is noteworthy in those of Armstrong, Mickle, Blacklock or Beattie; he writes no formal verse translations, though here and there he embeds a passage of translation in his own work. His rendering in Liberty of the close of the great Regulus ode is diffuse and weak, but what translation in an uninflected tongue could match that original? Thomson writes very little satire, but what he does (for example, the lines in The Castle of Indolence on earthly vanity) is well done, which is more than can be said for Mallet's 'Of Verbal Criticism', Falconer's 'The Demagogue', Smollett's Advice and Reproof, Blacklock's 'Advice to the Ladies' or Beattie's wretched attack on Churchill's memory. The vein which Thomson opened in the treatment of Scottish scenes and the supernatural was to be exploited with increasing confidence by his successors. Of more immediate effect was his lead in didactic verse.
Arbuthnot, more than thirty years older than Thomson, may have composed [Know Yourself] before Thomson could write at all; 'wrote several years before', it was published in 1734. It is convenient to group it with Scottish didactic verse, but it is more philosophical than instructive, related to De Rerum Natura rather than to the Georgics. The author is concerned with the hybrid and enigmatical nature of man, part animal and part divine. His poem is valuable, not so much for its literary quality as for the light it throws on the serious interests of Arbuthnot, and on his character. He was one of the most attractive figures of the age, witty, kind and unassuming. Swift found in him 'every quality and virtue that can make a man amiable or useful', and the news of his death 'struck [him] to the heart.' Pope's Epistle is but the most celebrated of the tributes paid him by the discerning, such as Berkeley, Gay and Chesterfield. But no member of the Scriblerus Club was safe from attack, and though James Moore Smyth's One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope, occasion'd by Two Epistles, lately published (1730) is merely entertaining in its abuse of Arbuthnot as a quack, and a 'puzzling, plodding, prating, pedant Scot', there is some justification for his couplet on
The grating scribbler! whose untuned Essays
Mix the Scotch Thistle with the English Bays.
Arbuthnot, unlike Thomson, paid little attention to style. He is strenuously occupied with the subject of Know Yourself, and where the printed text varies from his original manuscript it is for the purpose of expressing his thought with greater clarity and precision. There are incidental stylistic improvements: for example, in his account of metabolism 'The Fabrick changd; the Tenant still remains' becomes 'The mansion changed, the tenant still remains', where the kinship of the words from an identical root (maneo) sharpens the antithesis of the thought. More characteristic of the poem as a whole is his rewriting of the passage on the Bible:
Stupendous is thy power; Ï light divine
The sons of darkness tremble at each Line.
Black doubt, & Hell-Born error shun thy Ray
As tardy sprights are startled at the day.
Thow cleard the secret of my high descent,
Thow told me what those Motly tokens meant.
This appeared in the printed version as:
Thus the benighted traveller that strays
Through doubtful paths, enjoys the morning rays;
The nightly mist, and thick descending dew,
Parting, unfold the fields, and vaulted blue.
'O divine! enlightened by thy ray,
I grope and guess no more, but see my way;
Thou clear'dst the secret of my high descent,
And told me what those mystic tokens meant.'
The reader may regret the elimination of the sprights, while admitting their merely decorative character. The image of the benighted traveller clarifies the thought, and directly recalls Religio Laid, which the poem so closely resembles in its honest attempt to measure a problem of vital significance, and to reach a solution. Like Dryden too, Arbuthnot might have said:
Thus have I made my own Opinions clear:
Yet neither Praise expect, nor Censure fear:
And this unpolish'd, rugged Verse, I chose;
As fittest for Discourse, and nearest Prose.
[Dryden, Religio Laid]
Johnson's comment on lines by Richard Bentley the elder is wholly applicable to Arbuthnot's poem: 'they are the forcible verses of a man of a strong mind, but not accustomed to write verse; for there is some uncouthness in the expression.'
There is uncouthness of expression in Armstrong too, despite his more extensive practice in verse. (We cannot guess, of course, how many of Arbuthnot's papers, handed to his children for kite-making, may have been poetical compositions.) Both men, like Grainger and Smollett, were doctors of medicine. The first of Dr. Theobald's two Odes, 'Ad ingenuum Virum, turn medicis, turn poeticis, facultatibus praestantem, Johannem Armstrong, M.D.', opens with a neatly turned variant of the common compliment on a twofold kinship with Apollo:
Artisque Coae Ï et Citharae sciens,
Utroque mirè dexter Apolline!
The Art of Preserving Health is admirable in its seriousness, its effective organization and the power of much of its writing. Armstrong was conscious of the intractability of his material. He invokes Hygeia's help to steer him 'Thro' paths the Muses never trod before', because
'Tis hard, in such a strife of rules, to choose
The best, and those of most extensive use;
Harder in clear and animated song
Dry philosophic precepts to convey.
In the subject of diet he sees
A barren waste, where not a garland grows
To bind the Muse's brow.
Forced to make his own garlands, he weaves them of classical mythology, of passages on flowers and sunlight and music, of resounding rhetoric on the inevitability of old age and the transience of all things. Like Thomson, he uses place-words with rich effect:
the Babylonian spires are sunk;
Achaia, Rome and Egypt moulder down.
Like him, and indeed like most of these Scottish Augustans, he is moved by Scots place-names to tender autobiographical writing; his lines on the 'romantic groves' and 'fairy banks' of Liddel where he bathed and fished 'when life was new' stand with Smollett's 'To Leven-Water' as evidence of feeling unaffected by distance, absence or time.
With Armstrong, vocation and avocation are one. His verse is penetrated by his professional zeal. A Day—an epistle to Wilkes—is full of advice on matters of health, and the four stanzas which end Canto I in The Castle of Indolence were contributed by him. The portrait of Armstrong (I. lx) in this poem is that of a shy and silent man, and Alexander Carlyle, who noted his 'sarcastical vein', tells us that he 'was naturally glumpy'. Clearly he had nothing of Arbuthnot's happy charm; but he shared his power and honesty. His contemporaries admired him—except for Churchill, who found in him 'the vain stiffness of a letter'd Scot.' Hume thought he received less fame than he deserved; Lord Monboddo judged his diction more splendid than that of Milton's Paradise Lost; Boswell found it 'impossible to translate into French his force of style, a force remarkable even in English.' These men have a common factor which may render their praise a little suspect, and Hume's kindly feeling for a fellow-Scot was celebrated. Graham notes [in his Scottish Men of Letters in the Eighteenth Century (1901)] that, 'with him blind Blacklock, mildest of poetasters, was a Pindar; Wilkie, dullest of versifiers and most grotesque of mortals, was a Homer; Home was a Shakespeare "without his barbarisms'". But Goldsmith was unbiased. Though he finds Thomson 'in general, a verbose and affected poet', he gives discriminating praise to Armstrong's occasional verbal felicities. John Nichols, in a friendly and discursive note on the poet, predicts of The Art of Preserving Health that it will transmit Armstrong's name to posterity as one of the first English writers.
Falconer's The Shipwreck transcends its didactic 'kind' through its tragic theme and the passionate sincerity of its handling. The writer, in boyhood 'condemned reluctant to the faithless sea', knew his subject intimately. Alexander Chalmers quotes an expert's opinion that The Shipwreck 'is of inestimable value to this country, since it contains within itself the rudiments of navigation: if not sufficient to form a complete seaman, it may certainly be considered as the grammar of his professional science.' Falconer would have rejoiced in this tribute. He took his seamanship with intense seriousness. Each of the three editions published in his lifetime carries a detailed diagram of a ship; he added explanatory notes on his many technical terms; not only action, but time and place are exactly indicated. He would, he says in the Advertisement to the second edition, have referred his readers to dictionaries, but 'he could by no means recommend their explanations, without forfeiting his claim to the character assumed in the Title-Page, of which he is much more tenacious than of his reputation as a poet'. The character is that of 'a sailor', and Falconer guards it jealously. He does not tamper with fact, though he may vary its expression. His accuracy and reliability are shown, for example, in the details of the fate of the crew. A single couplet is changed from
As o'er the surf, the bending main-mast hung,
The shrouds still grasping, thirty Seamen clung
to
As o'er the surf the bending main-mast hung,
Still on the rigging thirty seamen clung
and finally to:
As o'er the surge the stooping main-mast hung,
Still on the rigging thirty seamen clung.
These two 'characters', of seaman and poet, Falconer deliberately cultivates and cherishes. The revisions of the poem show him taking increasing trouble to make his facts crystal clear; he removes no technical terms, but he expands and elucidates his explanations. Anything less than the truth and the whole truth would insult the 'dreadful grandeur of [his] theme'. The reader, to whom such terms are not unfamiliar through experience or reading ('Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling'!) accepts with fortitude their excessive use. It is otherwise with Falconer's second 'character'. His attempts to embellish the poem are, like much of Thomson's revision, the unhappy result of not letting well alone. The second edition is almost twice as long as the first; the third is yet longer. The characters at first are distinguished by their function alone; they are brave men, bearing each his share of responsibility, facing danger and death. But 'the master' of the first draft becomes 'Albert'; romantic love and friendship motives are added; Falconer adds a comparison of the master's grief to that of Priam at the fall of Troy. The first draft ends with a concise and simple narrative; this is expanded in the second edition by the introduction of a lengthy dying speech and an apostrophe; matter which filled sixteen lines is spun out to fill over a hundred and fifty. 'The design and power (or influence) of poetry' is a subject of much importance, but Falconer has seriously underestimated the power of his own narrative in supposing any reader would welcome a digression on poetry—or on anything else—at the opening of Canto III. The arrival of the Muses from the shores of light to tame the savages of old (third edition) is of even less immediacy to the story than the contrast (in itself pathetic) between Homer and himself with which Falconer opens the canto in his second draft. He could not, and he did not, improve on the original edition:
Now from the side the cumbrous ruins clear,
The falling prow at last begins to veer.
Alterations in language show a similar straining after elegance. In the first draft the second paragraph of Canto I ends:
The fate, in lively sorrow, to deplore,
Of wand'rers shipwreck'd on a leeward shore.
To this is added, in the second edition:
And, while my lines the nautic theme display,
Dissolve in sympathy the weeping lay!
The 'melting' numbers (1. 22) become 'sadly-social' in the second draft.
Falconer's additions and 'improvements' emphasize the literary quality which is prevalent in eighteenth-century writing, and in no writing more than that of the Scots. But his poem is rooted in experience. Its epigraph is literally true of the writer:
—quaeque ipse miserrima vidi,
Et quorum pars magna fui.
At least one added literary touch of intensely personal appeal is the quotation inserted in the third edition: 'A shipboy on the high and giddy mast.' He must have been an extraordinary shipboy. But admiration for his struggles after self-education, to which his poem freely bears witness, is mingled with regret that these struggles led him so far afield. The finest of all stories of wrecks in that classic sea is not in Pope's Homer; it lay to his hand in the Acts of the Apostles. In spite of all his well-meant efforts to improve his poem, Falconer's shipwreck is not unworthy to be named beside St. Paul's.
The first poem of James Grainger, 'Solitude. An Ode', proclaimed his belief: 'The height of virtue is to serve mankind'. This he did in the practice of his profession, in his prose Essay on the more common West India Diseases (1764), where he urges planters to treat their slaves with humanity, for 'they must answer before the Almighty for their conduct toward their Negroes', and this he conscientiously attempted to do in The Sugar-Cane: A Poem (1764), supplementing instruction in verse with copious footnotes in prose. He makes some effort, in Thomson's manner, to embellish his work: he inserts the tale of Junio and Theana; he digresses on Commerce; he touchingly refers to Shenstone, 'my too, too distant friend', and to his childhood:
O might the Muse
Tread, flush'd with health, the Grampian hills again!
Grainger adapts, without improving, lines from Shakespeare, Milton and Gray, and varies his verse, doubtless in honour of 'lofty Maro', with many a pathetic half-line; he does what he can, but his decorations are so ill-matched with his subject and its technical terms that the result reads like merciless parody:
Six times the changeful Moon must blunt her horns,
And fill with borrowed light her silvery urn;
Ere thy tops, trusted to the mountain-land,
Commence their jointing; but four moons suffice
To bring to puberty the low-land cane.
This blend of scientific accuracy with elegant expression reminds the reader of Blackmore's Creation and of The Loves of the Triangles; but that poem was meant to be funny.
Grainger's passion for the whole truth is his undoing. Somervile admitted rabies into The Chace, but 'Of lesser ills [his] Muse declines to sing'. Not so Grainger's; she can sing of composts, dung-heaps, yaws, 'nor soil her heavenly plumes'. The cocoa-bean too
In future times, the enraptur'd Muse may sing:
If public favour crown her present lay.
The condition was not fulfilled. Boswell's amusing account of Grainger's reading aloud of The Sugar-Cane, and his report of Johnson's remark, 'What could he make of a sugar-cane? One might as well write the "Parsleybed, a Poem"; or "The Cabbage-garden, a Poem",' suggest that his contemporaries, despite their love of the man (and Percy thought him 'one of the most generous, friendly and benevolent men [he] ever knew') felt that his Muse should rest. She had achieved the reductio ad absurdum of didactic poetry.
Robert Blair's The Grave is secure of immortality through the drawings of Blake. It went through many editions; its blank verse was turned into rhyme by Henry Lemoine (1790); it was frequently reprinted with Young's Night Thoughts or Gray's Elegy, and figures in the sombre collection printed by Thomas Tegg in 1823, of'The Grave. By R. Blair. Death. By Beilby Porteus, D.D. The Day of Judgment. By Robert Glynn, M.D. The Last Day. By E. Young, D.D. Deity. By Samuel Boyse.' Blair's theme and tone are so grim that it is no surprise to find Alexander Carlyle avoiding the manse of Athelstaneford, since its occupant 'was so austere and void of urbanity as to make him quite disagreeable to young people.' The Grave bears obvious marks of Jacobean drama, but with all its apparatus of mattock, worm and skull, its morality is a mere expansion of Thomson's 'Behold, fond man!' Slight as it is, it conveniently illustrates some of the most striking characteristics of the Scottish Augustans: their respect for what preceded 'the reform of our numbers'; their love of preaching and teaching; their sense of responsibility (Blair describes his poem in a letter to Dr. Doddridge as 'written, I hope, in a way not unbecoming my profession as a minister of the gospel'); their nervous anxiety to please London (in the same letter Blair refers to the arts he has used, sometimes against his inclination, 'to make such a piece go down with a licentious age, which cares for none of those things'). It is characteristic of them, too, in its unevenness of style, and the flashes of poetry which illumine the most unpromising theme:
Thus, at the shut of ev'n, the weary bird
Leaves the wide air, and in some lonely brake
Cow'rs down.
Finally, it associates wild natural conditions with the supernatural. The Grave is full of ghosts: twice they are used in similes; they are reported by fame to perform their mystic rounds, to rise grisly at the sound of the wind and the screaming owl, to shriek from the tomb and ring the church bell—even to forewarn men of their death. The schoolboy in the moonlit churchyard
hears, or thinks he hears,
The sound of something purring at his heels;
Full fast he flies, and dares not look behind him.
Half-a-century later Blair's terrifying image was to receive perfect expression at the hands of Coleridge.
Their treatment of the supernatural is the most fruitful and the most individual contribution made by these Scots to English literature. Addison, speaking for the Age of Reason, had dismissed it with polite contempt: 'Our Forefathers looked upon Nature with more Reverence and Horrour, before the World was enlightened by Learning and Philosophy, and loved to astonish themselves with the Apprehensions of Witchcraft, Prodigies, Charms, and Enchantments.' But in Scotland the forces of learning and philosophy had to contend, not only with the talk
In rangles round, before the ingle's lowe,
Fra guid-dame's mouth
but with the authority of the popular Satan's Invisible World Discovered … proving … that there are Devils, Spirits, Witches and Apparitions. The evidence of the power and prevalence of superstition in eighteenth-century Scotland is so rich that quotation is almost unnecessary. Alexander Carlyle tells a touching little story of his having settled with a dear friend
that whoever should die first, should appear to the other, and tell him the secrets of the invisible world. I walked every evening for hours in the fields and links of Prestonpans, in hopes of meeting my friend; but he never appeared. This disappointment, together with the knowledge I had acquired at the Logic class, cured me of many prejudices about ghosts and hobgoblins and witches, of which till that time I stood not a little in awe.
Relatively few had Carlyle's advantages of proof by experiment and attendance at the Logic class. Burns's letter to Dr. Moore shows, not only the range and variety of Scottish superstitions and their effect on a poetic imagination, but also their lasting influence even on a sceptic. The passage is of supreme importance for the full understanding of any eighteenth-century writer who spent his boyhood in Scotland. Burns writes of
tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elfcandles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery.—This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of Philosophy to shake off these idle terrors.
In the earlier years of the century the Scots poets' dealings with the supernatural were sparing and discreet, and their reception was cool. Arbuthnot removed the 'sprights' when he printed Know Yourself, but Chesterfield still found that 'his good understanding could not get the better of some prejudices of his education and country. For he was convinced that he had twice had the second sight, which in Scotch signifies a degree of nocturnal inspiration, but in English only a dream.' Thomson was careful to assign supernatural experience to uneducated peasants. David Mallet, a very minor Thomson, is in this respect a little more daring. His claim to 'William and Margaret' stands no longer, but The Excursion is his own, with its picture of Night, who
calls her train
Of visionary fears; the shrouded ghost,
The dream distressful, and th'incumbent hag,
That rise to Fancy's eye in horrid forms,
While Reason slumbering lies.
His description of the 'place of tombs' is a foretaste of Blair:
All is dread silence here, and undisturb'd,
Save what the wind sighs, and the wailing owl
Screams solitary to the mournful Moon,
Glimmering her western ray through yonder isle,
Where the sad spirit walks with shadowy foot
His wonted round, or lingers o'er his grave.
Moving in imagination, like Thomson, to the far North, Mallet finds a land of fears where
night by night, beneath the starless dusk,
The secret hag and sorcerer unblest
Their sabbath hold, and potent spells compose,
Spoils of the violated grave.
Armstrong, like Thomson, associates superstition with the peasant. His youthful imitation of Shakespeare 'helped to amuse the solitude of a winter passed in a wild romantic country; and, what is rather particular, was just finished when Mr. Thomson's celebrated poem upon the same subject appeared'. His 'hinds' by the winter fire talk
Of prodigies, and things of dreadful utterance,
That set them all agape, rouse up their hair,
And make the ideot drops start from their eyes;
Of churchyards belching flames at dead of night,
Of walking statues, ghosts unaffable,
Haunting the dark waste tower or airless dungeon;
Then of the elves that deftly trip the green,
Drinking the summer's moonlight from the flowers;
And all the toys that phantasy pranks up
T'amuse her fools withal.
The talk of these unlettered folk, reported no matter how apologetically, kept the subject before the educated, and, as the century advanced, poets grew bolder. Mickle has ghosts and spectres, wailing or 'ungrav'd', gliding not only on Eskdale Braes but (in simile) in the Siege of Marseilles and ('as the hoary villagers relate') on Almada Hill. His ballad, 'The Sorceress', is lavish in supernatural trappings:
In his 'Dissertation on the Lusiad' he defines the marvellous as 'the very soul of poesy'. Logan's 'Ode written in Spring', in characteristic rocking-horse metre, depicts the lonely milkmaid who
Poets grew bolder, and critics, such as Hurd and Warton, grew warmer. Gray, writing to Stonehewer (29 June 1760) about the 'nature and noble wild imagination' of Ossian, and the wind that sounds like the voice of a spirit, remarks that 'Thomson had an ear sometimes: he was not deaf to this; and has described it gloriously, but given it another different turn, and of more horror. I cannot repeat the lines: it is in his Winter.' The lines Gray had in mind are probably (191-4):
Then too, they say, through all the burdened air
Long groans are heard, shrill sounds, and distant sighs,
That, uttered by the demon of the night,
Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death.
This enthusiasm set Beattie researching 'to gratify [Gray's] curiosity and love of superstition', and Beattie sympathetically traces the Highland superstitions to the silence and solitude of a wild country. 'Nor is it wonderful, that persons of lively imagination, immured in deep solitude, and surrounded with the stupendous scenery of clouds, precipices, and torrents, should dream, even when they think themselves awake, of those few striking ideas with which their lonely lives are diversified' [Beattie, On Poetry and Music]. For evidence that wild scenery and the associated supernatural were especially identified with Scotland, one need look no further than Langhorne's Genius and Valour or Collins's Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands.
Interest in the legendary and marvellous, and its appropriate scenery, was fed and raised to fever-pitch by Macpherson's Ossian. Shenstone both explains and illustrates its effect [in a letter of September 24, 1761, to McGowan]: 'The public has seen all that art can do, and they want the more striking efforts of wild, original, enthusiastic genius…. Here is, indeed, pure original genius! The very quintessence of poetry.' We may allow it to be the quintessence of opportunism. Macpherson's way had been prepared by Jerome Stone, schoolmaster of Dunkeld, who published a translation of Gaelic poetry, 'Albin and the Daughter of Mey', in the Scots Magazine (January 1756). This, says Ramsay, 'though a pretty wild tale, yet being in verse, it attracted little notice, being classed with magazine poetry.' Macpherson's measured prose, suggested to him by John Home, is certainly not verse; and he avoided Stone's fate by the independent, though anonymous, publication of his Fragments in 1760. Success enlarged his plans and his ambition. Unchecked by the doubts of the judicious and sceptical, the fame and influence of
Ossian grew and spread till, as Arnold says, all Europe felt the power of its melancholy.
Thoughtful contemporaries were perplexed by the problem of originality or forgery. Johnson's comment is, on the whole, confirmed by later scholarship: 'He has found names, and stories, and phrases, nay passages in old songs, and with them has blended his own compositions, and so made what he gives to the world as the translation of an ancient poem.' Macpherson himself neatly posed their dilemma: 'Those who have doubted my veracity have paid a compliment to my genius.' His 'genius' is still our concern; his originals may be 'a non-existing non-existence,' but that need not discourage the study of Macpherson's printed pages.
The pages themselves provide their own discouragement. The didactic poets, however dull, do at least teach, and there are worse ways of spending time than in learning from an enthusiastic professional who knows his subject, even if his subject is elephantiasis or a compost-heap; the absence of humour which permitted so much instruction to be imparted in verse, so earnestly and so ingeniously, is in itself funny. But there is neither instruction nor amusement in Ossian—there is wind. Vague scenes of mist and shadow, moonlight and whirling leaves, bearded thistles, floating beards, white-bosomed females, moss, single trees, shielded warriors, harps, caves, tombs, meteors, rainbows, eagles and above all and everywhere ghosts, dissolve into each other with the ease but without the purpose of Shelley's Cloud. Everything is blurred and indistinct. The many epithets ending in -y point to and emphasize this vagueness: beamy, streamy, foamy, wavy, woody. Epithets are piled on one another so that phrases like 'the wan cold moon', or 'the breeze—that flies dark-shadowy over the grass', which have, in themselves, both feeling and charm, are smothered in their context. Rhetorical questions abound: 'Whence is the stream of years? Whither do they roll along?' Biblical phrase and image there is in plenty: 'The mighty have fallen in battle', 'We decay like the grass of the hill; our strength returns no more', 'Let none tell it in Selma, nor in Morven's woody land. Fingal will be sad, and the sons of the desert mourn.'
It is impossible to feel any interest in the story. Macpherson's heroines, disguised as men, follow their lovers to battle, as Cassandra follows Diomede in The Epigoniad; thus oddly are the least prosaic prose and the most prosaic verse of the century connected. Everyone, whitebosomed, grey-bearded or ghost, talks alike, in a mournful recitative. A favourable specimen of a recurring theme is: 'Happy are they who fell in their youth, in the midst of their renown. They have not beheld the tombs of their friends, or failed to bend the bow of their strength.' Beside Thomson's lines on Aikman, painfully wrung from him by a real grief, this is exposed for the fluent, facile and ready-made thing that it is. To this fragment of talk we may add some lines of narrative. Selection is easy, for though Macpherson's cakes are of different sizes and have different names they are all baked from the same mixture. Early in Book II of Fingal we find:
As the dark shades of autumn fly over the hills of grass, so gloomy, dark, successive came the chiefs of Lochlin's echoing woods. Tall as the stag of Morven, moved stately before them the king. His shining shield is on his side, like a flame on the heath at night, when the world is silent and dark, and the traveller sees some ghost sporting in the beam! Dimly gleam the hills around, and shew indistinctly their oaks! A blast from the troubled ocean removed the settled mist. The sons of Erin appear, like a ridge of rocks on the coast; when mariners, on shores unknown, are trembling at veering winds!
Dr. Hugh Blair, in that Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian in which, after comparing him to his advantage with Homer, Virgil and the romances of chivalry, he assigns him 'a place among those whose works are to last for ages', warns the reader 'that the beauties of Ossian's writings cannot be felt by those who have given them only a single or hasty perusal'. The present writer's perusals have been two, and as patient as possible. They have ended, like the Marriage Service, in amazement. Never, one feels, has so much excitement been roused, in so many, by such fustian.
The seventies of the eighteenth century, unlike the decades immediately preceding and following, produced so little that historians of literature have been thankful to mention Beattie's The Minstrel; or, the Progress of Genius. (Mickle's translation of The Lusiad is a much more creditable performance.) The Minstrel had its day. Cowper, poor as he was, felt that he 'must afford to purchase at least the poetical works of Beattie', and Burns, presenting a copy to Miss Logan, sent
more than India boasts
In Edwin's simple tale.
Beattie claims Spenser as his master, but The Minstrel seems rather a watered-down and emasculated version of The Castle of Indolence. With little of Thomson's poetic gift, Beattie has some of his ability to compound a popular mixture, and he attempts to 'be either droll or pathetic, descriptive or sentimental, tender or satirical, as the humour strikes.' Edwin's simple tale is the progress of a Poetical Genius, from fancy and love of nature (Book I) to an interest in education and the betterment of mankind (Book II). The hero, ('no vulgar boy'), is advised by a sage hermit. The poem peters out before anything much can happen, and the modern reader wonders, not so much that Beattie did not finish it, as that he could bear to amble along as far as he did. Thomson's influence is clear in Beattie's stern attitude to luxury; it is clear too in his idea of progress:
What cannot Art and Industry perform,
When Science plans the progress of their toil!
If this stanza directly recalls the hero of The Castle of Indolence, the following one is Liberty in a nutshell. The moralizing, and there is much moralizing, is all of the 'Behold, fond man!' kind:
Yet such the destiny of all on Earth:
So flourishes and fades majestic Man.
Like Thomson, Edwin is humanitarian and hates field sports.
But Fingal had appeared since The Castle of Indolence, and the vogue for mist and mountain is clear in The Minstrel. Edwin the child feeds on old wives' tales in winter, and dreams of fairy warriors and dames. True, the superstitions are exploded by Reason, but they have been described.
The Minstrel was composed while Beattie was working on his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth—they are commemorated together by Burns in 'The Vision.' The Essay won him royal favour and a pension (the King kept one copy at Kew and another in town), an honorary doctorate of the University of Oxford, an allegorical portrait by Reynolds and a popularity and respect hardly to be described. Some of his admired anti-sceptical reflections break into his verse too, and this may help to explain why it was so popular. It is awkward, unmusical stuff. Beattie strings words and phrases together in groups of three:
Is glory there achieved by arts, as foul
As those that felons, fiends, and furies plan?
Spiders ensnare, snakes poison, tigers prowl.
His pages are littered with ejaculation—loi alas! oh! ah!; with archaism—besprent, wight, imp, shene; and with personification. There is nothing in The Minstrel so 'glossy and unfeeling' as the diction of his translation of Virgil's Eclogues ('flexile osiers', 'my yielding fair', 'fostering Zephyrs fan the vernal skies'), but Beattie truly 'writ no language'. Only his dialect poem 'To Mr. Alexander Ross' is vital and vigorous. His English verse was patiently scrutinized by Gray, but it bears little sign that Beattie laid to heart his celebrated advice, 'Remember Dryden!'
Beattie's verse, nerveless as it is, has the interest of foreshadowing better work. Though the hero of The Progress of Genius has the advantage of beginning life among the beauties of Nature, it is only the accident of title that links it with Growth of a Poet's Mind; but Beattie's description of the Minstrel of old—
His waving locks and beard all hoary grey:
While from his bending shoulder decent hung
His harp, the sole companion of his way,
Which to the whistling wind responsive rung
—points forward unmistakably to a later and far more potent Minstrel.
The Scots poets, while freely using the stock measures of the time (they nearly all write heroic and octosyllabic couplets and some form of ode or lyric) were ready to experiment, and to revive disused forms. Their blank verse speaks for itself, and so, in its way, does Macpherson's measured prose. Mickle's sonnets, two of which were inspired by the passion for Camoëns which sustained his greater labour, are more easily overlooked. The imitations of Spenser are really important. Pope made a jest of him in his youthful parody, 'The Alley'. Prior was obviously deaf to his music, and An Ode, humbly inscribed to the Queen on the glorious success of Her Majesty's Arms. MDCCVI, is a travesty. In the Preface he explains that he is following Our great countryman Spenser … having only added one verse to his stanza, which I thought made the number more harmonious'. (Only!) He makes no mention of the fact that he has also eliminated Spenser's linking rhyme, and that for Spenser's total of three rhymes in the stanza he has substituted five. Hamilton of Bangour's idea of Spenser's style (On Seeing Lady Mary Montgomery sit to her Picture) is a Gray's Elegy quatrain with whilom, algates and couth sprinkled on it.
But Thomson's true Spenserians are followed, however feebly, by Armstrong, in his stanzas on disease inserted in The Castle of Indolence, and by Wilkie, in 'A Dream. In the Manner of Spenser', with which he cheered himself at the close of The Epigoniad. Saintsbury shows how Beattie's idiosyncratic treatment of the form reappears in Byron, who studied The Minstrel. Mickle seems to have had a special feeling for Spenser: 'The Concubine', later named 'Syr Martyn', is 'in the manner of Spenser', as is the unfinished 'Hence, vagrant minstrel', with which he closes the 'Observations upon Epic Poetry' which make part of the prolegomena to The Lusiad.
For evidence that the imitation of Spenser was connected especially with the Scots poets, one may turn to Nathan Drake's account of Johnson's critical papers in The Rambler. He agrees with Johnson that 'the obsolete words of this amiable poet, indeed, it would be pedantry to attempt to revive; but who, that has read the productions of Mickle and Beattie, would wish the structure of the stanza of Spenser, and the occasional use of his more polished diction, laid aside?'
The lead given by Thomson towards didactic verse was decisive with the more gifted of the Scots poets; Armstrong and Falconer have some power; Beattie and Black-lock are feeble. But didactic verse was a dying 'kind'. In his fable 'The Wilding and the Broom', a dispute on the importance of ethical teaching in verse, Langhorne shows Thomson pointing to the broom-flowers and saying:
Shepherd, there
Behold the fate of song, and lightly deem
Of all but moral beauty,
—but he gives Hamilton of Bangour the last word. The Preface to Joseph Warton's Odes (1746) states explicitly that their author 'is convinced that the fashion of moralizing in verse has been carried too far' at the expense of invention and imagination. The future belonged to the more romantic elements of superstition and legend, wild scenery and haunting place-names, discreetly introduced by Thomson and lavishly exploited by Macpherson. These are the elements which were to make Scott's lays so captivating to his contemporaries, and to form a contrasting strand in the richer and more lasting fabric of his novels. 'The rude sweetness of a Scotch tune' sounds in English fitfully through the century, from Thomson's 'Tell me, thou soul of her I love' and Mallet's 'The Birks of Endermay' to Logan's 'The Braes of Yarrow' and 'To the Cuckoo'. Whether this poem was his own or by Michael Bruce, Logan certainly wrote the autumn ode from which Dorothy Wordsworth quotes: 'We have been reading the life and some of the writings of poor Logan since dinner. "And everlasting longings for the lost." It is an affecting line. There are many affecting lines and passages in his poems' [The Grasmere Journal]. There are indeed, and in the poems of many of the Scottish Augustans, lines and passages which were seminal of the sustained poetry in this kind which they could not themselves achieve. [In his Observations on the Faerie Queen of Spenser (1754)] Thomas Warton describes Scotland as a nation 'which amidst a variety of disadvantages has kept a constant pace with England in the progress of literature.' No one intimate with the general run of average eighteenth-century English poetry will think it an extravagant claim. The satires of Pope, the lyrics of Blake are not average, and if eighteenth-century Scots produced, in English verse, nothing that should be named in the same day with these, there is comfort in the thought that one at least of their compatriots, working in the native tradition and in the mother-tongue, wrote poetry which needs no apology.
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