SOURCE: Davis, Arthur Paul. “Sermon and Essay” and “The Adventurous Muse.” In Isaac Watts: His Life and Works, pp. 127-187. New York: The Dryden Press, 1943.

[In the following essays, Davis provides an analysis of Watts's prose and its orientation, and argues that Watts's poetry deserves a place in English literary history not only because of its intrinsic worth, but also “because it is the best lyrical expression of eighteenth century evangelicalism.”]

SERMON AND ESSAY¹

Watts's period of literary activity covered forty-two years (1705-1747) of one of England's most important literary eras. During this interval the modern novel was born, the familiar essay under Addison and Steele developed into full maturity, and prose satire under Swift reached a height never equalled before or since. But these phenomenal activities seem to have passed over Watts as though he were in another age, and in one sense his prose works belonged to another age. Even though his style is largely typical of the eighteenth century, even though he imitates in an unconvincing way the essays of the Spectator, Watts is nevertheless a belated seventeenth century prose writer. His sermons and treatises of the popular religious type are eighteenth century continuations of the work of Dod, Greenham, Rogers, Perkins, Goodwin, Baxter and other seventeenth century Puritan divines. Like his poetry, they too were written for that religious element which lived and moved beyond the pale of the ordinary Neo-classic tendencies of the day.

Watts's sermons are contained in the following publications: A Sermon Preach'd at Salters' Hall, to the Societies for Reformation of Manners (1707); Sermons on Various Subjects, Divine and Moral, Vol. I (1720-1); Vol. II (1723); Vol. III (1729); Death and Heaven (1722); The Religious Improvement of Public Events (1727); A Collection of Sermons Preached at Berry Street by Several Ministers (1735);²The World to Come, Part I (1739), Part II, (1745); and Evangelical Discourses (1747).³

Two of the sermons listed above are topical and for that reason deserve separate mention. The first was the Reformation Sermon delivered at Salters' Hall on October 6, 1707 to the Societies of London and Westminster. Watts's address was an earnest exhortation to the “informers” and other officers of these unpopular organizations to ignore adverse criticism and persist in their work. Conscious of his severity, Watts admitted that he had “meditated a gentler subject.” Some members of the Societies, however, had assured him that the looseness of the times demanded strict censure of those opposing their efforts. In his defense of the Reformation Societies, Watts was decidedly out of character. He did not know enough about the world to write this type of sermon.

The second topical sermon, The Religious Improvement of Public Events, was occasioned by the death of George I and the “peaceful succession of George II.” In the preface, Watts stated that, after thirty years in the ministry, this was the first political sermon that he had published. Feeling that several of his brethren were better qualified to write such sermons, he had not planned to publish The Religious Improvement, but had been persuaded to do so by his congregation. As a matter of fact, Watts was not a good political preacher. He was too mild and too unworldly to do the kind of politico-religious rabble-rousing usually found in such works. And though a loyal Whig, he was never particularly enthusiastic in his personal allegiance to the House of Hanover. As a consequence, the sermon is a conventional consideration of the blessings bestowed upon England by God through the first George.

The remaining publications contain the sermons which are typical of Watts and which deal with the evangelical subjects so congenial to his particular talent. I cannot discuss in detail all of the sermons contained in these publications; nor is it really necessary, for they are almost monotonously similar in form and content. Watts was a good but not a great sermon-writer. His sermons are clearly and logically written; they contain only the necessary dogma and practically no controversy; but they are neither profound nor highly imaginative. They deal for the most part adequately and sincerely but not brilliantly with the usual subjects found in seventeenth century pulpit literature.

Watts's reputation as a sermon-writer rests primarily upon the following publications: Sermons on Various Subjects, Death and Heaven, and The World to Come. In these works, as we shall see later, Watts is characteristically evangelical, and it is this quality with which we shall be most concerned. But for the present it is necessary to discuss Watts as a preacher and to show his indebtedness in the field to his Puritan background and heritage.

It is difficult to conceive of Watts as a great preacher in the oratorical sense, for he was weak physically, had a thin voice, and possessed neither the pulpit-energy of a Whitefield nor the rough humor of a Bradbury. His appearance was not prepossessing. Only about five feet tall, with grey eyes, pale complexion, low forehead and prominent cheek bones, he was by no means a handsome man, and yet he was not ugly. His friends commented on the “spiritual mobility” of his countenance. But he was a popular preacher; all contemporary opinion attested this. And David Jennings felt that this popularity could be attributed only to the inherent spirituality of Watts's pulpit manner:

It is no Wonder, that a Man thus richly furnished with Gifts and Graces, was an admired Preacher. Though his Stature was low, and his bodily Presence but weak, yet his Preaching was weighty and Powerful. There was a certain Dignity and Spirit in his very Aspect, when he appeared in the Pulpit, that commanded Attention and Awe; and when he Spoke such strains of truly Christian Eloquence flowed from his Lips, and these so apparently animated with Zeal for God, and the most tender Concern for your Souls, and their everlasting Salvation; as one would think, could not be easily slighted or resisted.⁴

Gibbons also comments on the “respectable and serious auditory” that Watts always commanded, “the ease and beauty in his language,” and the “unaffected solemnity in the delivery of the most sacred and momentous truths.” Watts's diction, Johnson tells us, was purer than that of the celebrated Dr. Foster.⁵ The church was always crowded, Gibbons adds, whenever Watts preached.⁶

Watts preached with a restrained fervor that impressed and won listeners by the sheer force of sincerity. But his fervor was always under control. “I hate the thought,” he once said, “of making anything in religion heavy or tiresome.” Long and intricate sermons, he felt, drove the young away from the church. For this reason he was opposed to the “branching sermon” which cut the sense of the message into numerous minor ideas. He hated involved explications of obscure texts and felt that all of his remarks should be understood by the meanest capacity in his congregation. He tried to speak out of his own heart directly to the hearts of his auditory.

Watts was very seriously concerned about the so-called moralistic preaching fashionable in his day, particularly in the Establishment. The aims of such preaching were set forth in Burnet's funeral sermon upon Tillotson:

It was judged by the members of the Establishment the best way … first to establish the principles of natural religion, and from that to advance to the proof of the Christian Religion and of the Scriptures: not to enter much into the discussion of the mysteries of those sublime truths contained in the Scriptures concerning God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and concerning the persons of Christ; and to consider the whole Christian doctrine as a system of principles all tending to the reforming men's natures, and governing their actions, the restraining their appetites and passions, the softning their tempers, and sweetening their humours, the composing their affections, and the raising their minds above the interests and follies of this present world.⁷

This type of preaching, Watts believed, accounted in large part for the infidelity of the age. Several of his letters to Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, stated very strongly his convictions on the matter, and Gibson was inclined to agree with Watts.⁸ Both believed that the age required a reformation in its preaching in order to stop the decay of religion which was evident in all denominations. Gibson sought to stir the Church by means of his “Charges.”⁹ Watts prepared a special message for the preachers of dissent, An Exhortation to Ministers.¹⁰

He tells them that they must first of all possess an active experimental religion of their own before they can hope to save a single soul. They should also be learned men, with a knowledge of oratory, rhetoric, the arts and sciences, the ancient writers, and the Fathers; but they should conceal this knowledge as they use it. They must speak to be understood by the ignorant but in such a manner as to convince the most learned. Controversy and disputes ought to be avoided as far as possible; natural religion should be used as a groundwork for revelation. The minister must not read a prepared paper like a schoolboy but should have a few notes from which he could speak convincingly out of his own experience. He must search the souls of his auditory by varying his approaches to suit the differing states and degrees of sin possessed by his hearers.¹¹ He should lead an exemplary life in the world but avoid being “stiff or haughty,” “gloomy or sullen.” He must never forget the importance of his position as a minister of God, but must be pleasing and cheerful, and seek always to win people through his kindness, gentleness, and meekness. And above all the minister must always be warm and affectionate in his efforts to save sinners from their headlong plunge into hell:

Awaken your spirit, therefore, in your composures, contrive all lively, forcible, and penetrating forms of speech, to make your words powerful and impressive on the hearts of your hearers, … Practice all the awful and solemn ways of address to the conscience, … Try all methods to rouze [sic] and awaken the cold, the stupid, the sleepy race of sinners; … endeavour to kindle the soul to zeal in the holy warfare, and to make it bravely victorious over all the enemies of its salvation.¹²

The admonitions, the advice, the ideas, and on occasion the imagery of Watts's remarks on preaching could have been taken from any one of numerous Puritan sermons or treatises on the same subject; for Watts in this work is definitely carrying on the tradition of “spiritual” preaching which began at Cambridge about the time of Cartwright's expulsion in 1570. It was encouraged by the founding of two new “Puritan” colleges, Emmanuel in 1584 and Sidney Sussex in 1596. From Cambridge after this period came a steady stream of spiritual preachers to occupy the pulpits of the land and to win greater and greater support for the Puritan cause.¹³

Just as the experimental preaching of Watts was opposed to the moralistic type of the eighteenth century Establishment, the spiritual preaching of the Puritans was a reaction against the so-called “witty” preaching of the more conservative Churchmen.¹⁴ According to Professor Haller:

The themes of Anglican preaching were the divinely established authority of church and crown, the classic loci of the sacred epic hallowed by catholic Christian tradition, and the virtues and vices defined by the historic dialectic of medieval moral science. … They [the Anglicans] drew upon sixteenth-century humanism as well as upon the Christian fathers. They carried into the pulpit the stylistic methods of contemporary literary fashion. They delighted particularly, … in conceit and word play. They too exploited that arresting combination of dramatic emotionalism with flashing intellectuality—of poetic with realistic imagination—which was the distinguishing characteristic of metaphysical wit. Their sermons were elaborately tessellated with allusions to classical, patristic and medieval writers, punctuated by sudden descents into the familiar and the bizarre. Too often they merely coruscated laboriously with recondite erudition and verbal ingenuity.¹⁵

The Puritans opposed the so-called Anglican “Wisdom of Words” with “Words of Wisdom.” They put aside most of the stylistic tricks and the literary allusions of the Churchman and made use of more homely and natural similes, tropes, and proverbs. Their main emphasis was not placed on pleasing the learned and the fashionable but on winning souls to God and to the Puritan cause. Their preaching was “practical and affectionate”; practical in that it taught men what to believe and how to act; affectionate in that it appealed in the final analysis to a man's emotions. The aim of such preaching was to make every man ask himself the all-important question: What must I do to be saved?¹⁶ Every person was made to see himself, as Professor Haller observes, under the eternal image of the pilgrim and the warrior.

Puritan preaching was also “plain and perspicuous” and “English.” That is, the preachers used simple and lucid sentences without too much display of erudition; they analyzed clearly the marks and indications of pride and humility in the sinner's soul, and in so doing they often made use of realistic image or easily understood types or characters. They were “English” in that the preachers used and adapted to Puritan themes traditional medieval pulpit conventions. They also used the style of the newly popular English Bible which was, as they expressed it, dictated by the Holy Ghost and which was therefore the perfect model for discourse. Above all, Puritan preaching was experimental, that is, it tended to probe the individual conscience through the preacher's experimental knowledge of his own doubts, fears, and hopes.

Preachers usually came to the pulpit with only the heads of their discourses written out. To these preachers the “uses” or practical “applications” to be drawn from the texts were of paramount importance. John Dod's method was to ascend the pulpit with nothing but the “Analisis of Text, the proofs of Scripture for the Doctrine, with the Reasons and Uses.” He began by opening one or two verses, giving the sense of them so briefly and so plainly that the most ignorant could follow him. Next he cleared the doctrines by reference to the Scriptures themselves. Finally he spoke “most largely” in applicacation, probing men's hearts in such a manner as to leave them “nothing to object against it.”¹⁷ William Perkins' method as given in the Art of Prophecying was not essentially different from that of Dod.¹⁸

The fathers of the Puritan style of preaching were Richard Greenham, John Dod, Arthur Hildersam, Richard Rogers, and Henry Smith. But the teacher from whom above all others the method was learned was the great and influential William Perkins of Cambridge. His Art of Prophecying and his Of the Calling of the Ministerie are classic expositions of this type of preaching. Both were influential throughout the seventeenth century. Perkins' work on the art of preaching and on the duties and position of the minister was continued by Richard Bernard (The Faithful Shepherd, 1621), William Chappell (The Preacher, or the Art and Method of Preaching, 1656), and others.¹⁹ Baxter in sections of The Christian Directory and The Reformed Pastor brought the tradition down to the close of the seventeenth century, and Watts's An Exhortation to Ministers is an eighteenth century continuation of the tradition. Watts's work, combining the purposes of the two treatises by Perkins mentioned above, transmitted to the eighteenth century practically unchanged the methods and aims of Puritan preaching.

Watts not only preached in the Puritan manner; he also preached Puritan subject-matter. “The Christian Sabbath,” “The Knowledge of God by the Light of Nature,” “God's Election,” “Death a Blessing to the Saints,” “Faith the Way to Salvation,” “The Difference between the Law and the Gospel”—all typical seventeenth century subjects—were often touched on at Bury Street. And the evangelicalism inherent in the Puritan “applications” and “uses” assumed an even larger significance in Watts's sermons, for he showed to a great degree the tendency of Puritanism to soften in the eighteenth century into an emotional Protestantism which luxuriated in feeling.

Watts's evangelicalism tends to appear in the treatment of two recurring subjects: the world to come and the insufficiency of human reason. In the first the evangelical appeal is made through a vivid and moving description of the glories of heaven for the saved and the horrors of hell for the damned. Death and Heaven; or, the Last Enemy Conquered, and Separate Spirits made perfect; with an Account of the Rich Variety of their Employments and Pleasures is, as the title adequately describes it, an elaborate and quaintly imaginative picture of the glories of heaven. The theme was suggested by an anonymous work, The Future State (1683), and an essay by Sir Richard Blackmore, Letters of Religion between Theophilus and Eugenia (London, 1720).

Watts believes that immediately after death a man's soul is given a new “vehicle” which is kept until the Day of Judgment when the original body will be returned. With this new vehicle the soul receives immediate reward or punishment. For the saints the pleasures of heaven are varied because every man takes his peculiar genius there. One's knowledge is heightened and magnified beyond any earthly perfection. There are classes for the young saints in which men like Sir Isaac Newton teach mathematics and the “presidents,” Paul and Moses, lecture on Jewish law. It is amusing to note that Watts is unwilling to give up learning even in heaven and cannot conceive of a future world of bliss in which one does not improve oneself mentally and spiritually. Heaven therefore becomes for him a sort of celestial academy with God as headmaster and all the archangels and prophets as tutors.

Heaven to Watts is an actual physical place to be reached through saintly living. It is a promised land in which one finds rest and peace. It is that “holy world” in which dwells “God himself, who is original love; there resides our Lord Jesus Christ, who is love incarnate; and from that sacred head flows an eternal stream of love” blessing all the “inhabitants of that land.”²⁰ And Watts, when he writes on the “full assurance of the love of God,” speaks with almost antinomian fervor and zeal. His belief in a future world is exceptionally strong, and the sincerity of his emotion touches the reader. The sermon has therefore been extremely popular.²¹

The World to Come; or, Discourses on the Joys and Sorrows of Departed Souls at Death, and the Glory or Terror of the Resurrection²² is, as we can see by the title, similar in theme to Death and Heaven. In this work, Watts depicts even more lavishly the heavenly scene; but his final emphasis here is on the soul preparing for heaven; consequently, he emphasizes the theme of the Last Day when sinners shall meet the wrath of God.²³ Highly experimental and enthusiastic, the work becomes on occasion definitely mystical.²⁴ The mood here is the prose counterpart of that found in his mystical poems on the Song of Solomon theme.²⁵

On the question of the sufficiency of human reason, Watts was not always consistent. At times he seemed almost rationalistic,²⁶ but his characteristic position was that reason, though important, was not the whole of mind. “The quibbles of logic, against the sense and experience of a true christian,” he once wrote, “are but as darts of straw and stubble against the scales of a leviathan.”²⁷ And in a letter to his friend Samuel Say, he frankly expressed doubts concerning the efficacy of reason:

Never since the Apostles days were equall Arguments for Christianity produced as this Age has produced … these Sons of Wit and Unbelief have been solidly refuted by dint of Reasoning. And what is the effect of all this. Few are convinced. Deism prevails still.²⁸

This attitude appears again and again in his works, but it is seen at its best in a sermon on the “Inward Witness of Christianity.”²⁹ The definition of the term shows clearly Watts's stand:

It is a witness that dwells more in the heart than in the head. It is a testimony known by being felt and practiced, and not by mere reasoning; the greatest reasoners may miss of it, for it is a testimony written in the heart; and upon this account it has some prerogative above all the external arguments for the truth of christianity.³⁰

Watts here shifts the ground of credibility from reason to feeling, but he is too typical of his age to risk the charge of enthusiasm. He therefore hastily adds a compromising appeal to reason:

Though this inward evidence of the truth of christianity be a spiritual nature, and spring from pious experience, yet it is a very rational evidence also, and may be made out and justified to the strictest reason. It is no vain, fanciful, and enthusiastic business, …³¹

This warning does not detract from the power of his original statement, for he later buttresses his position with the claim that the inward witness is superior to the Bible as an evidence of Christianity. Deists and skeptics can attack and twist the meanings of Holy Writ, but the Christian who has this inward witness can solve all difficulties by simply saying: “I am well assured that the doctrines of this book are sacred, and the authority of them divine: For when I heard and received them, they changed my nature, …³²

Watts here relies on the “Inner Light” or witness of the Spirit. Such reliance was a prominent feature of seventeenth century Puritanism, particularly among the Quakers and other sectarians, with whom it often assumed an enthusiastic character. In De Doctrina Christiana Milton has expressed the usual Puritan stand on the theory:

Under the gospel we possess, as it were, a two-fold Scripture; one external, which is the written word, and the other internal, which is the Holy Ghost, written in the hearts of believers, … Hence, although the external ground which we possess for our belief at the present day in the written word is highly important, and, in most cases at least, prior in point of reception, that which is internal, and the peculiar possession of each believer, is far superior to all, namely, the Spirit itself.³³

Watts's position is essentially that of Milton.

A further extension of the Inner Light theory is found in Watts's sermons touching the question of the “extraordinary visitation of the Spirit.” A belief in the extraordinary visitation (that is, God appealing directly to the individual heart for some particular purpose), as opposed to the ordinary (which all men would receive through grace), laid one open to the accusation of enthusiasm. The question figured largely in sixteenth and seventeenth century religious literature, but most of the best minds tended to deny belief in the extraordinary visitation because of the enthusiastic implications attendant upon acceptance of the doctrine.³⁴

In the Guide to Prayer (1715), Watts, while not denying the extraordinary visitation, wrote as one convinced that such an experience was not likely to come to his rational age:

In our day, when we have no reason to expect extraordinary inspirations, the Spirit of God usually leads us in so soft and silent a manner, agreeable to the temper of our own Spirits, and concurrent circumstances of life, that his workings are not to be easily distinguished by our selves or others, from the rational motions of our own hearts, influenced by moral arguments; …³⁵

But in the Evangelical Discourses (1747), he spoke as an old man and his attitude had changed:

I am very sensible, that in our present age, the Spirit of God is so much withdrawn from the christian church … that a man exposes himself to the censure of wild enthusiasm, … if he ventures to discourse at all on a theme like this [the Extraordinary Witness]: But as I am persuaded these things were frequent matter of christian experience in the primitive days of the gospel, and in scenes of sharp persecution, so I am satisfied that God has not utterly with-held his divine favours of this kind from his churches and his children, for sixteen hundred years together; …³⁶

Watts gave a list of saintly persons, all seventeenth century divines, who, according to their own testimony, had been visited with extraordinary manifestations of the Spirit. John Howe left a note in his Bible stating that on December 26, 1689 and on October 22, 1704 he had received a “signal pledge of divine favour.” The evangelical John Flavel received while on horseback tokens of God's love “that greatly surpassed all the rational and inferential pledges that ever he had.” Joseph Caryl, Dr. Thomas Goodwin, and the great Dr. Owen all attested the immediate intercession or visitation of the Holy Ghost. And, as Watts pointed out, these men were no rattle-brained enthusiasts.³⁷ Watts accepted their testimony, because he too felt that God had visited New England in the same manner during the Revival. He was convinced that there were some honest and sincere souls whose knowledge, reason, and faith were so feeble that they derived almost all evidence of the love of God from holy raptures, visions, and other enthusiastic phenomena. These divine manifestations must not be despised, he felt, because they were sent “to confirm our faith, to exalt our joy to a heavenly degree, to be a bright and shining evidence of our interest in the Father's love, and to establish all of our other characters of adoption and put them beyond the power of doubt.”³⁸ The effect of the extraordinary visitation of the Spirit, like the “white stone of absolution” could not be explained adequately to some one else. “None knows but he that receives it.”³⁹ The fruits of such a witness were love, joy, peace, faith, meekness, gentleness, temperance, and goodness, whereas the “warm presumptions of fancy, or the delusions of the devil” left different fruits, for Satan could not “counterfeit the works” of God.⁴⁰

In his sermons Watts was rebelling against the coldness of Neo-classic religion. Leslie Stephen observes that, unlike most of his contemporaries, Watts “addresses the heart rather than the intellect; and in his hands Christianity is not emasculated Deism, but a declaration to man of the means by which God pleases to work a supernatural change in human nature.”⁴¹

Watts's sermons formed another portion of that bridge between the religious consciousness of the seventeenth century and that rekindling of religious consciousness which resulted in the evangelical movements of the eighteenth. The rhapsodic description of the world to come, the appeal to the heart rather than to the head, the probing of the individual conscience—all of these Puritan patterns and practices found a new interpretation and a new vitality in the Evangelical and Methodist revivals. Watts of course was not alone in these efforts, but the popularity of his works made him a significant figure in the transition from the old to the new Puritanism.

It is difficult to make the essays of Watts interesting to the modern reader. They deal largely with issues of importance only to the student of Puritan and Augustan theology. In most of these works, Watts is merely restating simply and clearly some abstruse theological problem that had troubled the previous generation and which was of interest only to the more conservative and orthodox of his own. But the essays are of significance to the student seeking to understand the mind of Watts. They show again that peculiar mixture of seventeenth century theology and eighteenth century philosophy referred to earlier. They also help to throw light on bypaths of Augustan thought which are often overlooked. Since, however, they have primarily only an esoteric importance, I have tried to discuss them as briefly as possible. Whenever it was practicable, I have showed their relation to better known works and authors.

The Essay Against Uncharitableness (1707), deals with a subject which appears in practically every other treatise that Watts wrote. He feels that the differences over which Christians fight are usually inconsequential. The exercise of a little charity would prevent most of the dissension in the religious world.

The year 1725-6 brought to England a wave of suicides, probably caused by the financial distress attendant upon the crash of the South Sea Bubble.⁴² In A Defence against the Temptation to Self-Murther (1726), Watts attributes these suicides to “skeptical humour,” “growing atheism,” and “disbelief of a future state.” There is nothing particularly new in the treatise. It contains the typical religious clichés against self-murder. Part of its content was borrowed from a sermon on suicide by Increase Mather.

J. H. Harder believes that the increase in the number of suicides in the first decades of the eighteenth century was symptomatic of the growth of sentimentalism in that century. There was much literature on the subject. Many of the writers who defended suicide used the examples of ancients such as Brutus and Cato to justify the act. When Eustace Budgell drowned himself in 1734 he left a note stating: “What Cato did, and Addison approved, cannot be wrong.” Pope's “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” (1717) was also considered an approval of suicide, and John Donne was frequently called in to testify in defense of the act. The Reverend Mr. J. Adams, rector of St. Albans and Chaplain-in-ordinary to the King, wrote in 1700 An Essay concerning Self-Murther to refute the principles of Biathanatos. All of this concern with suicide, Harder asserts, was but a part of the “morbid tendency of the cult of melancholy.”⁴³ Watts felt the same, and he was about to add an essay on melancholy to the tract when he discovered that a recent book on the subject had been issued, made up of extracts from Baxter's works.

In 1729 Watts published The Doctrine of the Passions Explained and Improved and Discourses of the Love of God, and its Influence on all the Passions. The two essays are really one, the first an introduction to the second. Watts's aim here is a curious one. He wishes to evolve a system whereby the passions may be used to promote religious discipline. In short, he is attacking openly and philosophically the coldness of eighteenth century religion, but he wishes at the same time to avoid the opprobrious epithet “enthusiast”. Religion, he asserts, may be both passionate and reasonable if one will but use the passions as they should be used, without abuse—a typical Neoclassical compromise.⁴⁴

The essay should be compared with the Humble Attempt in which Watts urges the ministers to throw off their “cold and languid style” and preach movingly, for here he is asking his readers to approach Christianity not as a thing to be argued about but as one to be felt. The question of the use of the passions in matters religious was a disturbing one for Watts's age. Watts, however, did not face the issue as squarely as did Jonathan Edwards in his treatise, The Distinguishing Marks of the Spirit of God (1741). Edwards admitted without hesitancy the use of passion, even violent passion, in the religious experience, but tried always to find out whether its origin was divine or satanic. Watts was too much the compromiser to go as far as Edwards, but their fundamental attitudes were similar. Both attitudes have a common origin—disgust with the frigidity of Neo-classic theological practices.⁴⁵

In an effort to rehabilitate the dissenting cause, Watts published in 1731 An Humble Attempt towards the Revival of Practical Religion among Christians. This work, which has been mentioned earlier in the present chapter, was an answer to Strickland Gough's An Enquiry into the Causes of the Decay of the Dissenting Interest (1730).⁴⁶ Watts's stand was that religion had “decayed” not only among the dissenters, but in the age as a whole. In the light of this fact he felt that dissent had a special mission:

What is that we mean by asserting the right and freedom of conscience in our separation from the established church, but more effectually to promote the kingdom of God amongst men, … and better to carry on the blessed work of the salvation of souls?⁴⁷

Watts tells the dissenters that if they are not better spiritually than the members of the Establishment they are foolish, for they are losing in two worlds—material advantages here and spiritual ones in the world to come. A hypocrite is bad anywhere, but to be a hypocrite among dissenters is, he feels, “a degree of folly that wants a name.” Dissenters should not only lead better lives but should be more tolerant than others, for dissent has failed when it begins to persecute those who differ in some of the “lesser points of religion.”

The essay as a whole was a strong plea for a revival of experimental preaching and of the “practical religion” of the seventeenth century Puritans. The work was not only the best answer to Gough's attack; it was also one of the best statements of the spiritual function of dissent that the age produced.

In 1737 Watts published Humility Represented in the Character of St. Paul. The work makes a good Sunday school lecture on the subject of humility, and that is about all that one can say. There is, however, a very interesting sidelight given in it on Watts's class-philosophy. Humility is a lesson to be learned by servants and by the poor in order that they may enjoy the position in which God has placed them.⁴⁸

The Holiness of Times, Places, and People, under the Jewish and Christian Dispensations, Considered and Compared in Several Discourses (1738) is Watts's attempt to clear up several of the irritating theological problems of his age. The essay deals with the questions of the “perpetuity of a Sabbath,” that is, whether to celebrate the first or the seventh day as the Sabbath;⁴⁹ the administration of the Lord's Supper, whether at noon or night;⁵⁰ the holiness and consecration of places of worship; forms of worship; and the difference between the visible and invisible church, the Jewish and the Christian church. It was a nice problem for Watts and his contemporaries to decide just how far the Jewish discipline in the Old Testament was to govern Christians. Watts believed that each new dispensation was all-sufficient and that it practically nullified the commands of the one which it succeeded if those commands were not implied in the new.⁵¹ He therefore emphasized the New Testament at the expense of the Old, and it was in this light that he attacked the issues presented in the essay. Watts made no new contribution to the settlement of these long dead controversies. He was merely rehashing arguments used by Puritans for over a century, but his work was at least tolerant and readable.

In 1739 Watts published A New Essay on Civil Power in Things Sacred, an excellent treatise on disestablishment from the dissenter point of view. Since the time of Henry VIII, the question of toleration had been a battle-ground for English religious and political debate.⁵² The seventeenth century saw a practical culmination of the argument in the 1689 Act of Toleration, but the issue flared up again during the reign of Anne and was alive during the whole eighteenth century. The dissenters wanted equality; toleration was only half-victory. They knew that even this sort of compromise was a patronizing condescension on the part of the Church. The Establishment said in effect: we are right; you are wrong, but if you behave yourselves we will not bother you. Walpole and other political leaders took this position when dealing with dissent.

From 1732 until 1739 the dissenters under the leadership of Dr. Chandler had worked to effect the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, but in March of the latter year the bill to bring about this reform was defeated in the Commons.⁵³A New Essay, written in the same month, tried to give a dispassionate view of the dissenter position on the matter of “penal laws and tests in civil and religious affairs.” Watts defined his aims in the preface:

The author was very much desirous to try ‘how far his reason could establish a national religion’, and adjust and limit the common rights of mankind, both sacred and civil, under this establishment, in any country whatsoever, wherein religion may be professed in various forms; and at the same time to maintain a perfect consistence with all due liberty of conscience, and support the just authority of supreme rulers.⁵⁴

Watts's arguments in this essay are based upon a variant of the “Inner Light” theory which was accepted by seventeenth century thinkers. God “by the light of reason hath led mankind into civil government.”⁵⁵ But Watts hastens to add: “Though civil government is an ordinance of God, and appointed by him according to the light of reason, … yet in it's proper aims and designs it hath no direct reach or authority beyond the benefit of men in this world, …”⁵⁶ With civil government dictated by the “candle of the Lord” within us and yet restricted to matters of this world, what type of established church could one derive?

Watts's answer is a national church based solely upon natural religion. The minimum requirements of worshipping God publicly, praying for the welfare of the nation, and attending lectures on morality are practically the only restrictions imposed by his scheme. There should be no persecution of any sort no matter what beliefs were held by the inhabitants of his hypothetical country; but Watts felt that Catholics because of their “persecuting principles” and because they were subjects of a foreign potentate who could absolve them from oaths, should be barred from holding office. Under such a scheme dissent and the Church of England would be on the same footing—separate but equal sects under one comprehending national establishment.

Like many an earlier Puritan, Watts was seeking to show that the only “natural” establishment was one in which all true Protestants could seek unmolestedly and unrestrictedly the truth of religion. As an Independent statement of tolerance and liberty, A New Essay follows in the tradition begun by John Goodwin's Theomachia (1644); Watts's stand, however, was broader than that of Goodwin. He was more closely related in spirit to Roger Williams, for Watts was pleading for absolute liberty and tolerance in things religious. He concluded his essay with a thought from Bayle: namely, that in the final analysis “heretics have as much right to persecute the orthodox, as the orthodox have to persecute them.”⁵⁷

We note in this essay a dependence upon reason which is not always characteristic of Watts. The “Inner Light” here is not that of the enthusiast; it is rather that “candle” which Watts's age insisted that all men had. As Professor Miller observes, “The Puritans did not really believe that the law of nature was extinct or useless, whatever harsh things they said in their more pious moods.”⁵⁸ Watts usually wrote in a “pious mood,” but in this essay he writes almost like a Deist. There was a distinct conflict between the Watts of the “extraordinary witness” and the Watts of the Essay on Civil Power, but Watts probably never saw it. This inconsistency I shall discuss in the last chapter, for it was an integral part of Watts's character.

The Harmony of all the Religions which God ever Prescribed: containing a brief Survey of the several Public Dispensations of God toward Man, or his appointment of different forms of Religion in Successive Ages (1742) was designed by Watts to show how God by degrees and in a way of emblem or figure reconciles a sinful world to Himself. Avoiding controverted points, he gives a résumé or “compendious arrangement” of the discoveries of God's grace as effected through Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and finally through Christ and his apostles. Feeling that every Christian should know and understand the grounds of his belief, Watts in this work simplified for popular consumption some essential theological data.

In 1745 Watts returned to the theme of charitableness with his Orthodoxy and Charity United: In Several Reconciling Essays on the Law and Gospel, Faith and Works. The 1707 essay was included in this new work as “Essay VII”. Watts was still trying to compromise differences of opinion on theological stands by new interpretations. Such interpretations simply angered the orthodox and had no effect on the unorthodox. Laudable as they were, Watts's efforts were futile. He tried too often to reconcile those holding radically opposed religious viewpoints by means of reasonable explanation. He never seemed to understand fully the insufficiency of mere logic in settling religious differences.

The Rational Foundation of a Christian Church (1747) was among the last works of Watts. The aim of the essay was still that of the reformer, to remove superficial differences and unite all Protestants through the use of reason and charity. Watts sought to show that the principles upon which the Christian church rested were not only natural and reasonable, but were also so similar to those which supported all other societies, that there should be no debate about them.

In church polity, Watts was a disciple of John Owen; and The Rational Foundation was written in the tradition of the latter's An Enquiry into the Original, Nature, Institution, Power, Order, and Communion of Evangelical Churches (1681)⁵⁹ and The True Nature of a Gospel Church and its Government (1689). By reason and revelation, Watts defends the dissenter type of worship. One of the discourses appended to the work, A Pattern for a Dissenting Preacher, draws an excellent analogy between the preaching of dissent and that of Christ and his apostles. It is a fine defense of experimental preaching and religion as contrasted with the legalistic and moralistic types of the Establishment.

Watts's two philosophical works come from the years 1732 and 1733 respectively. The first publication, An Essay on the Freedom of the Will, is more important as the inspiration for Jonathan Edwards' famous work on the same subject than it is in its own right. In the essay Watts attempts to prove freedom of the will by means of the so called “argument from indifference.”⁶⁰ It is not a very impressive argument, and we are far more interested in Watts's ultimate purpose in asserting the freedom of the human will than we are in his dialectics. Watts feels that if man has no will to choose, then rewards and punishments are senseless. If there is no free will, God and not Adam brought sin into the world; and if all the things in the world are as they are from necessity, even God is not free.

These arguments may not be logically watertight, but their practical import is clear. Watts believed that man fettered by the “doctrine of necessity” was really not a credit to God. Moreover, in the face of such a stern decree, all gospel-acceptance, all preaching, and all religions were meaningless and futile. He could not justify his position with the logic with which Edwards later presented the other side, but he was certain that his approach placed both God and man on a higher spiritual plane. Watts was unconsciously a Christian pragmatist in his thinking.

The second publication, Philosophical Essays on Various Subjects, is a marvel of inclusiveness, dealing with “Space, Substance, Body, Spirit, the Operations of the Soul in union with the Body, Innate Ideas, Perpetual Consciousness, Place and Motion of Spirits, the Departing Soul, Resurrection of the Body, the Productions and Operations of Plants and Animals: with some Remarks on Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. To which is subjoined a Brief Scheme of Ontology.”

The preface to this work gives an account of Watts's philosophical development. In his youth he studied Descartes. Descartes prepared the way for Newton, and from the latter Watts learned the experimental approach to philosophy. After Newton he studied Locke,⁶¹ from whom he learned the great lesson of tolerance:

These leaves [Locke's] triumphed over all the remnant of my prejudices on the side of bigotry, and taught me to allow all men the same freedom to choose their religion, as I claim to choose my own.⁶²

This lesson, by and large, was the most important in Watts's whole career; it was the seed-bed of his usefulness in an age of controversy and theological strife.⁶³

Philosophical Essays, written for the “leisured upper class,” was designed to be a popular and not a technical work. Its purpose was, of course, to display God's wisdom in the animal and vegetable worlds. Watts could scarcely conceive of philosophy having any other purpose.

Leslie Stephen deals summarily with Watts's philosophical beliefs:

His philosophy was the expression of a desire to preserve part of Descartes' theory about the soul, whilst accepting Newton's physical philosophy, and a good deal of Locke's metaphysics. Such a crude amalgam could have no great value in itself, and occasionally he descends to mere childishness, as in some remarks upon the awkwardness of a complete resurrection of the body of a dropsical patient.⁶⁴

Watts's philosophical speculations were colored too much by his piety to be of much value. Certain ideas which were repulsive to that “sacred veneration of soul” due to the majesty of God were, he felt, in their very nature untrue and to be rejected. This is the attitude he took in his strictures on Locke's theory of the tabula rasa. For Watts the theory was untenable because it denied that man instinctively knew right from wrong, thereby erasing all moral responsibility. Man has a moral sense which is innate, he contended, “a sort of pathetick instinct or disposition towards goodness.” Any theory which asserted the contrary was unchristian and therefore false.⁶⁵

The doctrine of the “moral sense” immediately brings Shaftesbury's Characteristics to mind, and we have already seen that Watts disapproved of Shaftesbury.⁶⁶ But this doctrine in the eighteenth century need not necessarily come from the latter's work. It was given popular expression long before the publication of Characteristics (1711). Isaac Barrow's sermons, written before 1677, and John Hartcliffe's A Treatise of Moral and Intellectual Virtues (1691)⁶⁷ are explicit on the point, as are also the works of John Preston.⁶⁸

Watts's metaphysical fancy sometimes led him into quaint surmises. For instance, he was concerned with the state of Methuselah's body in the next world: “because all the atoms that ever belonged to the animal body of Methuselah in nine hundred and sixty-nine years would make a most bulky and disproportionate figure at the resurrection.”⁶⁹ And when he philosophized on his pet theme, the world to come, there was no limit to his metaphysical fancy. One gem on this theme concerned itself with the following problem:

They are yet further puzzled to conceive whether a soul departing from any place, for example, from London at noon, would find out its friend who died there the foregoing midnight, since a direct ascent would increase their distance and separation, far as the Zenith is from the Nadir; …⁷⁰

It surprises us that such an approach to philosophy should be taken seriously, but many of these views were common enough among certain classes in Watts's age.⁷¹ At least one person felt that Watts's attacks on Locke were worthy of refutation. This was Vincent Perronet, A.M., Methodist vicar of Shoreham in Kent, “chaplain to Right Hon. Earl Stanhope” and friend and intimate of the Wesleys. Perronet's work, A Second Vindication of Mr. Locke (1738), was aimed primarily at Bishop Butler, but he added “Reflections on some Passages of Dr. Watts's Philosophical Essays.” Perronet is no better logician than Watts, and his quibbles over the disagreements between Locke and Watts need not concern us here.

Another work, however, has recently been found which throws light on the place which the Philosophical Essays occupied in the minds of certain eighteenth century readers.⁷² It is an edition of the essays annotated by Mrs. Piozzi, the friend of Johnson.⁷³ Mrs. Piozzi's first raptures in her annotations are elicited by the style of Watts's preface:

This is a singularly beautiful Piece of Writing—I mean the Preface for the Work itself—Like every Metaphysical Enquiry it leaves Men where it found them, only impress'd with honest Veneration for so much Candour joined to so much learning.⁷⁴

At the end of the “Table of the Essays,” Mrs. Piozzi writes:

If one is to read Metaphysical Disquisitions in hope of that Truth which perpetually escapes the search of Man; it is best to read Watts or Beattie; for all other Metaphysicians seek rather to confound their opponents, than instruct their Readers: Watts and Beattie to great Strength of Mind add a religious Moderation not to be found in other Philosophers.⁷⁵

But in a note following the preface to the essay on ontology, Mrs. Piozzi throws out Beattie:

I can bear to read no author but himself [Watts] upon the subject—No, not Beattie—The Irony and Sarcasm of a Scotsman is always offensive, …⁷⁶

Throughout the annotations, Mrs. Piozzi makes conventionally sententious remarks of agreement or disagreement with Watts's sentiments. Her views on the world to come are as fantastic as those of Watts. She is carried away with the latter's prose and at one point inscribes the following surprising comparison:

This is like Ajax's prayer in the Iliad. Scarce inferior to Homer in Poetical Expression. O admirable Isaac Watts!⁷⁷

A later comparison is just as startling:

Sweet Modest Watts! he is a writer by no means meaner than Locke. He is greater, because his Mind took in more sciences; he had a larger capacity.⁷⁸

The literary essays of Watts are to be found in two works: Reliquiae Juveniles: Miscellaneous Thoughts in Prose and Verse, on Natural, Moral and Divine Subjects (1734),⁷⁹ and Remnants of Time Employed in Prose and Verse. The second work, although completed by 1740, was left in manuscript and published by the literary executors in the authorized edition of 1753. I shall treat the two together since both were supposedly written in younger years, and Watts originally intended that the material of the second work be included in the first.

I have used the word “literary” to distinguish these essays; perhaps “miscellaneous” would be a better term. They are short prose compositions on religious, moral, and critical themes, the shortest a paragraph in length, the longest seven pages (in the 1753 edition). Like the philosophical essays mentioned above, they were not written for individual publication but primarily for diversion. The essays as a whole are not particularly good, but they furnish another index to the mind of Watts. He is thinking aloud in these little pieces, and they show even better than his more formal essays the real Watts with all of his little weaknesses and prejudices as well as his many fine qualities.

The Spectator influence is very strong in these essays, but Watts lacked the sophistication of Addison and Steele; consequently, his efforts at imitation of the periodical tend to become a bit too heavy. One essay, however, “One Devil Casting out Another,”⁸⁰ does achieve some of the lightness of the Spectator satires. Latrissa is sick unto death; nothing can help her, and all hope is gone. But her friends come in and inadvertently mention a pet enemy of Latrissa. She rallies immediately, proceeds to berate her enemy, and soon forgets that she is ill.

A more solemn influence of the Spectator is to be found in “The Churchyard” which echoes Addison's Westminster essay. “The Rake Reformed in the House of Mourning” has the same melancholy theme and is a sort of prose counterpart of Young's Night Thoughts (Book I). The “Retirement”, the “Vanity of Life”, and the “Last Day” themes are all here, for Watts had the interesting habit of rewriting in prose many of his finer poetic pieces.⁸¹

We find also in these essays a certain attitude towards nature common in the age. It is a Newtonic approach to nature which foreshadows both Hervey and the romanticists. In his “Meditation for the First of May” and “Divine Goodness in the Creation,” the author looks through the wonders of nature to the glory of God. The beauties of nature are to Watts not sufficient in themselves, but they are highly important in that they carry the mind of the observer irrevocably to the contemplation of the Grand Artificer of earth and sky.

Several other characteristic subjects appear in these brief essays. The first is not pleasant. It is Watts's hatred of Catholicism. In “Roman Idolatry”, “The Table Blessed”, “Purgatory”, “Formality and Superstition”, and several other pieces, he shows a relentless hatred of papistry. This was the one chink in his armour of charitableness, but one must remember that most Englishmen of his day shared his feeling. One must also note that this hatred extended not necessarily to individual Catholics but to the idea and institution of Catholicism. It is ironical that he could not apply the admonition against blind allegiance to sects in “Souls in Fetters” to his own attitude towards Catholics.

There are also essays of the patriotic sort like “The Thankful Philosopher” in which the character thanks God that he was born in England in the eighteenth century and not in a savage land. There is no sympathy with the “noble savage” in Watts. Other essays like “Entrance upon the World”, which were lay-sermons of evangelical advice to the young and which were written for persons of “meaner understandings”, were taken by the Religious Tract Society and sold in the penny chapbooks far up into the nineteenth century.⁸²

These essays show Watts trying to be entertaining and light, but he is not successful in his efforts. He is far too moral and religious for this sort of thing; moreover, having no sense of plot, he often bungles a good idea. His invention of names was faulty enough to bring forth Johnson's denunciation,⁸³ and the pieces as a whole are amateurish. But his style in these essays is the clear limpid prose of the eighteenth century with no sign of affectation or singularity. Watts here is often quaint, but that quaintness is not one of expression.

In the Improvement of the Mind, Watts takes the lines from Horace's De Arte Poetica beginning:

                                                                                                                                                      Ut sibi quivis
Speret idem; sudet multum, frustraque laboret
Ausus idem.

and “Englishes” them thus:

Smooth be your style, and plain and natural,
To strike the sons of Wapping or Whitehall.
While others think this easy to attain,
Let them but try, and with their utmost pain
They'll sweat and strive to imitate in vain.(84)

This is the style of Watts's personified “Pellucido” whose writings are so simple and plain that many, until they attempt to write in the same manner, consider them commonplace. We achieve Pellucido's style by avoiding unnaturalized foreign words, fantastic, affected, vulgar, and obscure words, cloudy language, and undue length of sentence. We must also read and imitate clear authors, acquire a large vocabulary, know our subject thoroughly, and “talk frequently to young and ignorant persons upon subjects which are new and unknown to them” and make them understand what we are saying.⁸⁵

These are excellent rules for acquiring a style capable of pleasing both the “sons of Wapping or Whitehall,” and Watts generally wrote as he advised others to write. In essay and in textbook, Watts's style is eminently clear, plain and unaffected. The only serious fault he has is a tendency to prolixity. But Watts's sermon style is on occasion quite different. The editor of the Monthly Review felt that it was too florid and pathetic. He thought that

The doctor's early relish for poetry, and long acquaintance with the muses, may probably have occasioned such a florid diction, such a diffusive and pathetic style, as some critics of a severer turn of thought may be ready to object to, as not so properly adapted to theological discourses, whether popular or polemical.⁸⁶

The editor had in mind the style of writing found in thousands of passages of the following sort in Watts's sermons:

Awake, O my soul, and bless the Lord with all thy powers, and give thanks with holy joy for the gospel of his son Jesus. It is Jesus by his rising from the dead has left a divine light upon the gates of the grave, and scattered much of the darkness that surrounded it. It is the gospel of Christ which casts a glory even upon the bed of death, and spreads a brightness upon the graves of the saints in the lively views of a great rising-day. O blessed and surprising prospect of faith! O illustrious scenes of future vision and transport!⁸⁷

This is Watts's pulpit style. In it he is putting into practice his advice to ministers to be experimental, warm, and affectionate. Purposely pathetic, he was trying to save souls and not to please Neo-classic critics. Any consideration of Watts's prose style must take into account the practical aims of these sermons, for with Watts the evangelical mission always came first. Literary decorum had to be sacrificed to the larger purpose. In the words of Palgrave, he was “one of those whose sacrifice of art to direct usefulness have probably lost them those honors in literature to which they were entitled.”⁸⁸

.....

THE ADVENTUROUS MUSE

It has been customary among certain critics to smile at the poetry of “Mother Watts”. Pope, it is said, originally included Watts along with Brome and Samuel Wesley in a line of the Dunciad (1728).⁸⁹ With his parodies of Divine Songs, Lewis Carroll did much to make the name of Watts amusing to the late nineteenth century. And as late as 1920, one finds an author still poking fun at the quaintness of “The Little Busy Watts.”⁹⁰

But in every age since that of Watts, there have been scholars who have found that Watts's poetry, far from being quaint, is in the main well-written and on occasion very good. Samuel Johnson thought Watts's judgment exact, his imagination “vigorous and active”, his ear well-tuned and his diction “elegant and copious”. Though opposed on principle to devotional poetry, Johnson felt that Watts had “done better than others” what no man can do well.⁹¹ To Cowper Watts, though often careless, was yet a “man of fine poetical ability”, “frequently sublime in his conceptions and masterly in his execution.”⁹² In the romantic period Southey credited Watts with having a “skillful ear”, an “active fancy”, and a “mind well-stored with knowledge”. He has, concluded Southey, that “rare merit of being seldom dull”.⁹³ And Saintsbury, writing in the early twentieth century was fascinated by Watts's prosodic versatility. He found Watts “really worth reading”.⁹⁴

In recent years there has been something of a renascence of Watts. From the Nation for March 16, 1927 came this word of praise, mingled, of course, with the usual depreciation:

Watts may be mawkish and twaddling; but his poetry will not die; it is too well written. It has an uncanny felicity, for it is the product of an ingenious and poetically sophisticated mind.⁹⁵

In 1933, the late A. E. Housman compared Watts with Pope (a name not usually mentioned in the same breath with that of Watts):

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room, and the eighteenth century, except for a few malcontents, was satisfied with what its leading poets provided. ‘It is surely superfluous’ says Johnson, ‘to answer the question that has once been asked, whether Pope was a poet, otherwise than by asking in return, if Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?’ It is to be found, Dr. Johnson, in Dr. Watts.

Soft and easy is thy cradle,
          Coarse and hard thy Saviour lay;
When his birthplace was a stable,
          And his softest bed was hay.

That simple verse, bad rhyme and all, is poetry beyond Pope.⁹⁶

Writing in 1935 from the college in Watts's home-city of Southampton, Professor V. de Sola Pinto asked for a new evaluation of Watts's work:

It is time that his [Watts's] poems were rated at their true worth, and no longer dismissed with the productions of Yalden, Pomfret, Blackmore and other small fry of Dr. Johnson's and Chalmer's collections or lost in a rosy mist of conventional piety.⁹⁷

And in his recent work, Religious Trends in English Poetry (1939), Professor Fairchild has given Watts an important place among the eighteenth century divine poets:

Although he [Watts] was in several respects a typical Independent minister of his age, he was one of a very few men who, … preserved the old spiritual ardor of Dissent; and he was literally the only man who gave that ardor anything like a significant poetic expression. His ministry and his writings form a link between the zeal of the seventeenth and the revived zeal of the later eighteenth century.⁹⁸

To Cazamian, writing in a similar vein, Watts was a “link between the spiritual fervour of a still active though latent religious life, and the possible renovation of poetry.”⁹⁹ He was the poet of that deep current of imaginative and religious emotion which, flowing beneath the surface of Neo-classic religion and art, brought to the eighteenth century the ardor of the seventeenth. The following pages of this chapter will attempt to treat Watts in that light.

In order to study him as the poet of the “latent religious life” of the age, we must keep in mind the political and philosophical compromise which, after a hundred years of struggle, the Revolution of 1688 brought to English life. There was compromise between Crown and Parliament, between Church and State, and between Whig and Tory. In the sphere of taste and criticism there was an analogous compromise which nourished two great streams of influence flowing side by side.¹⁰⁰ One was the highly articulate upper-class stream of intellectual and rationalistic tendencies which may be grouped under the term Neo-classic. The other was that deep, more or less inarticulate religious and emotional stream which may be termed the evangelical.¹⁰¹ The two tendencies, though converging at times, were by nature opposed. The second stream had been strengthened by the rise of middle-class morality; it saw the nucleus of even greater strength in the rise of Religious Societies. In prose literature it had Bunyan, Baxter, and a host of lesser men; it was soon to express itself more emotionally in the rise of a hymnology. Finally it produced an eighteenth century poet in Isaac Watts, who, with his poetry and his “System of Praise,” became a leading exponent of the evangelical tendencies of the age.

The poetry of Watts is a result of the conflict between the growing rationality and the strong religious passion of the age. Schooled in Neo-classic thought, Watts spoke the language of the initiate, but he had a religious mind that openly rebelled against the coldness and formality of the Compromise's religion and art. From this clash came his efforts to reform the poetry of his day, to add new forms, to revitalize its content. Seeing the spiritual poverty of the Neo-classic poetry, he tried to renovate it with an infusion of the evangelical strain.

Watts's scheme for the renovation of poetry is set forth in the Preface to the second edition of Horae Lyricae (1709). He opens with a complaint against the wretched state into which poetry has fallen:

It has been a long complaint of the virtuous and refined world, that poesy, whose original is divine, should be inslaved to vice and profaneness; that an art inspired from heaven, should have so far lost the memory of its birth-place as to be engaged in the interests of hell! How unhappily is it perverted from its most glorious design.¹⁰²

The profanation and debasement of the divine art of poetry have gone so far that some “weaker christians” imagine that poetry and vice are naturally akin. “They will venture to sing a dull hymn or two at church, in tunes of equal dulness; but they still persuade themselves, … that the beauties of poetry are vain and dangerous.” It is strange that persons with the Bible in their hands should have “so wild and rash an opinion.”¹⁰³ Have they forgotten, asks Watts, that many parts of the Old Testament are Hebrew verse?

After this attack on the Puritan attitude towards poetry, Watts comes to the main issue of the Preface. Boileau had questioned in L'Art Poétique whether the doctrines of the Christian religion would “indulge or endure a delightful dress.” To refute Boileau, Watts cites the example of Racine and Corneille. Cowley's Davideis and the two Arthurs of Blackmore, he also feels, “experimentally confuted” the French critic. The Christian mysteries, Watts admits, do not need the gay trappings necessary to beautify “heathen superstition.” They have a “native grandeur, a dignity, and a beauty” in them, which though not utterly denying ornament, make easier the work of the poet who uses them. Like Milton, Sprat, Cowley, and other seventeenth century writers, Watts believed that the fables of antiquity were becoming exhausted and outworn. They were but the “tinsel trappings” of pagan error, whereas the Bible is God-inspired truth.¹⁰⁴ Moreover, the language of the Bible has stronger figures, bolder metaphors, and images “more surprising and strange” than are to be found in any profane writer. If the modern poet will but model his style upon the Hebrews, he will surpass even the writers of classic antiquity. Go then, advises Watts, to the Bible for both the subject-matter and the form of modern poetry. Make poetry the handmaid of religion. Let its one great purpose be to allure souls to God.

Watts then discusses the means of bringing about this reformation in poetry. First, as to the mechanics, the poet may use couplets, but couplets that are written like blank-verse, because the “tedious uniformity” of Neo-classic couplets with their perpetual chime of even cadences “charms to sleep with their unmanly softness.” Or the poet may use blank verse, but not necessarily Miltonic, because Milton is sometimes “harsh and uneasy.” Or he may use the “free and unconfined numbers of Pindar.”

As for the themes to be used in this reformed poetry, the passage in which Watts describes the subject-matter rivals and recalls that describing similar aims in Giles Fletcher's Christ's Death and Victory:¹⁰⁵

The affairs of this life, with their reference to a life to come, would shine bright in a dramatic description; nor is there any need or any reason why we should always borrow the plan or history from the ancient Jews or primitive martyrs; … But modern scenes would be better understood by most readers, and the application would be much more easy. The anguish of inward guilt, the secret stings, and racks, and scourges of conscience; the sweet retiring hours, and seraphical joys of devotion; the victory of a resolved soul over a thousand temptations; the inimitable love and passion of a dying God; the awful glories of the last tribunal; the grand decisive sentence, from which there is no appeal; and the consequent transports or horrors of the two eternal worlds; these things may be variously disposed, and form many poems.¹⁰⁶

And the poet who deals with these themes must have a divine inspiration:

If the heart were first inflamed from heaven, and the muse were not left alone to form the devotion, and pursue a cold scent, but only called in as an assistant to the worship, then the song would end where the inspiration ceases; the whole composure would be of a piece, all meridian light and meridian fervour; and the same pious flame would be propagated, and kept glowing in the heart of him that reads.¹⁰⁷

The Preface ends on a high note; it is the same stand taken earlier by Milton:

He that deals in the mysteries of heaven, or of the muses, should be a genius of no vulgar mold: And as the name Vates belongs to both; so the furniture of both is comprised in that line of Horace,

‘cui mens divinior, atque os
Magna sonaturum’.(108)

When Watts implies that poetry should have a moral function, he is expressing a view common enough in his age.¹⁰⁹ The theory in Watts, however, goes deeper than usual. Poetry has fallen from grace; in order to regain its former glory, it needs to become reconciled with religion. The poet must become an original genius, divinely inspired to lead and to influence men in the way of truth. This Platonic concept of the poet's function was exemplified in Milton's life;¹¹⁰ it found expression in the preface to Cowley's collected poems (published in 1656), and in Edward Phillips' Theatrum Poetarum. It was also given critical justification in the works of Richard Blackmore and John Dennis, both of whom Watts mentions favorably in his Preface.¹¹¹

Watts may have been directly influenced by Dennis and Blackmore. Both figure largely in the Preface to Horae Lyricae. But Watts knew thoroughly the critical writings of the seventeenth century, and it would be safer to say that the three writers made use at approximately the same time of a theory which was generally known in the preceding century. Watts, Dennis, and Blackmore therefore jointly brought over into the eighteenth century this Platonic-Renaissance view of the divinely inspired poet. From this point we can trace it through works like Aaron Hill's “The Creation”, Thomson's “Winter”, Collins' “Ode on the Poetical Character”, Joseph Warton's “Ode to Fancy”, Akenside's “The Pleasures of the Imagination”, Isaac Hawkins Browne's “On Design and Beauty”, and James Beattie's “The Minstrel” to the romantic movement at the end of the century.¹¹²

Watts was not only asking that poetry become the handmaid of religion. He was protesting with all of the power at his command against the sterility of Neo-classic poetry. With the Bible and Christian experience as a background, the poet must replace the cold rhetoric of Augustan satire and imitation with religious truth carried alive into the heart. Poetry in short must regain its lost essential ingredient of religious enthusiasm. Watts's attempted reformation of poetry was of course a futile gesture, but it foretokened a later and successful effort. The Preface to Horae Lyricae remains as a record of Watts's attempt.

The poetry of Watts is contained in the following publications: Horae Lyricae (1706), Divine Songs (1715), Reliquiae Juveniles (1734), Remnants of Time (published posthumously, 1753), and The Posthumous Works (published by a “Gentleman of the University of Cambridge” in 1779). This last work presents some problems and will be discussed in “Appendix B.” These volumes will not be considered separately but simply as the poetry of Watts. And though treated elsewhere, the hymns will be used whenever necessary for purposes of illustration.

Before discussing this poetry, I must refer once more to Watts's religious beliefs. He was a Calvinist, and the doctrines of that faith permeate his poetry. But at least he was not one of the more rigid Calvinists. As we have seen, he explained away predestination, the most important doctrine of Calvinism.¹¹³ And though there is much so-called Calvinistic gloom in his poetry, there is also much more evangelical hope. Watts laid far more emphasis on regeneration than on reprobation. In him Calvinism has softened into incipient sentimentalism.

Calvinistic influence expresses itself in two ways in Watts's verse. It is found, first, in poetic renditions of the main tenets of the sect, for example, the doctrine of God's unknowableness (“God only known to himself”):

Stand and adore! how glorious he
That dwells in bright eternity!
We gaze, and we confound our sight
Plung'd in th' abyss of dazzling light;

or the doctrine of election (“Condescending Grace”):

Mortals, be dumb; what creature dares
          Dispute his awful will;
Ask no account of his affairs,
          But tremble, and be still;

or the doctrine of the division of the world into saints and non-elect (“The Atheist's Mistake”):

Hence, ye profane, I hate your ways,
          I walk with pious souls;
There's a wide diff'rence in our race,
          And distant are our goals.

Second, Calvinism, with its strict morality, its emphasis on the saints' worldly asceticism, its despising of all things here below, carries over into the general atmosphere of Watts's poetry and gives it an unhappy quality. The themes of eighteenth century melancholy poetry are therefore ever present in Watts's work.

In her recent work, Miss Sickels observes that the reader of the eighteenth century was familiar with the following themes and moods of melancholy: “pensive joys of solitude and retirement”, “death and ruins”, “death and corruption”, “the generally unsatisfactory nature of human life”, “the illusiveness of worldly pride and ambition”, “white melancholy and black”, “melancholy neo-classic and religious”, “melancholy sincere and assumed”, “melancholy praised as the muse of virtue and reviled as the enemy of society”, belief in hell, and the “spleen” and “vapors”.¹¹⁴

These themes (the product of the combined influences of Milton and the Latin classics at work upon the background of early seventeenth century Burtonian melancholy) existed at the turn of the century as common elements in both the classical and the Biblical literary tradition, and they offered to any poet giving them a new turn and a fresh impulse the possibility of appealing to a large audience.¹¹⁵ In Horae Lyricae (1706) one finds most of the themes and moods listed above. To a limited extent, Watts does give a new turn and a fresh impulse to these melancholy themes, sending them down to the poets of the mid-century.

The retirement theme as presented by Watts expresses often the idea of withdrawal from a blind following of the inbred custom of the world:

Wisdom retires; she hates the crowd,
          And with a decent scorn
Aloof she climbs her steepy seat,
Where not the grave nor giddy feet,
Of the learn'd vulgar or the rude,
          Have e'er a passage worn!

Or it takes the more spiritual attitude of retirement within oneself:

When I view my spacious soul,
And survey myself awhole,
And enjoy myself alone,
I'm a kingdom of my own.

Or it may take even the extreme attitude of “sanctified affliction” in which the Christian welcomes sickness because it foretokens withdrawal from the world of flesh:

My cheerful soul now all the day
          Sits waiting here and sings;
Looks thro' the ruins of her clay,
          And practices her wings.(116)

The “generally unsatisfactory nature of human life” and the “illusiveness of worldly pride and ambition” are themes which are either stated or implied in most of Watts's poems. To him

Bright and lasting bliss below
          Is all romance and dream;

he finds that

—the whole round of mortal joys
With short possession tries and cloys;
'Tis a dull circle that we tread; …

and Watts feels that

Life's a long tragedy: This Globe the stage,
.....                                                                                The Actors many;
The Plot immense: A flight of daemons sit
On every sailing cloud with fatal purpose;
And shoot across the scenes ten thousand arrows
Perpetual and unseen, headed with pain,
With sorrow, infamy, disease and death.(117)

In “The Hero's School of Morality”, he advises the contemplation of a “ruined monument” as a cure for all earthly ambition:

He guessed, and spelled out, Sci-pi-o.
                                                                                                                        He
That living could not bear to see
An equal, now lies torn and dead;
Here his pale trunk, and there his head;
Great Pompey! …
Thy carcase, scattered on the shore
Without a name, instructs me more
Than my whole library before.(118)

But Watts's taedium vitae is always motivated as in “Felicity Above” by the assurance of future bliss:

Why move my years in slow delay?
          O God of ages! why?
Let the spheres cleave, and mark my way
          To the superior sky.

The death-hell theme is represented best in the well-known “Day of Judgment”:

I

When the fierce North wind with his airy forces
Rears up the Baltic to a foaming fury;
And the red lightning, with a storm of hail comes
                                                  Rushing amain down,

IV

Tears the strong pillars of the vault of heav'n,
Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes;
See the graves open, and the bones arising,
                                                  Flames all around 'em!

V

Hark, the shrill outcries of the guilty wretches!
Lively bright horror, and amazing anguish,
Stare thro' their eyelids, while the living worm lies
                                                  Gnawing within them.

The imagery of this poem is forceful and impressive; the sweep of the metre adds to the effect of tumult on the Last Day. The piece is a striking example of the intensity and vividness of Watts's best work. Miss Reed feels that the “Day of Judgment” links Young's “The Last Day” and Aaron Hill's “The Judgment Day” with seventeenth century works like Flatman's “A Dooms-Day Thought,” Roscommon's “The Day of Judgment,” Wigglesworth's “The Day of Doom” and Pomfret's “On the General Conflagration, and Ensuing Judgment.” “The enormous popularity of … the ‘Day of Judgment,’” she observes, “is sufficient evidence of the continuance into the eighteenth century of the seventeenth century emphasis on the vanity of life and the horrors of death and judgment. While Watts consistently offset these ideas by the thought of the saving power of Jesus and the bliss of the good in heaven, popular imagination seized most readily upon the gruesome parts of his poetry, and fed therewith that religious melancholy which Burton described in the Anatomy.”¹¹⁹ “The Day of Judgment” is a significant eighteenth century poem.

A special group of poems in this melancholy vein may be found in Book III of Horae Lyricae, containing poems “Sacred to the Memory of the Dead.” There are seven funeral elegies in this book, and three more, plus many epitaphs, in both English and Latin, in Reliquiae Juveniles and Remnants of Time. Watts was morbidly concerned with the theme of death. With him it was not a mere poetic convention, for most of his letters and practically all of his sermons stress the “four last things.”

Moreover, the funeral elegy was one type of poetry which the Puritan tradition readily condoned. Draper feels that there was a “distinctive elegiac literature” during the period that could be definitely associated with the Puritan and dissenting tradition, and that this elegiac literature presents in theme and imagery an interesting contrast to the poetry, even the elegiac poetry, produced for “aristocratic consumption.”¹²⁰ The poetic model in this field for the seventeenth century Puritans, Draper asserts, was Francis Quarles. Though he was an avowed Royalist, his works, particularly his Emblems and A Feast for Worms, found high favor with the Puritans. These works contained a “magazine of elegiac ammunition” from which Puritan writers all through the century borrowed at will. Almost every theme found in the funeral elegy of later years was anticipated in Quarles's work.¹²¹

Although Watts's funeral elegies do not often possess the poetic lavishness found in those written by his Puritan predecessors, they do contain on occasion the phrases, the funeral machinery, and the macabre imagery of the earlier elegies. This material however was so generally diffused throughout the works of the century that it would be difficult to point to any one author as Watts's model.

Watts's most notorious funeral poem was “An Elegy on Mr. Thomas Gouge.” This piece has probably done more to harm Watts's reputation than any other that he wrote. When he made a world cataclysm out of the death of a dissenting minister:

          Sion grows weak, and England poor
          Nature herself with all her store
Can furnish such a pomp for death no more,

the critics justly lashed the poem. Watts's Pindaric Pegasus runs away with him on this occasion, and the elegy is a monument to “Pindarick folly.”

In “An Elegiac Ode on the Death of Sir Thomas Abney” Watts shows none of the bathos and bombast found in the above poem. This restrained and dignified elegy is formally divided into two parts: “Private Life” and “His Public Character and Death.” Watts's concern is not with the gloom or horror of the grave but with the assured placed of Abney in the world to come:

          We mourn; but not as wretches do,
Where vicious lives all hope in death destroy:
          A falling tear is nature's due;
But hope climbs high, and borders on celestial joy.

Watts's best funeral ode is the elegy “To the Memory of my honoured Friend, Thomas Gunston, Esq.” Gunston was the brother of Lady Abney and one of the poet's closest friends. Watts tells us that in writing the poem he transcribed “nature without rule and with a negligence becoming woe unfeigned.”¹²² Based on “Lycidas,” the elegy is one of the earliest imitations of that poem in the century.¹²³ Watts, however, was never a slavish imitator; he takes from Milton only the general plan and occasional phraseology. Using as a theme the unfinished hall which Gunston was building, the elegy describes in typical, melancholy elegiac style the funeral procession to the “cold lodging in a bed of clay.” It paints the midnight scene and the graveyard where the “lowing herds should come.” “Moaning turtles” murmur over the grave. Nature mourns in general grief and drops her leaves as in “Adonais”. The poem ends with a description of the hall bathed in moonlit splendor, and Urania ceases her “doleful strain” to assure us that:

Gunston has mov'd his dwelling to the realms of day;
Gunston the friend lives still.

One finds in this poem much of the “mortuary landscape” and other stock properties of the graveyard school. It is a forerunner of similar poems by Blair, Young, and Gray. It brings from the seventeenth century funeral poetry the “midnight scene,” the “pensive thought,” the Gothic landscape, the “stately elms,” the “lonesome vault” and other funeral detail to be used by the Youngs and Grays of the mid-century. These are common ideas and images, and we cannot claim any direct influence except in the case of Blair,¹²⁴ but a poet as popular as Watts would have some share in planting these ideas and images in the poetic and popular mind of generations immediately following him.

To Watts poetic and religious inspiration are closely related:

Change me, O God; my flesh shall be
An instrument of song to thee
          And thou the notes inspire.

In “Asking Leave to Sing” Watts boasts concerning his muse:

But when she tastes her Saviour's love,
          And feels the rapture strong,
Scarce the divinest harp above
          Aims at a sweeter song.

His concern with “original genius” leads him to protest against the confining powers of

Custom, that tyrannes of fools,
That leads the learned round the schools,
In magic chains of forms and rules!
          My genius storms her throne:

Watts prefers the

                                                            muse whose generous force
                    Impatient of the reins,
          Pursues an unattempted course,
Breaks all the critics iron chains,
And bears to paradise the raptur'd mind.

Such an attitude looks forward to the romantic idea that genius is superior to rules. In Watts it is found highly developed, and is critically justified in the Preface to Horae Lyricae.

There is more nature poetry in Watts's works than one would expect. He was a keen observer, but his attitude is not romantic. We cannot know God through nature; we can only see proofs of the greatness and the majesty of the incomprehensible deity:

Thy hand unseen sustains the poles
On which the huge creation rolls:
The starry arch proclaims thy pow'r,
Thy pencil glows in every flow'r:
… The meanest pin in nature's frame,
Marks out some letters of thy name.
… There's not a spot or deep or high,
Where the Creator has not trod,
And left the footstep of a God.(125)

“We espy some faint beams, some glimmerings of his glory breaking through the works of his hands, but he himself stands behind the veil, …”¹²⁶ Nevertheless, Watts felt as did Bacon that the upper link of nature's chain was fastened to the throne of God.

Courthope believed that the Whig principles which gained ascendancy in 1688 were not as conducive to the production of poetry as the Tory principle of personal loyalty. The former were too intellectual and abstract to lend themselves readily to poetic expression.¹²⁷ As a consequence, Whig panegyric tended to exemplify that “faintness of thinking” which Johnson found in Addison's “Campaign”. In this and in other respects the panegyrics of Watts are typical.

His first attempt at Whig panegyric comes from the year 1694, and the subject is Queen Mary rather than William (“On the Sight of Queen Mary, in the year 1694”):

I saw th' illustrious form, I saw
Beauty that gave the nations law:
Her eyes, like mercy on a throne,
In condescending grandeur shone.

William, however, is the central figure in the rest of these pieces. The first poem on him was written in 1695, a “Hymn of Praise for Three great Salvations, viz. From the Spanish Invasion, From the Gun-powder Plot, From Popery and Slavery by King William of Glorious Memory, who landed, Nov. 5, 1688.” The poem shows Watts's hatred for James II and his acts of persecution.

In 1698, Watts wrote to his friend, David Polhill,¹²⁸ “An answer to an infamous Satire, called Advice to a Painter; written by a nameless Author, against King William III, of glorious memory, 1698.”¹²⁹ To Watts, William is the “brave, the pious, and the just, who is abroad a hero, and at home a saint.” He is:

Sweet, with no fondness; cheerful but not vain:
Bright, without terror; great, without disdain.
His soul inspires us what his lips command,
And spreads his brave example thro' the land.

Watts's third attempt in this vein is happier than the first two. It is “An Epitaph on King William III of glorious Memory,” written in 1702. In this the poet's restraint is far more effective than the bombast of the earlier pieces. The epitaph begins in the manner of Jonson's poem on “Elizabeth, L. H.”:

Beneath these honours of a tomb,
Greatness in humble ruin lies:
(How earth confines in narrow room
What heroes leave beneath the skies!)

Religion, Liberty, and Peace are mourners, and in the last stanza:

Glory with all her lamps shall burn,
And watch the warrior's sleeping clay,
Till the last trumpet rouse his urn
To aid the triumphs of the day.

In 1705 Watts wrote a poem “To her Majesty,” Queen Anne,

Queen of the northern world, whose gentle sway
Commands our love, and charms our hearts t' obey;

but he printed a retraction of the piece in 1721, because the last part of Anne's reign was of a “different colour” from the first. The retraction is not only presented in the appended note, but also in an inserted poem, “Palinodia,” in which he asks:

Britons, forgive the forward muse
That dar'd prophetic seals to loose.

George is the sovereign, not Anne, who will give the “dying nations day” and “crown the work that Anne forsook.”

“On the Coronation of Their Majesties King George II and Queen Caroline,” written in 1727, was the last of Watts's Whig panegyrics. The “faintness of thinking” referred to above is evident in this poem. William came bringing deliverance to Watts's group after a trying period. George II, other than being a member of the House of Hanover, had no special claim on Watts's affections. The poem is therefore a conventional panegyric with the usual parade of personified abstractions, and Watts is forced to end on his old note of loyalty:

Great William shall rejoice to know
That George the second reigns below.

Watts was not a great Whig panegyrist. His loyalty to Whig principles prompted him to efforts which seem forced. But he did have a deep love for William of Orange and just as deep a hatred for the Stuarts. When writing on either theme, he managed to produce at least representative Whig panegyric.

Watts's translations concern us next. In his poetical works there are twenty-four acknowledged translations and imitations—four from the French, seven from classical Latin (principally Horace), thirteen from modern Latin, ten of which come from Matthew Casimir Sarbiewski.¹³⁰ Except for the translations from the latter poet and from Horace, these works are not important. Usually mere snatches of verse, they were evidently done in odd moments. In the Latin poem “To the Reverend Mr. John Pinhorne,”¹³¹ written in 1694, Watts, pledging himself to the service of the Christian muse, decided to put aside the “romance” and “fictitious Panoply” of the classic poets.¹³² He felt, however, that some of the heathen poets, if sufficiently purified, could be used to diffuse virtue. Horace was especially useful for this purpose:

Horace shall with the choir be join'd,
When virtue has his sense refin'd,
          And purg'd his tainted page.(133)

To illustrate his theory he takes Horace's Ode 29 in Book III and translates it into “The British Fisherman.” Like all of his short translations from the Latin, the experiment has no unusual merit, but it may be used to illustrate Watts's type of translating:

Non meum est, si mugiat Africis
Malus procellis, ad miseras preces
          Decurrere, et votis pacisci,
          Ne Cypriae Tyriaeque Merces
Addant avaro divitias mari.
Tunc me biremis praesidio scaphae,
          Tutum per AEgeos tumultus
          Aura feret, geminusque Pollux.

This is rendered in English by Watts:

Let Spain's proud traders, when the mast
Bends groning to the stormy blast,
Run to their beads with wretched plaints,
And vow and bargain with their saints,
Lest Turkish silks or Tyrian wares
          Sink in the drowning ship,
Or the rich dust Peru prepares,
Defraud their long projecting cares,
And add new treasures to the greedy deep.(134)

The second stanza ends on the religious note, but the first is enough to show that Watts's method here is similar to that followed in his imitations of the Psalms. He not only translates, he modernizes as well.¹³⁵

The most successful translations of Watts are those from Casimir. Similar in spirit, the two men wrote poetry that tended toward imaginative lavishness. In the Preface to Horae Lyricae, Watts calls Casimir “that noblest Latin poet of modern ages” and admits that in a few places “I borrowed some hints … without mention of his name in the title.” In the Improvement of the Mind the praise is even stronger: “I will readily acknowledge the odes of Casimir to have more spirit and force, more magnificence and fire in them, and … arise to more dignity and beauty than I could ever meet with in any of our modern poets.” Watts made his first acquaintance with Casimir under Pinhorne in Latin school and used him in both Horae Lyricae (1706) and Reliquiae Juveniles (1734). He translated Casimir into all kinds of stanzaic forms and for all purposes—religious lyrics, epigrams, and friendship poems. The finest of these translations, and the poem which Samuel Johnson liked best, is “The Celebrated Victory of the Poles over Osman the Turkish Emperor in the Dacian Battle.” This is a long, well-sustained narrative poem in blank verse. There are two vivid descriptions, one of the battle, the other of the death of the two young princes; and the whole poem moves with such ease and spirit that one wishes that Watts had tried the type more often.

In Book I of Horae Lyricae Watts has several poems showing a “consciousness wider and deeper than normal.”¹³⁶ These mystical poems record his attempts to ally himself with and to lose himself in contemplation of the eternal principles of the Godhead. In these pieces the evangelical principle is carried to its ultimate degree. The religious soul suffused with divine influence abandons all perceptions of sense and intellect and loses itself in mystical love.

The “tremendous lover” of these poems is sometimes the Calvinistic God (“The Incomprehensible”):

          Far in the heav'ns my God retires,
                    My God, the mark of my desires,
                    And hides his lovely face;
          When he descends within my view,
          He charms my reason to pursue,
But leaves it tir'd and fainting in th' unequal chase.

More often, however, the mystical lover is Christ, and following the seventeenth century tradition, Watts turns to the Songs of Solomon for the content of his “Divine Love” poems. One of the best and most restrained of these Canticles is found in the hymn:

We are a garden wall'd around,
Chosen and made peculiar ground;
A little spot, inclosed by grace,
Out of the world's wide wilderness.(137)

But Watts tells us in one of his sermons on the “foretaste of heaven” that there are some persons who love Christ with such “intense and ardent zeal” that their “transcendent affections” carry them away “captive above all earthly things.”¹³⁸ In some of the “Divine Love” poems he shows this type of transcendent affection for Christ the “tremendous lover.” His imagery becomes startlingly sensual:

Once I beheld his face, when beams divine
Broke from his eye-lids, and unusual light
Wrapt me at once in glory and surprise.
My joyful heart, high leaping in my breast,
With transport cried, “This is the Christ of God;”
Then threw my arms around in sweet embrace,
And clasped and bowed adoring low
          till I was lost in him.

He seeks Christ “panting with extreme desire,” he carves Christ's name in the bark of a lover's tree, he meets his loved one in “some lofty shade where turtles moan their loves.” The passion in these poems is so shockingly detailed that without exception every biographer of Watts has stated or hinted dislike of the poems, even though each was aware that Watts was following the usual seventeenth century symbolical interpretation of the Songs of Solomon.

Watts became conscious of the changing taste in such matters; he apologized for the poems in the 1736 edition of Horae Lyricae and again in the Preface to Mrs. Rowe's Devout Exercises (1737). In the latter work he wrote like a Freudian: “I know it hath been said that this language of rapture addressed to Deity, is but a new track given to the flow of the softer powers, after the disappointment of some meaner love; or, at least, it is owing to the want of a proper object and opportunity to fix those tender passions.”¹³⁹ Watts explained that this was not so either in his own case or in that of Mrs. Rowe. He confessed, however, that the “sense of mature age” had persuaded him that this language was not the happiest in which to disclose “warm sentiments of religion;” but he insisted that there were some souls “favored with such beautifying visits from heaven, and raptured with such a flame of divine affection” that they were constrained to use the language of divine love.¹⁴⁰

A. Hamilton Thompson believes that Watts's best work on this theme “has nobility of thought and style,” and that the language of the Song of Songs has seldom been used with “such faultless taste and beauty” as in the hymn quoted above, “We are a garden wall'd around.”¹⁴¹ In a few of these poems Watts approaches his ideal of devotional poetry, “all meridian light and meridian fervour.” They glow with religious passion and intensity, and though such intimacy with divine persons as depicted in them is objectionable to many, the poetry is intrinsically of a high order. If Watts could have written all of his verse with the power and passion found in the “Divine Love” poems, his proposed renovation of poetry would not have seemed so visionary an objective. With these poems we arrive at the high water mark of Watts's evangelical verse.

In prosody Watts rebelled against the Neo-classic tradition. Even before Pope reached his maturity as a poet, Watts had written against the dominance of the all-powerful rhymed-couplet:

In the poems of heroic measure I have attempted in rhyme the same variety of cadence, comma and period, which blank verse glories in as its peculiar elegance and ornament. It degrades the excellency of the best versification when the lines run on by couplets, twenty together, just in the same pace, and with the same pauses. It spoils the noblest pleasure of the sound: The reader is tired with the tedious uniformity, or charmed to sleep with the unmanly softness of the numbers, and the perpetual chime of even cadences.¹⁴²

In his Reliquiae Juveniles¹⁴³ Watts gave rules for avoiding this “too constant regularity.” He suggested the use of a happy intermixture of spondees and trochees and double-rhymes, though he advised against the latter for serious poetry.¹⁴⁴

With the “sweet Cowley” as master, Watts had been taken as a school-boy with the “Pindarick folly”, and he never relinquished the form. He seemed to think that Pindarics were especially suited to express sublimity of thought, and in most of his poems dealing with the theory of divine poetry he used the measure.¹⁴⁵ “Two Happy Rivals, Devotion and the Muse” is intended to describe Watts's own Pindaric song:

Wild as the lightning, various as the moon,
          Roves my Pindaric song:
Here she glows like burning noon
          In fiercest flames, and here she plays
Gentle as star-beams on the midnight seas:
          Now in a smiling angel's form,
          Anon she rides upon the storm,
Loud as the noisy thunder, as a deluge strong,
          Are my thoughts and wishes free,
And know no number nor degree?
          Such is the muse: Lo, she disdains
          The links and chains,
          Measures and rules of vulgar strains,
And o'er the laws of harmony, a sov'reign
          queen she reigns.(146)

Even in the use of Pindarics, Watts is unconventional, for he tells us that he has imitated the short line of the ancients rather than the long line, especially in the concluding verse, of modern imitators. He then adds:

In these the ear is the truest judge; nor was it made to be inslaved to any precise model of elder or later times.

In his study of the English ode Dr. Shuster finds Watts a disciple not only of Cowley but of Dryden as well, and he points out that Watts's remarks concerning the shortened last line come from the preface of Dryden's Sylvae. To Shuster, however, Watts is the only significant religious Pindarist in the early eighteenth century.¹⁴⁷

One of the most interesting metrical experiments in the Augustan Age was Watts's “Day of Judgment” (quoted above). Showing a healthy reaction against the chilling uniformity of the couplet, the poem is also of importance in the history of classical metres in English. It is one of very few links (the Alcaics of Milton and Marvell may be considered as such) between Sidney's efforts in the Sapphic metre and those of the nineteenth century poets. According to Enid Hamer, Watts, by substituting stress feet for the quantitative used by Campion and Sidney, ushered in the second phase in the history of classical metres in English.¹⁴⁸ Cowper's poem, “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity”, was inspired by the piece. The Sapphic rhythms of Southey, Lamb, and the Anti-Jacobin were in all probability influenced by Watts's experiment.

Milton occupied an important place in Watts's mind. Watts was one of the early imitators not only of Paradise Lost, but also of the “Minor Poems”. Havens believes Watts to be the first in the eighteenth century to give reasons for the use of Miltonic blank-verse; unfortunately the age was not ready to listen.¹⁴⁹ It is interesting to note that to James Ralph, writing in 1729, Milton, John Philips, Thomson, and Watts were the only writers who, in his estimation, successfully employed blank verse in narrative poems. Ralph included Watts primarily because of the “Dacian Battle” in which he felt that the latter had “performed extreamly well, and in every line deserves the character of an artist.”¹⁵⁰ The Horae Lyricae contains eight poems in “easy flowing blank verse.” Although all of them do not show Miltonic influence, that influence crops up so often in Watts's poems that it would be tedious to list the evidences of it. Watts had a profound respect for Milton, but he never slavishly followed him. In the Preface, he gives us his frank opinion of Milton's faults:

In the Essays without rhyme, I have not set up Milton for a perfect pattern; though he shall be for ever honoured as our deliverer from the bondage [of couplets]. … The length of his periods, and sometimes of his parentheses, runs me out of breath: Some of his numbers seem too harsh and uneasy. I could never believe that roughness and obscurity added anything to the true grandeur of a poem: Nor will I ever affect archaisms, exoticisms, and a quaint uncouthness of speech, in order to become perfectly Miltonian. It is my opinion that blank verse may be written with all due elevation of thought in a modern style, without borrowing any thing from Chaucer's tales, or running back so far as the days of Colin the Shepard, and the reign of the Fairy Queen.

In his Reliquiae Juveniles he has also an essay, “Of the Different stops and Cadences in Blank-verse,” in which he acknowledges again the supremacy of Milton but gives rules whereby Milton may be improved. One notes that Watts considers Milton “the parent and author of blank-verse among us.” Milton is Watts's “Adventurous Muse” who

          Pursues an unattempted course,
          Breaks all critics' iron chains,
And bears to paradise the raptur'd mind.

Watts's own blank verse is felt by some scholars to be a new departure:

This is a sort of blank verse hitherto unknown in England. It is not epic like Milton's or dramatic like that of Shakespeare and that of his successors. It is lyrical and meditative blank verse of the kind that was to be developed so brilliantly by Cowper and Wordsworth.¹⁵¹

It is at its best in short reflective poems like the “Epistle to Sarissa”:

Farewell, ye waxing, and ye waning moons,
That we have watch'd behind the flying clouds
On night's dark hill, or setting or ascending,
Or in meridian height: Then silence reign'd
O'er half the world; then ye beheld our tears,
Ye witness'd our complaints, our kindred grones,
(Sad harmony!) while with your beamy horns,
Or richer orb ye silver'd o'er the green
Where trod our feet, and lent a feeble light
To mourners.

In the Divine Songs (1715) we find a treasure-house of all the metres not expected in the eighteenth century. There are anapaests, trochees, and feminine rhymes. There are mixtures of feminine and masculine endings, as in “A Cradle Hymn,” and an impressive mixture of stanzaic forms. In Watts's poetry one finds blank verse, Pindarics, Sapphics, run-on couplets; ten, eight, and seven syllable couplets; triplets; and all the various typical quatrains: the eight and six and eight and eight, and double eight and six. Saintsbury's estimate of Watts's prosodic experiments is a terse but favorable summation: “In short, he has variety, and he has craftsmanship.”¹⁵²

The imagery of Watts reflects his peculiar mission in the field of poetry. As one would expect from his advice in the Preface to Horae Lyricae, the Bible was an important influence. Watts's work with metrical Psalms and scriptural hymns created in his poetic consciousness a reservoir of Biblical imagery and phraseology upon which he drew spontaneously. He was also particularly adept at changing Bible verses into metre. For instance the famous “Sluggard:”

Tis the voice of the Sluggard; I heard him complain,
“You have wak'd me too soon, I must slumber again.”
As the door on its hinges, so he on his bed,
Turns his sides, and his shoulders, and his heavy head,

was made up of the following verses from the Proverbs of Solomon: xxvi:14, “As the door turneth …”; vi:10, “A little more sleep …”; xxiv:30, “I went by the field …”; and xxc:33, “Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.”

Miltonic imagery occurs usually in the blank verse and Pindaric poems of Watts. Phrases like “of brightness inexpressible,” “the tangles of Amira's hair,” and “hasty fate thrust her dread shears” abound. Watts tended to associate Miltonic imagery, like the Pindaric form, with the sublime in poetry.

Watts was well-read in seventeenth century literature; and though I cannot trace images to any one poet other than Milton, the following lines do show a belated metaphysical tendency:

On the thin air, without a prop,
          Hang fruitful showers around:
At thy command they sink and drop
          Their fatness on the ground;

and these:

Our eyes the radiant saint pursue
Through liquid telescopes of tears;

and these:

When I within myself retreat,
I shut my doors against the great;
My busy eye-balls inward roll,
And there with wide survey I see
All the wide theatre of me.

But the characteristic imagery of Watts's poetry comes from that body of pious discourse which was the common property and language of the churchgoer, the popular preacher, the emblem-writer, and the popular tract-writer. Made up of Biblical phraseology mingled with evangelical theological commentary, it was a discourse that dealt concretely and emotionally with the vanity of life, death, judgment, the machinery of salvation, and the world to come. It spoke to the pious in images that had become highly conventionalized through generations of use.

Watts's evangelical poetry contains too many of these familiar images. The soul is forever taking an “awful chariot” or making “a daring flight” to a “mansion in the sky.” Heaven is “my home,” and “my native land,” and a “celestial seat.” The flesh is a “weak cottage,” “a cage,” or “prison walls.” The world is a “mole-hill,” “a stage of clay,” a “bubble or a dust.” Men are “mortal worms,” “degenerate worms,” and “despicable worms.” And the gospel is a “golden chain” which saves man from the “unfathomable sea” of death. There are many variants of these and similar images. Watts seldom startles us with new and unexpected analogies. His practice reminds one of Johnson's dictum concerning the “perpetual repetition” which tended to occur in devotional poetry because of the “paucity of its topics.”

Before attempting a final evaluation of Watts as a poet, we must reverse the medal and see him in his bad moments. He is an uneven poet and can sink, not often to be sure, but occasionally, to frightful depths of bathos. For example, it is hard to surpass in poetic bad taste the following lines:

In limbs of clay tho' she [the soul] appears,
Array'd in rosy skin, and decked with eyes and ears.

It is difficult to believe that the same person wrote the following charming verses:

          I've a mighty part within
That the world hath never seen,
Rich as Eden's happy ground,
And with choicer plenty crown'd:
Here on all the shining boughs
Knowledge fair and useful grows;
On the same young flow'ry tree
All the seasons you may see;
Notions in the bloom of light,
Just disclosing to the sight;
Here are thoughts of larger growth,
Rip'ning into solid truth; …

It has been customary to accuse Watts of carelessness in his rhymes. Noting that he rhymed divine—sin, steal—will, cradle—stable, feed—bed, scenes—pen, dumb—room, suns—once, bestows—lose, stand—man, sport—dirt, boughs—grows, and growth—truth, some critics, classifying them all simply as false rhymes, have dismissed them as a part of Watts's indifference to such niceties. Others with more discrimination have pointed out that many of these so-called bad rhymes were admitted in Watts's day and are to be found in Pope as well as in Watts. But no one, to my knowledge, has suggested that Watts was deliberately using imperfect rhyme, assonance, and suspended rhyme for a wider range of effect. I cannot believe that he was indifferent to niceties of rhyme and metre. He knew too much about them and wrote too discriminatingly on them to be careless in such matters. And these “slips” occur too often to be mere carelessness. In the twelve-line passage quoted above there are three suspended rhymes. This seems too frequent to be accidental.

Though one finds a considerable number of assonant and imperfect rhymes in his works, Watts seems particularly fond of suspended rhyme. Usually considered a modern departure, suspended rhyme is found in Shakespeare, Marlowe and other Elizabethans as well as in the contemporary work of Spender, Elinor Wylie, and MacLeish. The latter poets, like Watts, vary effectively the suspended with the perfect rhyme. The technique of Auden, though exaggerated almost beyond recognition, is essentially akin to that of Watts. And the same may also be said of Emily Dickinson, in whom some critics find echoes of Watts.

But to return to the blemishes—perhaps Watts's most glaring fault is the poetic frowsiness into which he allows the Pindaric stanza to carry him on two or three occasions. The poem on Gouge is the best known example. The forced enthusiasm in these instances results in turgidity. His striving leaves the reader cold, and his heightened style becomes the false sublime. This is by no means the rule with his Pindarics, but a few bombastic examples have been weapons for derisive critics.

Watts's range was limited, but he was good within these limits. His diction was simple, pure, and singularly free of eighteenth century conventional phraseology. He possessed unusual metrical skill. He had fervor, but it was usually held within the bounds of good taste. On three great themes—God's Majesty, the heart of a Christian touched by the love of Christ, and the world to come—he sang in graceful verse sometimes with the religious emotion of a George Herbert, sometimes with the amorous imagination of a Crashaw, and always with the sincerity of a devout believer. He was at his best in short lyrics in which a single emotion of the Christian's heart is portrayed.

Watts's efforts to renovate poetry made little impression upon the polite writers of the age; and in the Preface to Reliquiae Juveniles (1734), we find a pathetic admission of his failure as a poet:

I make no pretences to the name of a poet, or a polite writer, in an age wherein so many superior souls shine in their works through this nation. Could I display the excellencies of virtue and christian piety … with all the beauty and glory in which Mr. Pope has set the kingdom of the Messiah. … Could I paint nature … in such strong and lively colors as Dr. Young has done; … I should have a better ground for a pretence to appear among the writers of verse, and do more service to the world. … But since I can boast of little more than an inclination and a wish that way, I must commit the provision of these amusements to such celebrated authors as I have mentioned, and to the rising genius's of the age: …¹⁵³

This statement compared with the confident 1709 Preface to Horae Lyricae sounds like the complaint of a disillusioned old man whose youthful plans failed to mature.

Watts's position in the field of English poetry, however, is not so modest as the above Preface claims. Perdeck,¹⁵⁴ Draper,¹⁵⁵ Schöffler,¹⁵⁶ and Fairchild¹⁵⁷ have shown in their respective works that pre-romantic tendencies were kept alive during the early eighteenth century by the religiously-inclined poets. Watts was a very important member of this company who in an age of versified rhetoric wrote feelingly of inspired truth. Through him the Sapphic experiments of Sidney, the Pindarics of Cowley, and the blank verse of Milton were given fresh treatment. Through Watts the melancholy, retirement, and graveyard themes of seventeenth century poetry were transmitted to the Youngs, Blairs and Grays of the mid-eighteenth century. Through him the Platonic-Renaissance theory of “original genius” was given a new turn and a critical justification. Watts is therefore a pre-romantic figure of some little significance.

But he is above all else the poet of the still active though latent religious life which carried over from the seventeenth century to blossom in eighteenth century Methodism and Evangelicalism. He was the poet from whom

          Each heav'n-born heart shall choose a favorite ode
To bear their morning homage to their God,
And pay their nightly vows. These sacred themes
Inspire the pillow with ethereal dreams:
And oft amidst the burdens of the day
Some devout couplet wings the soul away,
Forgetful of this globe: …(158)

He put into verse the thoughts, emotions, hopes, and fears of the thousands of everyday Englishmen left outside by the religion of the Compromise. Watts was the poet of that vast army of religious persons who read poetry not as a literary exercise but for spiritual food. Colonel Gardiner expressed the attitude of this group when he wrote to Doddridge:

… I have been in pain these several years, lest that excellent person should be called to heaven before I had an opportunity to let him know how much his works have been blessed in me, … well am I acquainted with his works, especially with his psalms, hymns, and lyricks. How often, by singing some of them when by myself, on horseback and elsewhere, has the evil spirit been made to flee away, …¹⁵⁹

The poetry of Isaac Watts deserves a place in the history of English literature not only because of its intrinsic worth, but also because it is the best lyrical expression of eighteenth century evangelicalism.¹⁶⁰

Notes

1. Only those essays which have not been considered elsewhere will be discussed in this chapter.

2. Watts had nine sermons in this collection. See “Bibliography I”. Associated with him were Neal, Guyse, Price, Hubbard, and D. Jennings.

3. In 1812 John Pye Smith published Nine Sermons, Preached in the years 1718-19, By the late Isaac Watts, D.D. (Oxford, 1812). These sermons are characteristic of Watts but do not compare favorably in form and expression with those that he prepared for the press. In Post. Works, Vol. II, pp. 241 ff. and 293 ff. there are two series of sermons preached by Watts in 1707 at Pinners' Hall.

4. Works, Vol. I, p. ix.

5. Johnson's Works, op. cit., Vol. XI, p. 46.

6. Gibbons, op. cit., p. 142.

7. Quoted in the Christian Observer, Vol. XII (London, 1813), p. 720.

8. See Milner, op. cit., p. 639; see also p. 502.

9. Cf. especially the “Charges” for the year 1727.

10. Found in An Humble Attempt (1731) which will be discussed later in this chapter. Watts also had sections on the art of preaching in The Improvement of the Mind and in the Rational Foundation of a Christian Church. In the latter work he justifies the Puritan-dissenter manner of preaching.

11. For the Puritan origin of this type of soul-analysis, cf. Haller, Rise of Puritanism, pp. 90-91.

12. Works, Vol. III, p. 22. Contrast this advice with that given by Swift to a young clergyman: “But I do not see how this talent of moving the passions can be of any use towards directing Christian men in the conduct of their lives, at least in these northern climates, where I am confident the strongest eloquence of that kind will leave few impressions. …” in Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Temple Scott, ed. (London, 1898), Vol. I, p. 205.

13. Haller, Rise of Puritanism, p. 20.

14. The remarks on seventeenth century preaching are taken largely from the following secondary works: Perry Miller, The New England Mind (New York, 1939), W. F. Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson (London, 1932), and William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938).

15. Haller, Rise of Puritanism, p. 22.

16. Ibid., p. 25.

17. Ibid., pp. 134-5.

18. See Mitchell, op. cit., p. 99.

19. See Miller, op. cit., p. 335.

20. Works, Vol. II, p. 156.

21. There were four editions by 1737. The sixteenth edition came out in 1818. In 1727 it was translated into German by Professor John Jacob Rambach of Halle.

22. Cf. Baxter's The Saints' Everlasting Rest (1649). Although the world to come was a typical Puritan theme, it is highly probable that Watts took some hints from Baxter's work.

23. The End of Time, one of the discourses appended to The World to Come, has often been published separately. It is one of Watts's most popular works.

24. See Works, Vol. I, pp. 686 ff.

25. Cf. pp. 175-8, infra.

26. See p. 146, infra.

27. Works, Vol. I, p. 24.

28. This letter, written in 1732, is found in the MS. collection of Basil Cozens-Hardy, Norwich, England.

29. Works, Vol. I, p. 1.

30. Ibid., p. 20.

31. Ibid., p. 22.

32. Ibid., p. 27.

33. Frank A. Patterson (ed.), The Student's Milton (New York, 1931), p. 1041.

34. See Umphrey Lee, Historical Background of Early Methodist Enthusiasm (New York, 1931).

35. Works, Vol. III, p. 179.

36. Ibid., II, p. 95.

37. Ibid., p. 97-8.

38. From a MS. sermon in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.

39. Works, Vol. II, p. 102.

40. Ibid., p. 101.

41. L. Stephen, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 386.

42. The “Bills of Mortality” report 59 cases of suicide in London in 1725, besides 74 drowned and 43 found dead of causes unknown.

43. J. H. Harder, Eighteenth Century Tendencies in Poetry and Essay (Amsterdam, 1933), pp. 120-141.

44. See Works, Vol. II, pp. 637-8.

45. Edwards' final position is found in A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746). To Edwards, religion was primarily a matter of the affections. Compare also Baxter's Directions for the Use of the Passions found in his Christian Directory. Baxter's work in aim and content foretokens Watts's essay.

46. There were many answers to this pamphlet. Among them were: A Letter to the Author of the Enquiry, … (London, 1730); The Methods to be taken by Ministers for the Revival of Religion … by David Some (London, 1730); Some Observations upon the Present State of the Dissenting Interest (London, 1731); and An Apology for the Church of England (London, 1732). One of the best answers was that by Philip Doddridge, Free Thoughts on the most Probable Means of Reviving the Dissenting Interest (1730).

47. Works, Vol. III, p. xi.

48. Works, Vol. II, p. 345.

49. This particular section was answered in 1740 by Robert Cornthwaite in a tract, An Essay on the Sabbath; …

50. One of Watts's members refused to take communion at noon because it was called “supper” in the Bible.

51. Watts's translation or rather “imitation” of the Psalms was done in this spirit. See next chapter.

52. See H. F. R. Smith, The Theory of Religious Liberty in the Reigns of Charles II and James II. (Cambridge, 1911).

53. Dale, op. cit., pp. 519-21.

54. Works, Vol. VI, p. 134. Watts set out to draw up this scheme without consulting any authors, but he stated that he had read Locke's Charter for the State of North Carolina and Puffendorf's The Relation between Church and State.

55. This argument was found in practically all of the Puritan writers on toleration. See the essays on John Goodwin, Henry Parker, Walwyn, and Henry Robinson in Haller's Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, Vol. I.

56. Works, Vol. VI, p. 137.

57. Works, Vol. VI, p. 168.

58. Miller, op. cit., pp. 185-6.

59. This was an answer to Stillingfleet's Unreasonableness of Separation (1680).

60. When two objects are so similar that choice of either could not be made on the grounds of “apparent goodness,” then man exercises freedom of the will in taking one or the other.

61. The influence of John Locke may be seen not only here but in Watts's educational theories (see p. 101) and also in his Essay on Civil Power (see p. 145 n).

62. Works, Vol. V, p. 503.

63. Watts tells us in a letter dated May 13, 1735 (unpublished and found in the Pennsylvania Historical Society's collection), that he regretted not having read Bishop Berkeley's works in his “Philosophical age of Life”. They were considered then too “whimsicall and chimerick.”

64. Stephen, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 386.

65. Note that both Wesley and Edwards had the same reaction to Locke's philosophy. Cf. Wesley's An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion.

66. Cf. p. 107, supra.

67. R. S. Crane and M. E. Prior, “English Literature, 1660-1800: A Current Bibliography,” Philological Quarterly, Vol. XI (1932).

68. See Miller, op. cit., p. 186.

69. Works, Vol. V, p. 583.

70. Ibid., p. 576.

71. Jonathan Edwards' beliefs were essentially similar to those of Watts.

72. There were five editions of Philosophical Essays by 1800.

73. James P. R. Lyell, Mrs. Piozzi and Isaac Watts, being annotations in the Autograph of Mrs. Piozzi on a copy of the First Edition of the Philosophical Essays of Watts (London, 1934).

74. Ibid., p. 23.

75. Ibid., p. 24. Beattie's Essay on Truth (1761) was a very popular orthodox philosophical work of the day.

76. Ibid., p. 44.

77. Ibid., p. 26.

78. Ibid., p. 42.

79. This work was dedicated to the “Right Honourable the Countess of Hertford.” See p. 44, supra.

80. Works, Vol. IV, p. 512.

81. Compare “To Velina, on the Death of Several Young Children” with “The Hazard of Loving the Creatures” (Horae Lyricae) and “The Day of Judgment” (Horae Lyricae) with “Distant Thunder”.

82. See Nos. 37 and 61 of the Religious Tract Society (London) publications.

83. Johnson's Works, op. cit., Vol. XI, p. 50. Johnson himself was guilty on the same score; see the Rambler.

84. Works, Vol. V, p. 233.

85. Ibid., pp. 326-9.

86. Monthly Review, Vol. X (1754), p. 93.

87. Works, Vol. I, p. 702.

88. Quoted in Louis F. Benson, The Hymnody of the Christian Church (New York, 1927), p. 111.

89. According to Nichols' Literary Anecdotes, Vol. V (1812), pp. 218-9, Watts is supposed to have remonstrated with Pope who consented to change the line. The original appeared only in surreptitious editions.

90. L. F. Salzman, “The Little Busy Watts,” Cornhill Magazine, n.s., Vol. XLIX, pp. 472-8.

91. Johnson's, Works, op. cit., Vol. XI, p. 50.

92. J. G. Frazier, Letters of William Cowper (London, 1912), Vol. I, p. 146. The letter was addressed to Newton.

93. Specimens of the Later English Poets (London, 1807), Vol. II, p. 96.

94. Geo. Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody (London, 1908), Vol. II, p. 508.

95. The Nation (March 16, 1937), art., “Homage to Isaac Watts,” p. 280.

96. A. E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry (Cambridge, 1933), p. 30.

97. V. de Sola Pinto, “Isaac Watts and His Poetry,” op. cit.

98. Fairchild, op. cit., p. 123.

99. Legouis and Cazamian, History of English Literature (New York, 1930), p. 819.

100. W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry (London, 1919), Vol. V, pp. 273 ff. and 327 ff.

101. The word is used here not to denote the party of the English Church which did not come into existence until the third or fourth decade of the century, but as a generic term for all the dissident emotional and religious forces of the age.

102. Works, Vol. IV, p. 317.

103. Ibid., p. 318.

104. See Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (London, 1934), p. 227; also Spingarn's Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1908), Vol. II, p. 89.

105. See Works of Giles and Phineas Fletcher (Cambridge, 1908), Vol. I, pp. 10-13.

106. Works, Vol. IV., p. 323.

107. Ibid., p. 323.

108. Ibid., p. 327.

109. For a full discussion of this subject, see H. G. Paul, John Dennis (New York, 1911), pp. 120-44. For other examples, see Flecknoe's Discourse on the English Stage (1664); Rymer's Tragedies of the Last Age (1678); Baxter's Poetical Fragments (1681); Nahum Tate's On the Present Corrupted State of Poetry (1684); John Norris's Preface to A Collection of Miscellanies (1687); and Jeremy Collier's Short View (1698).

110. See especially Reason of Church Government and Paradise Lost, Books I and VII.

111. The theory is presented in the preface to Blackmore's Redemption (1722) and A Paraphrase on the Book of Job (1700); Dennis's The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704).

112. See Sister M. Kevin Whelan, Enthusiasm in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century (Washington, 1935), pp. 51-73 for a fuller discussion of the evidences of this critical theory in the late eighteenth century.

113. See p. 108, supra.

114. Eleanor M. Sickels, The Gloomy Egoist (New York, 1932), pp. 35-6.

115. Amy Reed, Background of Gray's Elegy (New York, 1924), p. 47.

116. Cf. “Afflictions by divine influence purge out sin, and promote holiness; loosen from the world and prepare for leaving it.” (The Magistrate and the Christian … by Jeremiah Smith, London, 1722).

117. Cf. this poem with Drummond's “This World a hunting is”. Note also its influence on Blair's Grave and on Blake (see pp. 228-9, infra).

118. Note the resemblance to Shelley's “Ozymandias”.

119. Reed, op. cit., p. 94. It is possible that all of these “last day” poems have a common inspiration in the very popular Theory of the Earth (1684) by Thomas Burnet. It is filled with conflagration and “last day” imagery. A fifth edition of the work came out in 1722 as The Sacred Theory of the Earth.

120. J. W. Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (New York, 1929), p. 92.

121. Ibid., p. 75.

122. Works, Vol. IV, p. 437.

123. R. D. Havens, Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge, 1922), p. 425.

124. See p. 228, infra.

125. Works, Vol. IV, p. 462.

126. Ibid.

127. Courthope, op. cit., Vol. V, p. 21.

128. Works, Vol. IV, pp. 410-12. Polhill was one of the five gentlemen who presented the famous “Kentish Petition” to Parliament in William's Reign.

129. This is Watts's only attempt in poetical satire.

130. Matthew Casimir Sarbiewski (1595-1640), commonly called “Casimir,” was a Polish Jesuit who wrote exclusively in Latin. He was known in his day as the “Christian Horace.” His poetry tended to the moral.

131. Translated by Gibbons, op. cit., p. 12.

132. In 1708 Watts wrote a poem on “Burning several Poems of Ovid, Martial, Oldham, Dryden, etc.,” (Works, Vol. IV, p. 401).

133. Translated by Gibbons, op. cit., p. 12.

134. Works, Vol. IV, pp. 608-9.

135. Cowley and Denham introduced this type of translation to England. See C.H.E.L., Vol. VII, pp. 298-9.

136. Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (Oxford, 1916), p. vii, the definition of a mystical poem. “The Incomprehensible” is one of the four poems listed for the eighteenth century (before Blake).

137. There are thirteen of these poems in Book I of Hymns and Spiritual Songs and twenty-two in Horae Lyricae.

138. Works, Vol. I, p. 687.

139. Devout Exercises of the Heart (London, 1826), p. xv.

140. Ibid., p. xiv.

141. “The Mystical Element in English Poetry,” Essays and Studies, Vol. VIII (1922), pp. 90-108.

142. Works, Vol. IV, p. 326.

143. Ibid., p. 582, essay on “The Cadence of Verse.”

144. Ibid., p. 585.

145. Watts's position on this matter was one commonly held in his age. See Whelan, op. cit., pp. 121-27 for a discussion of this critical attitude.

146. Watts implies in his poem “The Adventurous Muse” that “coupled sound” cannot climb to sublimity.

147. George N. Shuster, The English Ode from Milton to Keats (New York, 1940), pp. 154-6.

148. Enid Hamer, The Metres of English Poetry (New York, 1930), pp. 306-9.

149. Havens, op. cit., p. 62. Havens feels that there is a correlation, exemplified by Watts, Say, Grove, and Standen, between the piety of dissent and the use of blank verse.

150. Miscellaneous Poems (London, 1729), p. iv.

151. V. de Sola Pinto, “Isaac Watts and His Poetry,” op. cit., p. 35.

152. George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody (London, 1908), Vol. II, p. 508.

153. Works, Vol. IV, p. 458.

154. Theology in Augustan Literature (Groningen, 1922).

155. Op. cit.

156. Protestantismus und Literatur (Leipzig, 1922).

157. Op. cit.

158. Works, Vol. IV, p. 593.

159. Doddridge's Correspondence, op. cit., Vol. III, pp. 389-90. The letter is dated July 9, 1739.

160. See Chapter IX for a résumé of Watts's influence as a religious poet.

161. Unless otherwise stated, all works were published in London.

Bibliography I

Works of Isaac Watts¹⁶¹

1731 An Humble Attempt towards the Revival of Practical Religion among Christians, and particularly the Protestant Dissenters, by a Serious Address to Ministers and People, in some occasional Discourses.

1733 Philosophical Essays on Various Subjects, viz. Space, Substance, Body, Spirit, the Operations of the Soul in Union with the Body, Innate Ideas, Perpetual Consciousness, Place and Motions of Spirits, the Departing Soul, the Resurrection of the Body, the Production and Operation of Plants and Animals, with some Remarks on Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. To which is subjoined a Brief Scheme of Ontology, or the Science of Being in General, with its Affections.

1735 Faith and Practice Represented in fifty-four Sermons on the Principal Heads of the Christian Religion; Preached at Berry-Street, 1733. By I. Watts, D.D., D. Neal, M.A., J. Guyse, D.D., S. Price, D. Jennings, J. Hubbard. Published for the use of Families, especially on the Lord's-Day Evenings. [The work appeared in two volumes. Watts wrote Sermons i, xi, xiii, xix, and xxv in Vol. I and xxxi, xxxvii, xlii, and xlix in Vol. II.]

1739 The World to Come: or, Discourses on the Joys or Sorrows of Departed Souls at Death, and the Glory or Terror of the Resurrection. Whereto is prefixed, An Essay towards the Proof of a Separate State of Souls after Death.

1739 A New Essay on Civil Power in Things Sacred; or, an Inquiry after an Established Religion, consistent with the just Liberties of Mankind and practicable under every form of Civil Government.

1741 The Improvement of the Mind: or, a Supplement to the Art of Logic: containing a Variety of Remarks and Rules for the Attainment and Communication of useful Knowledge in Religion, in the Sciences, and in Common Life.

1745 The World to Come. (Vol. II.)

1747 The Rational Foundation of a Christian Church, and the Terms of Christian Communion. To which are added three Discourses, viz. Discourse I. A Pattern for a Dissenting Preacher. Discourse II. The Office of Deacons. Discourse III. Invitations to Church-Fellowship.

Posthumous Publications

1753The Works of the late Reverend and Learned Isaac Watts, D.D. Published by himself, and now Collected into Six Volumes. In which are also inserted The Second Part of The Improvement of the Mind, An Essay on Education, And some Additions to his Miscellaneous Thoughts in Prose and Verse. Now first Published from his Manuscripts, and, by the Direction of his Will, Revised and Corrected by D. Jennings, D.D. and the late P. Doddridge, D.D.

1779 The Posthumous Works of the late Learned and Reverend Isaac Watts, D.D. In Two Volumes. Compiled from Papers in Possession of his immediate Successors: Adjusted and Published by a Gentleman of the University of Cambridge. [See pp. 239 ff., supra, for comments on this work.]

Bibliography II

General

Courthope, W. J., A History of English Poetry, London, 1905, 6 Vols.

Dale, R. W., History of English Congregationalism, New York, 1907.

Doddridge, Philip, The Correspondence and Diary, ed. John D. Humphreys, London, 1830, 5 Vols.

Fairchild, H. N., Religious Trends in English Poetry, New York, 1939.

Gibbons, Thomas, Memoirs of the Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D., London, 1780.

Haller, William, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, Vol. I. New York, 1934.

Havens, R. D., The Influence of Milton in English Poetry, Cambridge (U. S. A.), 1922.

Johnson, Samuel, Works, Troy, N. Y., 1903, 16 Vols.

Milner, Thomas, The Life, Times and Correspondence of the Rev. Isaac Watts, D.D., London, 1834.

Nichols, John, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, London, 1812-16.

Pinto, V. de Sola, “Isaac Watts and His Poetry,” Wessex, Vol. III, No. 2, (Southampton, 1935), pp. 27-36.

Stephen, Sir Leslie, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, New York, 1927, 2 Vols.

Whelan, Sister M. Kevin, Enthusiasm in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, Washington, 1935.