[In the following essay, Feingold examines some characteristics of Augustan poetry and compares the work of several poets, including Collins.]

The inwardness that the writer reveals may be his own, it may be another's—and that other may be either concretely imagined or universalized. As for the audience, it may be imagined as immediately, or as more distantly, present; it may be a figure in the text itself, explicitly addressed, or it may be constituted by the tacit yet clearly acknowledged presence of a reader. Whatever its form, an audience is always in some sense there as an object of address, and plainly or subtly the work enacts the writer's and the audience's contact with one another, a condition indispensable to the writer's assertion of his authority for speech. In the works discussed here, the representation of inwardness therefore, is always, in some sense a public occasion, a fact usually marked by the writer's didactic stance. Neoclassical poetry is unusually rich in writing whose explicit intention is didactic. Where this poetry is most accomplished, its didactic impulse is shaped to its representation of an inwardness that complicates the didactic material and, doing so, produces or enhances the effects I am calling Augustan lyricism.

An audience to speak to, a lesson to deliver, and a focus on inward experience—this complex blend of highly private subject matter and obviously public rhetoric is certainly a familiar feature of the most characteristic and significant poems of the eighteenth century. But the presence to the poet of his audience can seem to be a problematic—perhaps the most problematic—feature of Augustan representations of inwardness, especially to readers accustomed to romantic ways of representing the activity of the subjective consciousness. In recognizing the ubiquity of the imagined audience within Augustan poetry, we may easily recall John Stuart Mill's manifestly romantic insistence that in the specially charged species of writing he is willing to call "poetry," an audience can have neither place nor function. In Mill's scheme it is eloquence, but not poetry, which seeks an audience, for the purpose of eloquence is plainly to influence those to whom it is addressed, to convince them of notions, to induce in them feelings about notions.

These are social tasks above all, whereas for Mill it is solitude that marks the situation and the moment of poetry. In solitude, consciousness—determined and given shape by feeling—encounters itself only, and what it knows and says it knows and says for itself alone. Poetry is "passion brooding over itself,"¹ and its expression, though written to be read, is not written to enact the poet's contact with reader; it is written, indeed, to feign the impossibility of such contact (p. 349). Hence Mill's familiar insistence that poetry is the species of utterance which is overheard. Almost inevitably, Mill would come to identify this overhead utterance with lyric, and thus to identify lyric almost with poetry itself.

Lyric poetry, as it was the earliest kind, is also, if the view we are now taking of poetry be correct, more eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other; it is the poetry most natural to a really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully imitated by one not so endowed by nature. [p. 359]

Mill's remarks about lyric, of course, hardly exhaust the subject; it is perfectly clear that he has no interest in what might be called the ceremonial or theatrical lyric popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the greater and lesser odes of Dryden, of Gray, of Collins, of Smart, of Swift, and even, occasionally, of Pope. Nor is there in Mill's discussion of poetry any mention whatever of the writers of the two or three literary generations preceding William Wordsworth's, as if among them were none who found a rhetoric adequate to express "passion brooding over itself," and none who had recognized the possibility of such experience. And yet, whatever the limitations, and whatever the merits, of Mill's discussion, he seems to be implicitly responding to and providing a guide for inquiry into the poetic practice of those literary generations.²

What, after all, is signified by the scarcity in eighteenth-century poetry of the lyric writing that, pretending to be overheard, feigns the absence to each other of poet and reader or, more generally, of speaker and addressee? Nor is this a formal question only. For we are asking also about the experience that the formal situation is designed to represent: the experience of "passion brooding over itself."³ What possibilities are there for representing this in a poetry whose commitment to public speech in public situations is marked by the insistent dominance of epistle, satire, and verse essay? In these forms, where so much that is said is meant to be heard (or read as if heard), how may the overheard component be recognized and listened for? And if in these public genres there is indeed a covertly present lyricism, what then of the overtly lyrical kinds—the elegies and the quiet odes, which even in their most intimate representations seem to seek a listener and perhaps a judge? These questions respond to the odd complexity of neoclassical poetry when the subject it engages is self-encounter, and when the experience it represents is primarily inward. They are questions that ask ultimately about the nature of lyric utterance within a rhetoric whose first task is to present the general experience of mankind as a knowable presence even in the moment of lyric solitude.⁴

…..

My emphasis in this book is on the covertly lyrical rhetoric of the more obviously public genres: epistle, satire, verse essay, conversation. But, to begin, some consideration of the more familiarly, more overtly lyrical Augustan writing will be useful, because, as the questions I have been raising suggest, the strictly formal distinctions between the apparently personal and the apparently public kinds of poetry tend to mask the presence in both of similar rhetorical tensions. Moreover, these rhetorical tensions themselves can become a poem's central subject.

I shall illustrate with an ode of Horace, simply assuming his paradigmatic stature for the English poets of the eighteenth century, who found in his work a variety of models for writing about the intersection of private and public experience; in Horace's work, indeed, public and personal are virtually forms of thought and feeling.⁵ Nor was it only about the intersection of the private and the public that Horace wrote, but also about those boundaries between the two orders of experience which were not to be violated.⁶ Here is Ode 1.24, the elegy for Quintilius, which will illustrate the pressure contained within Augustan lyric utterance when it is given to the exploration of intensely powerful states of subjective consciousness:

[What restraint or measure should there be to grief for so dear a life? Teach me a song' of mourning, O Melpomene, to whom the Father gave a liquid voice and with it the lyre. So now perpetual sleep presses itself upon Quintilius! When shall Honour, and unmoveable Loyalty, the sister of Justice, and plain Truth, ever find his peer? He dies mourned by many good men; by no one, Virgil, more than by you. In useless devotion you ask the gods for Quintilius, but, alas, he was not given to this life on such terms. Were you able more sweetly even than Thracian Orpheus to strike the strings the trees once heeded, still no blood would return to that empty shade, now that Mercury with his hideous rod has gathered it to the dark herd—Mercury, not easily persuaded to open the gates that Fate has shut. This is hard: but patience lightens the weight of those evils which it would be sinful to seek to set right.]

This poem, so obviously about an intense inward state, is nevertheless marked by language of an unmistakably public character. The poem's elegant and sometimes astonishing circumlocutions; the didactic charge of its concluding lines; the personified abstractions that suggest large attitudinal agreements, that is, Honor, Justice, Loyalty, Truth; and the poem's ceremonial manner—these register Horace's primary commitment to his hearers and thus to the decorums of a speech whose reticence must be the vehicle for its emotionally charged material. And that commitment is nowhere more plainly underlined than in the poem's opening. Here Horace's address to the muse acknowledges immediately that, between the powerful inwardness of grief and the act of speaking suitably about it, there must be some strain: "What restraint or limit should there be to grief for so dear a life? Teach me a song of mourning." In fact, the poem that follows is the very mourning song that gives answer to a question initially put as though no answer were possible or even desirable.

Such an answer must be complex enough not only to memorialize the dead Quintilius, but also to explore the problems inherent in such song as would meet that commitment. This task Horace accomplishes by his unexpected focus on the mourner, Virgil, whom Horace presents as both inconsolable and inarticulate. Once Horace has uttered his own memorial to the dead man, the accomplishment of his first two stanzas, he develops his poem as an address to Virgil. This address marks implicitly the contrast between what can be said and what must not be said ["nefas"], between Horace as artist and Virgil as mourner. It is Virgil, "frustra pius," who is represented as saying the "unspeakable"—beseeching the gods for the dead man's restoration. Perhaps most interesting and moving here is Horace's emphasis upon Virgil's fruitless speech, and upon the irony inherent in that supremely articulate man's incapacity for proper speech in this situation.

But Horace does not merely assert the fruitlessness of Virgil's speech; he emphasizes as well its impiety. In the beautiful moral lyricism of the two lines with which Horace ends his poem, the consolatory sympathy is obvious: "durum: sed levius fit patientia, / quidquid corrigere est nefas." But the final word surprises with its harshness. Heard in it is the deep connection between the idea of the unutterable and the idea of the impious, the unlawful, the unnatural. It is as if two kinds of speech are set in opposition to each other: the one, expressing Virgil's unutterable grief and unspeakable protest; the other, lawful, substantial, in accord with what is "right," what is "said," what "must be" (fas—fari—fatum)—in a word, with what is authorized. This is Horace's speech; it is the yield, finally, of his invocational request of the muse; indeed, his poem is bounded by that request, spoken in its opening lines, and by the final word of the final line—"nefas." And quite plainly, the muse gives, along with her lesson in the authorized sounds, a warning away from the sinful ones.

Now in aligning his own authorized song with what is pious, and Virgil's lament with what is unspeakable, Horace not only distinguishes between poem and outcry, but also between two kinds of poem. We see this in the question he sympathetically addresses to Virgil, the full force of which is not really clear until we have read to the end of the poem's last line.

The sympathy so obvious here is accompanied still by a subtle disclaimer: we hear it in the complexity of "vanae … imagini," in which, as against Virgil's desperate and fantastical insistence upon the continuing substantiality of the dead man, Horace asserts, plainly, his bloodlessness, his shadowiness. Once again, Horace's assertion implies a distinction between two kinds of utterance: the kind associated with miraculous and enchanting and unnatural speech, the speech of Thracian Orpheus (which can figure to itself as though still possessing substance the mere image of the precious dead), and the pious, the sane, the eloquent and reticent speech Horace is composing here. In the context of this reticent speech, "imagini" works to associate two ideas—first, the bloodlessness of the dead man, and second, the trope, the metaphor, the imago (one feels strongly the suggestion that this is the "mere metaphor") of the mad speech of the Orphic poet, the phantasm only, vana imago. Each—the dead man, and the poet's useless trope—is unreal, insubstantial, without blood. For all the sympathy Horace feels, his speech brutally insists upon this point.

But in aligning his style of speech with "what is said" (and in taking "what is said" to be synonymous with "what is ordained"), Horace is not merely dismissing the orphic impulse and its way. He is also acknowledging its rootedness in rich desire, and acknowledging too the tragic implications of his own choice of style. If indeed Virgil's speech—and the outcome it seeks—is impious, "nefas," what are we to make of Horace's description of Virgil as "frustra pius": "tu frustra pius heu non ita creditum / poscis Quintilium deos"? It seems an astonishing oxymoron: "deceived in your devotion [to Quintilius]" would be the primary reading here, but "pius" obviously registers also the sense of "righteous before the gods", so that Virgil is seen to be not only self-deluded in his insane wish for the return of his friend, but also "deceived in his righteousness" with respect to the gods. The ironic possibility here accords with the strong but not unlikely resonance of "swindled" in "frustra." These are meanings that certainly complicate Horace's role as spokesman for the authorized vision. Obviously, he has burdened this expression, "frustra pius," in order to suggest how complex and strained are the choices faced by a human speaker who would align his speech with that of the gods: what can it be but an implied indictment of their ways to say of the mourner that he has been deceived or swindled in his piety? Or wanton in his secular devotions? Certainly, Horace's exclamation in this stanza, "heu," tells us how aware he is of Virgil's victimization. Moreover, Horace's representation of Mercury is in obviously ironic relationship with his larger effort to align his speech with that of the gods and to define this effort as an act of authorized piety. Unmistakable here is the relentlessness of the figure of Mercury and his hideousness:

Here the rhetoric makes it impossible to accept simply Horace's effort to distinguish his speech from Virgil's on the grounds of piety. The hideous figure of Mercury works decisively to limit our affective commitment to "what is decreed" (here "fata") and to the style of human speech that seeks an accord with it. Moreover, the image of Mercury compelling the beloved friend (caput carus, the dear life) into the "dark herd" is a terrifying expression of dehumanization; it stimulates our sympathy for Virgil's desire to see "the blood return to the empty [perhaps even here the 'drained'] shade," and it underscores how problematic indeed is Horace's effort to associate his vision and style with the way things are—a notion here complicated by its articulation in the word "fata," whose deep connection to the words fari and fas (and "nefas") is played upon richly. The irony of "corrigere" most powerfully acknowledges the insufficiencies Horace himself perceives in his effort to speak substantially for "what is ordained": "it is hard, but patience eases the weight of those evils which it would be sinful [unspeakable] to set right." That is, what is spoken is not right. To change it is to set it right ("corrigere"). But to set it right is "nefas"—unspeakable, an abomination. The richness of the irony here requires no comment.

In its development, then, Horace's poem demonstrates that, to the question he initially addresses to the muse, there are two answers: Virgil's resists the limits that the decorums of substantial speech would impose upon speaking about grief (and perhaps upon imagining it), Horace's defines and enunciates them. The result is the reticent eloquence of the poem Horace gives us: a politeness that acknowledges and sympathizes with an experience that is, still, elusive and very threatening. Horace's reticence composes the poem, then, but it is Virgil's incapacity for restraint and for substantial speech which calls the poem into being and gives it shape.⁸ In the play of Horace's way against Virgil's way, the poem's lyricism is made manifest, and what we overhear in this drama is Horace's coming to the recognition of the complexity of his stylistic and moral choices. Even in a poem so plainly marked by the gestures and conventions of social speech, much of what is meant is not finally spoken out, and though the poem's speaker is not situated in solitude, he is discovering the limits of the reach of his public voice.

…..

Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of Horace's poem is its intricacy. This intricacy is a function of the poem's attention to the ironies inherent in Virgil's, that supremely articulate man's, incapacity in this situation for substantial speech, speech that accords with decree and with fate, speech, therefore, that speaks out. Such substantial speech cannot be adequate to Virgil's inner situation, and intricacy of the kind manifested in the Quintilius ode is perhaps inevitable in Augustan poetry when it is about intensely inward states of mind. Perhaps this happens because in Augustan poetry eloquence is regularly understood to have primarily public functions or to be an essentially social display. The intricacy Horace's poem displays, generated by its search for a decorous eloquence at the same time that it articulates its sympathy for what must not be said, enacts the poet's experience of strain in representing or in honoring powerfully subjective experience. And this experience of strain is itself a tacit subject of Augustan poems when they are about such experience. The meaning of speech and the meaning of inarticulateness are perceived as rich and complex matters, problematized, as we might now say, whenever the rhetoric of social display seeks to reveal the contours of inward experience.

In Horace's poem, Virgil is not represented as being without words, but he is seen as essentially inarticulate. This crucial point is enforced by Horace's decision to keep him from speaking for himself within the rhetorical structure of the whole poem. That is, Horace attributes to Virgil a speech whose primary characteristic is its excess, but Horace does not represent that speech. Within Horace's poem Virgil himself has no voice of his own, and though the reader hears of Virgil's speech, he experiences it only as a silence. Now, especially interesting here is this enactment within the poem of the essential equivalence of verbal excess and silence, each a sign of a failure to reach substantial speech, each at the same time a sign of an inner experience of especial richness, in Virgil's case, his "unspeakable" desire for the "dear life."

In considering the association that Horace sees between Virgil's insubstantial speech, both excessive and unheard, and the intensity of his inner experience, we may call to mind those figures who belong to a later literary age but whose rhetorical situation is at least cognate with that of the Virgil we see in Horace's poem: figures such as Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby, Yorick, Harley. Excess and silence seem to mark their presence too, and the most eloquent moments of these heroes of sentimentalism are given out not by words, but by gestures; what we learn about them with most delight, we learn through feelings they enact rather than articulate, more accurately perhaps, through the fullness of feeling they point to. Indeed, the inarticulate eloquence of the hero of feeling, the sentimentalist, may well be a way of exploring concerns similar to those at the center of Horace's memorial ode. And more generally, in the overtly lyrical poetry of the eighteenth century, it is usual to discover the careful decorums of public speech shadowing forth and honoring certain rich states of mind of which speaking out is no necessary consequence. The complex ending of Thomas Gray's Elegy, for example, works to generate powerfully lyrical feeling without precisely defining it or describing its sources within the narrator. Indeed, the poem's concluding presentation of the speaker's own imagined monument, its reticent and unrevealing epitaph cut into it, clearly signals the way in which a public eloquence could be put to the task of honoring what it refuses to reveal, as if the refusal to reveal were itself an important constituent of valuable emotional experience. Here too, as in the Quintilius ode, intricate poetic activity will be generated by the poet's interest in the conditions of speech and speechlessness, but here the poet's refusal to commit himself entirely to his hearers even as he makes the sounds of public speech is more clearly brought forward than it is by Horace.⁹ In the Elegy the poem's speaker is both Horace and Virgil: his is both the mastery of a reticent eloquence and the experience of a valued emotional excess.

Gray's gesturing at the presence of what he will not reveal I would define as a sentimental act; it marks the high value the writer places on inward experience, but also his somewhat contradictory suspicion that such experience can have no standing until it is translated into a heard language whose very good manners would give to the inward the grace and the status of the social. But then too, this uncertainty about the standing of the inward is accompanied also by the writer's hostility to the social, the speakable, the authorized. In Gray's poem, certainly, the public life is presented as knowable, as uninteresting, and as mean, and the poem's lyric effect is largely created by the speaker's incomplete effort at self-revelation played out against those assertions. What we are left with finally is the sense that having one's own story is all that counts, but publishing that story can only deface it. Gray's speaker wants, at one and the same time, the privileges of silence and of speech, to walk a stage where passion may brood over itself and still speak to a hearer. The special distinction of the Elegy is to have accorded moral dignity to this sentimental condition of mute articulateness.¹⁰

I want to turn now to a similarly revealing poem of William Collins in whose intricacies the rhetorical dynamics of Gray's Elegy can be seen to be played out in an even more complex fashion, all to demonstrate how an Augustan articulateness can be made to function in a situation in which, again, heard speech is situationally impossible. In A Song from Shakespear's Cymbelyne Collins has reimagined a dramatic action as a lyric poem, signaling in this his double effort to give standing to the experience of inwardness by linking it, if only allusively, to an originally public mode, the dramatic action, and at the same time to resist the opportunities and obligations of public speech. Collins's peculiar aim, like Gray's, is to honor silence and solitude, but also to authorize them—to be simultaneously inward and social, speechless and eloquent, sentimental and gentlemanly.

The intricacies of Collins's own Song from Cymbelyne result from its subtle use of the Shakespearean original, of course. But even the most cursory glance at the poem tells us that Collins had not only tuned his ear to "Fear no more the heat o' the sun"—the beautiful lyric that in the play ceremonializes the apparent death of Fidele, the real Imogen—but also drew together Shakespeare's "Song" and the dramatic movement immediately lead ing up to it. This he did, not merely to represent in his own terms the song of the two brothers at Fidele's burial, but to represent it by introducing into the situation a new line of sight altogether, one that would reveal the capacity of some distanced, indistinct, and generalized mourner for responding feelingly, but without uttered words, to that doubly fictional event. As in Horace's poem, it is the mourner and not the mourned who claims our central attention: but unlike Horace's dirge, and unlike Shake-speare's "Song," Collins's poem attenuates markedly its representation of the social dimension of the mourning situation.

Now in Horace's poem the social character of his response to Quintilius's death and Virgil's sorrow is perhaps most clearly marked in the plain didacticism of the concluding thought, however complex the implications of that didacticism may be: "durum: sed levius fit patientia, / quidquid corrigere est nefas." In Shakespeare's "Song" a similar didactic charge is expressed in the recurring rhyme of "dust" and "must"—that is, in the utterly realistic insistence upon the plain inevitability, finality, and democracy of death:

Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust …
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust …
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee and come to dust …¹¹

But this is only one of several sounds we hear in the "Song": this plain realism is blended with a note of genuine pathos itself articulated as elegiac circumlocution—"Thou thy worldly task hast done, / Home art gone and ta'en thy wages…"—and elsewhere in the most direct of sayings—"Care no more to clothe and eat; / To thee the reed is as the oak." In this, the utterance of a distanced but sympathetic consciousness, we can hear yet another music too, that of the small couplets chanting the ceremonial imperatives in which the song is concluded and which ordain, as if it were a ritual action, the reverential silence which is, oddly, to mark Fidele's grave.¹²

No exorciser harm thee.
Nor no witchcraft charm thee.
Ghost unlaid forbear thee.
Nothing ill come hear thee.
Quiet consummation have,
And renowned by thy grave.

This blend of realism, pathos, and ceremonial dignity gives the song its character and is the final style of the lyric utterance of the two brothers who had in the dialogue immediately preceding the song argued gently over what constituted speech proper to the occasion. The song itself is produced as the resolution of their argument, which was about the suitability of such excessive, such sentimental language as this to the fact of death:

This, Arviragus's speech, is interrupted in the impatience of grief by his brother, Guiderius: "Prithee have done, / And do not play in wench-like words with that / Which is so serious." Guiderius objects to the apparent excessiveness of his brother's rhetoric, its inadequacy to the fact of death, while Guiderius reveals what he himself would take to be a more appropriate style in the brusque phrase in which he summarizes his impatience with his brother's speech. He says simply: "To the grave." And yet Guiderius had a moment earlier uttered his own "wench-like words," entirely in response to the shock of Fidele's apparent death:

This expression of a rich fantasy—"Why, he but sleeps"—with its merely subjunctive acknowledgment of the "truth" ("If he be gone"), its indicative assertion of an impossibility ("And worms will not come to thee"), and its transformation of a grave to a bed—all this is hardly the blunt realism that the speaker is himself to insist upon in a moment. It is, like Virgil's unheard speech, an excessive, a sentimental expression of desire for the "dear life." And only in the wonderful song to come thirty lines later are the realism Guiderius insists upon and the desire he feels brought together and harmonized. But in creating that harmony, Shakespeare has eliminated in the "Song" all trace of the sentimentalist's excess. That is to say, in the dramatic action, the sentimentalist's emotional excess is—unlike Virgil's unheard lament and Gray's unrevealed sorrow—plain and outspoken. But then this very outspokenness permissible in the dialogue—indeed, it is the subject of the dramatic dialogue—is entirely suppressed in the lyric movement that resolves the stylistic disagreement the dramatic dialogue articulates. And the new music of this "Song"—the ceremonial, the pathetic, the elegiacal chant—is entirely denuded of the language of flower and fairy in which the brothers had expressed their excessive, sentimental, and fantasized desire to preserve Fidele from death and corruption.

But, and this is especially interesting, Collins's Song from Cymbelyne is grounded entirely in that sentimental language of the two brothers. In Collins's reworking of Shakespeare's "Song" there is no reference whatever to the sententious realism of their new "Song"; nor is there any enactment of the small dispute over proper speech which precedes that song. Nevertheless, Collins clearly signals his attention to that dispute. For, in his Song from Cymbelyne, Collins reproduces the earlier sentimental language of both brothers—the language they will give up—but does so in the same ceremonial cadences that had marked their abandonment of the sentimental style. And, in this union of ceremonial and sentimental speech, Collins has discovered a public voice for the inwardness of the sentimentalist. We hear the ceremonial music in "No wither'd Witch shall here be seen, / No goblins lead their nightly Crew…" and in the following couplet, we hear the ceremonial and the sentimental: "The Female Fays shall haunt the Green, / And dress thy Grave with pearly Dew." The first two lines I have just cited plainly echo the ceremonial chant that concludes Shakespeare's song; equally clearly the second two lines pick up the excess of Guiderius's speech before it had been transformed into ceremonial song: "With female fairies will his tomb be haunted." Collins blends this, the language of Guiderius, to Arviragus's similarly expressed promise ("With fairest flowers … Fidele, I'll sweeten thy sad grave"), all in order to produce his new and now gentlemanly version of the speech of the young brothers: "The Female Fays shall haunt the Green, / And dress thy grave with pearly Dew."

What then has happened to the excessive, the sentimental utterance of the brothers' dramatic dialogue, which, as in Horace's memorial ode, represented a verbal fullness felt to be inappropriate both to the actuality of death and to the memorial song for the dead? Quite simply, Collins has pruned away that fullness. Arviragus's flowers—pale primrose, the azured harebell, the leaf of eglantine—each along with its analogue in some part of Fidele's anatomy, have been generalized to their simplest seasonal identity and ceremonial function:

Even more radical surgery is performed on Arviragus's robin, which Shakespeare gives us in this language:

Here is Collins's version:

Obvious here is Collins's effort to do away with Arviragus's sententiousness and to tame his fervor; note the absence of exclamation, as well as the transformation of a desolate winter scene, spontaneously imagined, to an evening ceremony, regularly recurring. In this restraint Collins demonstrates that the reticence of ceremonial speech and the valued excess of the sentimentalist can, indeed, be harmonized, harmonized here in the generalizing decorums of Augustan eloquence, which has in Collins's version of the song become the sentimentalist's preferred style. Embodying these decorums, Collins's reworking of Shakespeare's scenario can give lyric articulation to the emotional and verbal excess which Shakespeare would dramatize in his dialogue but not allow in his "Song."

But the transformed sentimentalist who is the lyric speaker of Collins's poem and in whose Augustan decorums fullness of feeling has discovered its reticent eloquence—this lyric speaker has sought no occasion for speaking out. For, though he imagines the pastoral ceremony honoring Fidele, and even blesses it, he is by no means a participant in it. Indeed, he insists upon his separation from that ceremony and from its society, as his language makes clear: "soft Maids," "Village Hinds," "Shepherd Lads," and "melting Virgins"—it is for these that Fidele's tomb is a shrine. Not a member of this pastoral community (from which he excludes himself by the very act of naming it so conventionally and so elegantly), the speaker cannot appear in the poem as a presented figure at all. That is, he has taken from Shakespeare's play a dramatic action, and reimagined its cast of characters as a generalized and anonymous pastoral community; he then has excluded himself from participation in that community, but still asserted his own as the central consciousness of the scene he has thus re-created.

In this odd and intricate process, Collins creates a lyric poem out of a dramatic action and out of a set of actors, a single lyric speaker. Now this speaker, in his separation from a scene that is now not enacted but instead envisioned, can utter a speech that is not heard, but only overheard. But—and this is very important—the politeness and the ceremony of this overheard and entirely inward utterance are still the hallmarks of social speech. Were this a lyric constructed according to Mill's specifications, we would not expect to see written into it—at the moment, and at the site, of lyric speech—so clear, if tacit, a representation of the speaker's social self-awareness, here made plain in his insistence upon his separation from the very scene he broods over and claims emotional kinship with. But it is Collins's achievement to have represented the speaker's social self-awareness at the same time as he has made that representation the very condition of our entering into earshot of his overheard address, and thus into contact with his inwardness. Overheard address—this paradoxical, or at least odd, designation—best describes the character of Collins's lyric speech. It is the vehicle for the social display of inward experience.

Indeed, in transforming Shakespeare's dramatic action into a lyric poem, Collins seized the opportunity to create a new line of sight and with it a new register of feeling, the sight and feeling of the cultivated consciousness itself, socially and intellectually distinct from the pastoral milieu of both play and poem, but emotionally involved in it, as the last two stanzas show:

Note the primacy here of the "tender Thought": thinking it is not represented as an experience the speaker sympathetically shares, if only from a distance, with the pastoral characters, as are the ceremonies of the earlier stanzas at Fidele's shrine. Now instead, it is his alone, available to him either when pastoral society is unable to assemble for its pleasures ("In Tempests"), or when it is inappropriately engaged in them ("midst the Chace on ev'ry Plain"). So the shrine built in the previous four stanzas has all along been intended for this new speaker, not as a place at which he and the pastoral characters might "assemble," as in a dramatic action embodying the experience of an acknowledged community of feeling. The shrine is instead a stimulus to the speaker's own capacity to think the "tender Thought," to weep, to love, to mourn, and to pity. The initial representation of the speaker as in sympathy with the pastoral characters is somewhat inconsistent, then, with the poem's concluding emphasis on his social and psychological isolation from them, an inconsistency that reveals the poem's straining point. Nevertheless, what Collins has done seems an exquisite feat of language; he has fully articulated a scene of solitude in which eloquence has been associated not with public utterance or even with the participation in public ceremony, but rather with inwardness itself—the thinking of the "tender Thought," "each lonely Scene," the tear "duly shed" (note the insistence upon decorum in that adverb even as the action it describes is entirely private). These scenes of solitude and acts of silence are the home and deeds of the inward consciousness itself, for which the restoring of loss is equivalent to thinking about the lost object—"Each lonely Scene shall thee restore"—just as loving and mourning are equivalent states. It is finally that quality of consciousness, the sovereign inwardness of which is demonstrated in its extraordinary command of social speech and simultaneously in its freedom from social declarativeness, that Collins's poem is all about. That is, its subject is "Pity's self," and "Pity's self" is actually the poem's speaker—Pathos, the very muse of inwardness. The poem's action, moreover, is to represent Pathos or Feeling coming to consciousness of itself, or as Mill stipulated, "brooding over itself." But what Mill would have deemed generically impossible is the poem's remarkable accomplishment: the demonstration that only a social eloquence (the poem contains no more obvious a public locution than that final personification, "Pity's self") can fully honor and make intelligible what must be experienced only in solitude and can be known only inwardly.

…..

Now, it is an oddity of Collins's Song from Cymbelyne that it is presented entirely without irony, because the opportunities for irony here are considerable. The most obvious is that, though Shakespeare's Fidele will almost immediately in the play awake from what has been only the appearance of death, as Collins's poem is given, Fidele's death is not to be undone. His (or her) life is now newly bounded by the poem, for the poem is complete in itself as the contemplation of Fidele's memorial, and in that, of Feeling's coming to the awareness of itself. The poem does not question, parody, nor ironize that experience, it just presents it. At the same time, then, that the poem calls our attention to its rather subtly elaborated system of allusions, it also insists that we willfully refuse to look beyond the single moment in the play to which they immediately refer. Were we to look beyond that moment and then to read the poem in the light of our better knowledge, it would be difficult to take its lyric speaker seriously. He would be read as a figure mourning a death that has not happened, he would become therefore vulnerable to irony, and the poem would be open to a more complex reading than our experience of it can verify. If we were, in a triumph of judgment, to see the speaker ironically, we would be undoing our own rich act of sympathetic reading, and the poem would become pointless. For the very purpose of its rhetoric is to cause the reader to become aware of himself resisting that interpretive temptation. In this he gains a power to resist the full claim of the sophistication which the poem's brief allusion to Cymbeline has itself called into play.

Collins's willingness to resist that full claim seems to me central to his lyric success in A Song from Shakespear's Cymbelyne. In fact, his insistence on calling attention to the bounds he is willing to impose on his literary sophistication is a quite explicit indication of the importance he attached to the freedom thus gained, a freedom he did not always command as a writer of lyric poetry. For, in fact, Collins's extraordinary literary sophistication is more usually the subject of his poetry than are the feelings and the visions that give names to his poems and that he pretends to invoke. In the very midst of his Ode to Fear, for example, at what might have been a moment of great intensity, are two footnotes he himself places within his text to cool it down by calling attention to his sources in Sophocles. If this is not a simple act of pedantry, it is certainly a complex one, central to his intention in the ode, which is not, after all, to represent his being overcome by Fear, but politely to represent a sophisticated literary consciousness toying with that possibility and enjoying its distance from it. In his Ode to Fear Collins depends upon his reader's similarly sophisticated pleasure in catching the allusions, noting the discrepancies between source and poem, and deriving from this activity an affirmation, not of his power to feel Fear, but of the power his literacy gives him to make a game out of that possibility. The bond between poet and reader here is formed not by feeling, but by intelligence, by judgment, by sophistication.¹³

But the poise that characterizes Collins's Song from Cymbelyne seems to me a sign of sentimental expressiveness working its most interesting effects: such writing registers the author's awareness of the possibilities for ironizing his manner or parodying his material, but then his conscious resistance to doing so. To acknowledge those possibilities is to acknowledge the social claims of intelligence and judgment, to resist them is to embrace the pleasures of inwardness, and still to have one's intelligence and judgment endorsing that choice. Precisely this pointedly articulated, sentimental drama between intelligence and feeling produces the characteristic blend of lyricism and intellectual adroitness which is the special distinction of eighteenth-century poetry. Again, Gray's success in the Elegy in drawing the full evocative force from his rural material at the same time as he creates room and opportunity for the critical play of intelligence upon this rural material will stand as the primary example of the kind of pleasure a sentimental rhetoric can yield.

But when this kind of writing does not succeed—as, for example, in Gray's Eton College ode—the play of eloquence upon emotionally evocative material will seem intrusive. In such situations we can sense the poet reaching out too directly to his audience of readers, as if to assure them and himself that his lyrical material is not too much his own, not disruptive of the bond that social experience, intelligence, and literary sophistication have formed between them. The writer's fussiness rather than his intelligence is the most obvious message in the signals he sends out to assure the reader that despite the poem's personal charge it still is a record of shared public experience: it will pass judgment's muster. An example is Gray's use of the word "redolent" in the Eton College ode: it is not a bold straining beyond John Dryden's "honey redolent of Spring" to test the limits of our language (as Samuel Johnson disapprovingly thought),¹⁴ but a fussy reminder of Dryden's usage. With that word Gray plays it safe, calling for support from Dryden's eloquent precedent to help establish his own authority for personal expression in his own poem. Gray's uncertainty in the personal and lyrical stance is evident also in the ode's shift into declamatory and pointed utterance, thoroughly inconsistent with the initially private and meditative situation the poem springs from: "Alas," "Yet see," "Ah, shew them," "Lo," and, of course, "No more: where ignorance is bliss, / "Tis folly to be wise." The poem falls short in lyric power because it is not so much a record of what the poet felt and thought from his distant prospect of Eton College; it really registers instead his concern for his authority to speak about the experience.¹⁵

It is this concern for authority, this sense that poetic speech is warranted by a bond of intelligence, education, and sophistication between writer and reader, that often vitiates the portrayal of inwardness in the eighteenth-century lyric. The poet seems to think of his authority as a property of that bond, which he seeks to affirm, looking to it and not finally to his inner experience for the justification of his poem. When this happens, declamatory speech usually follows, since declamation more easily than the overheard speech of the lyric can stand as a demonstration of the intellectual and social bond the poet seeks with the reader. It is not surprising, therefore, to discover a mixture of lyricism and declamation pervading the period's lyric expression despite its formal variety, from Collins's visionary odes to William Cowper's unbroken conversation. Even so genuinely lyrical a talent as Robert Burns's, so late in the period, is disrupted and distorted by this mix, as in The Cotter's Saturday Night, where the charge of personal feeling so strongly binding the poet to his rural material dissipates itself in his search for a style to distinguish him from the peasantry. He tests no fewer than three languages in his effort to connect with his readers rather than with his subject: these languages are the dialect of the poor themselves, the "standard" English that sets the poet apart from the peasants, and then the borrowings from other poems that serve to link him in consciousness and sophistication with his readers and with high culture.

The most usual form of the poet's declamatory utterance in the lyric situation is didactic. In didactic address the eighteenth-century writer most regularly asserts his authority for speech; in didactic address he most often reveals himself in the role of writer, bonded to his audience by literary tradition, by intelligence, by judgment. Of course, the great variety of uses to which didactic address could be put, and of forms to which it could be shaped, itself speaks for the variousness of the conceptions of literary purpose and of literary being in the period. Jonathan Swift's pamphlets, for example, whether straight or satirical, all assume a writer in a position of some authority, with something to say to an audience, whatever the result of that saying may come to be. Alexander Pope's Moral Essays reveal by their very title their at least initially didactic intention, and his poetry throughout is rich in its presentation of serious and improving conversations in which the delivery of a lesson, as in Bethel's "sermon," is an important moment in a poem's thematic and emotional development. In the finest didactic literature, of course, an initially didactic stance will become richly complicated, and in this process the positive assumptions about the writer's bond with his audience which are implied in his didactic stance will be scrutinized; they may be rejected, or reaffirmed, or redefined.

In the obviously public poetry of the period—the poetry written for an audience, even if it be an audience of one, as in Swift's poems to Stella, even if it be a meditating reader, as in Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes, or the recipient of an epistle, as in Pope's Horatian imitations—in this obviously public poetry, the representation of inwardness will usually be a function of the poet's scrutiny of his didactic stance. His rejection, or his reaffirmation, or his redefinition of it, will be seen as a humane complication of his lesson; and, in the process of complicating it, his poem will develop dramatically. The pleasure we derive from such writing comes from our sense that, shaping the lesson with which these poems direclty address us, there is in them a curve of feeling to which we become alert, and that in this curve of feeling we overhear something of the poet's inner experience as the lesson's teacher. Our responsiveness to the poem as such a record of the poet's inwardness gives us our sense of its lyric force, and in the dramatic accord the poet establishes between his didactic manner and his inwardness is to be discovered the largest lesson of his work, its yield of instructive pleasure.

What I am describing here I have earlier called covert lyricism—covert, because the poet's inwardness is not his ostensible, his first subject. Nor can we see from his rhetorical situation, his "speaking out," that it can become his subject. Thus, Oliver Goldsmith's Deserted Village begins with an explanatory letter about, of all things, a matter of historical fact, and proceeds as a discourse on social policy. But this covertly lyrical poem soon enough comes to reveal the remarkable resources for the representation of inwardness which were inherent in the forms of its public address, of which the didactic was Goldsmith's favorite. In their discovery of the resources of a covert lyricism, the poets I discuss in the following chapters were able to satisfy two demands that were soon to seem incompatible: that they speak out with authoritative eloquence, and that they still reveal their own rich inwardness. It was a project that the overt lyric approached with uncertainty, never commanded, and usually failed at.

Notes

The following abbreviations have been used in the notes:

ECS

Eighteenth-Century Studies

EIC

Essays in Criticism

ELH

English Literary History

HLQ

Huntington Library Quarterly

YR

Yale Review

¹ John Stuart Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties," Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger, 25 vols. to date (Toronto and London: Univ. of Toronto Press and Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1981), 1: 363.

² As these remarks indicate, M. H. Abrams's account of neoclassical and Romantic critical theories (especially his highlighting of Mill's presentation of the "expressive" position) has been of continuing usefulness to me; see The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Norton, 1958), esp. pp. 21-26, 84-88, 103-114.

³ I ask these questions in the same spirit that S. L. Goldberg, writing about some manifestly romantic features of Pope's mind and art, comments: "To say all this, however, is not to claim that Pope was 'really' a Romantic, nor merely to repeat (what everyone knows) that 'Augustan' and 'Romantic' are very slippery terms. But it does suggest that the English Romantics differed from Pope less in exhibiting these characteristics, than in being philosophically conscious of them and of their fundamental importance, and so taking them as a conscious program for poetry." See his "Integrity and Life in Pope's Poetry" in Studies in the Literature of the Eighteenth Century, 2, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Canberra: Australia National Univ. Presses, 1973). My reference is to the reprint of this piece in Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands, ed. Maynard Mack and James A. Winn (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1980, p. 41.)

⁴ Anne Williams in her important book, Prophetic Strain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), has sought to open up discussion of lyric impulse and lyric form in eighteenth-century poetry. Williams too is especially interested in poems not ostensibly lyric, but with strong lyric presence nonetheless, and she is willing to say that the most interesting of these in the eighteenth century, whether epistles or satires or elegies, are really all versions of what she calls the "greater lyric"—in period discussion usually called the "greater ode." In the poems she chooses for discussion, Williams emphasizes as a sign of their lyric character their presentation of a central consciousness, generally emerging as a prophetic voice, as it shapes and is shaped by its engagement with the "abiding issues about man, nature, and human life which have always occupied serious poets in their most ambitious work" (p. 2). A limitation of this valuable book, perhaps, is that in its emphasis on the prophetic voice of Augustan lyricism it misses the essentially social origins and commitments of that expression, and consequently the powerfully autobiographical cast, whether feigned or "actual," of its representations of inwardness. Lyricism for Williams is essentially a sign of consciousness coming to itself by transcending the social. In the poems I explore, the process usually involves a continuing negotiation between the inward and the social.

Donald Davie's succinct discussion of Augustan lyricism in his introduction to his collection of poems of that title has been very useful to me. Davie's interest, however, is not in the lyric of inwardness, but in the quite different "public" lyric, which in its various forms—the patriotic song, the hymn, the ballad—stood in essential contrast to the period's satire, and had its sources in attitudes toward public and religious experience more positive than those which gave rise to satire. Moreover, Davie focuses on the lyric that is "composed either to match an existing piece of music, or in the expectation and hope of a musical setting being contrived for it." See The Augustan Lyric (London: Heinemann, 1974), esp. pp. 2-6.

⁵ See Davie, pp. 7-8: "It is Horace above all who matters; the Horace of the carmina. For the pre-Augustan Catullus, the eighteenth century as a whole had less liking than the seventeenth century before it or the nineteenth century after…. It is the Horace of the carmina who stands for most of the eighteenth century as the type of the lyric poet." Davie emphasizes that aspect of Horace which Prior takes over and gives expression to in "A Better Answer to Cloe Jealous," for instance, that is, the "urbanity … which is neither more nor less than tact and sympathy and sureness in the handling of human relations within the decorous proprieties insisted on by a civilized society…. The more trivial the overt occasions [of these poems], the more the lesson goes home, for what is involved is precisely nuance, a nicety of human attention for which no occasion … is too trivial to be worth taking care about."

⁶ A point regularly made in Horace studies is that the autobiographical actuality of Horace's representations of his own personal experience is a difficult matter for his reader to be confident about. Horace is a poet of extraordinary elusiveness, yet one who nevertheless seems so often to sound as though he might be telling about himself (whatever himself might be taken to mean). Gordon Williams has explored this matter and has commented on the "immediacy that approximates to autobiography" to be found in some places in the Satires, and also on the markedly enhanced opportunities for self-presentation which Horace's originality in the verse epistle provided him. Entirely original to Horace's epistle was its accommodation to "any and every mood, any tone, and, being completely dependent upon the personality of the poet in relation to the particular addressee, it offered a form which was infinitely sensitive and responsive to autobiographical expression." But commenting in another place on Horace's self-representation in the love poetry, Williams writes: "There is much that is left unsaid in Horace's love-poetry. It is never sheer self-expression; always the poet's personality is away out of reach…. There is point and balance and objectivity of statement, delight in contrasts and contradictions, mockery, often self-mockery, never self-revelation or confession without an ulterior motive." See Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), pp. 438, 565.

⁷Q. Horatii Flacci: Carminum Libri IV, Epodon Liber, ed. T. E. Page (London: St. Martin's, 1977), pp. 23-24. The translation, with some changes of my own, is by C. E. Bennett, Horace: Odes and Epodes (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard Univ. Press and Heinemann [Loeb Classical Library], 1978), p. 69.

⁸ On the separation between Virgil and Horace in this ode, see Steele Commager, The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 287-290. Commager goes too far, I think, in saying that Horace's "cry of grief yields, by the poem's end, to an assertion of the order that grief defies." But Commager is certainly right to state that "Neither is absolute. Only the powerful balance is final: frustra … heu."

⁹ John Traugott's comment is pertinent here: "As sentimentalism is a cultural attitude, neither a philosophy nor a disease, it is futile to seek a definition that is more precise than such text-book cliches as 'delicacy of feeling and perception,' 'benevolism,' 'tender, romantic, or nostalgic feeling'; together with their pejorative analogues, 'preciousness,' 'bathos,' 'self-indulgent emotivity.' When we have repeated the cliches we have little more to say" ("Heart and Mask and Genre in Sentimental Comedy," Eighteenth-Century Life, 10, n.s. 3 [1986]: 140).

¹⁰ Gray's solemn and agile masking of his inner life all the while he presents it as his central subject still seems a phenomenon cognate with the heartier playfulness of sentimental comedy. Here the triumphant fantasy is that the pure-hearted and transparent sincerity preferred by the sentimentalist, and the masking preferred by the worldly, can find an accord. Traugott writes: "In sentimental comedy, worldliness and sentiment, though opposites, seem to feed on one another. If the world is composed of nothing but masks the pretended desire of sentiment to penetrate the mask and spy out the naked heart is just another mask. The age did not choose between worldliness and sentiment; it chose both as paradoxical necessities. They could live together in the fantasy of triumph of the best comedy" (p. 143). On Gray's articulation of all that he needs to say about himself at the same time that he hides almost everything, see Bertrand Bronson, "On a Special Decorum in Gray's 'Elegy'" in Facets of the Enlightenment (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1968), pp. 157-158.

¹¹ Please see Appendix I for the scene from Cymbeline, Appendix II for A Song from Cymbelyne by William Collins.

¹² Note how the word "renowned" in the following citation suggests the possibility of something public, something known and noted emerging from all the silence and peace ordained by the prayer-like wishes, each of which describes not an event but the absence of one.

¹³ "Even the striking depiction of the Furies as 'that rav'ning Brood of Fate / Who lap the Blood of Sorrow' is interrupted by an asterisk … which refers the reader to a scholarly note on the Electra. The passage in short announces its politeness in ways that seem designed to prevent the reader from confusing Collins' artificial vision with the naive enthusiasm of its Cibberian equivalent" (satirized by Pope in Dunciad III. 235-252). See Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge, (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), p. 94.

¹⁴ "Gray thought his language more poetical as it was more remote from common use: finding in Dryden honey redolent of Spring, an expression that reaches the utmost limits of our language, Gray drove it a little more beyond common apprehension, by making gales to be redolent of joy and youth" (Lives of the Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1905], 3:435.)

¹⁵ See M. H. Abrams, "Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric," in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. F. W. Hilles and H. Bloom (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford Univ. Press [Galaxy Books], 1965), p. 539: In the Eton College ode "Gray deliberately rendered both his observation and reflections in the hieratic style of a formal odic oratio. The poet's recollection of times past … is managed through an invocation to Father Thames … and the language throughout is heightened and stylized by the apostrophe, exclamation, rhetorical question and studied periphrasis…. Both reminiscence and reflection are depersonalized, and occur mainly as general propositions which are sometimes expressed as sententiae … and at other times as propositions … converted into the tableau and allegory form…"