SOURCE: “William Lisle Bowles,” in Eighteenth Century Literature: An Oxford Miscellany, Clarendon Press, 1909, pp. 151-83.

[In the following essay, Casson discusses Bowles's role as both poet and critic in the transition from eighteenth century poetry to Romantic poetry.]

In the transition from the poetry of the eighteenth century to the poetry of the Romantic Movement, no critic has been able to put down his finger and say, ‘Here the old ended, the new began.’ Indeed, the lover of paradox might plausibly assert that the transition dates from the birth of the older school. But no critic could deny the paramount importance of the Lyrical Ballads, as the unmistakable manifesto of the later poetry. If, then, by his art a poet can be shown to have affected the two authors of that book, he may be reasonably regarded as having borne a share in the creation of the new forms. And if, in addition he assailed the criterions of the earlier faith in such a way as to provoke the bitter retaliation of its defenders, he may be said to have contributed, not only to the inception of another practice, but also to the erection of a new theory. Such a poet, and such a critic, was Bowles; it is in these two capacities that he will be here regarded.

Not, indeed, that this was the full extent of his activities. In a life of eighty-eight years, he combined also the offices of country parson, cathedral dignitary, defender of the public school system, antiquarian, and musician. But these we will pass by, as alien to our purpose; only remarking that the Dictionary of National Biography pronounces him to have been a capable archaeologist, and premising that his studies in that direction, as in music, were not without effect upon his poetry. We shall turn rather to a brief narration of the dates and incidents of his life, never more important, perhaps, than in the consideration of a poet of transition.

William Lisle Bowles was born at King's Sutton, Northamptonshire, in 1762, his father being vicar there. He was thus eight years older than Wordsworth, whose life his own completely overlapped; for both died in 1850. Coleridge he antedated by ten years. Most of Bowles's earliest years were spent in that district which was to be the birthplace of the Lyrical Ballads, his father holding the living of Uphill in Somersetshire, and himself receiving his first instruction in Bleadon parsonage. In 1776 Bowles was entered on the foundation of Winchester School, the headmaster at that time being Dr. Joseph Warton. From the captaincy of the school, he was elected in 1781 a scholar of Trinity College, Oxford; Thomas Warton, then professor of poetry, being senior fellow. In 1783 he was Chancellor's prizeman for a copy of Latin verses, entitled “Calpe Obsessa, or the Siege of Gibraltar.” In 1792 he took his Master's degree, and was ordained to the curacy of Donhead St. Andrew in Wiltshire. After holding the livings of Chicklade in Wiltshire and Dumbleton in Gloucestershire, he was presented, in 1804, to Bremhill in Wiltshire; and it was here that he received visits from Coleridge, Southey, Rogers, Crabbe, Sir George Beaumont, Sir Humphrey Davey, Moore, and Madame de Staël. In 1804, also, he was collated to a prebendal stall in the cathedral of Salisbury; and in 1818 was appointed chaplain to the Prince Regent. In 1828 he became a canon residentiary of Salisbury. In 1850 he died.

There is thus, in the bare outline of his life, a certain parallelism to be observed with those of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In childhood he is brought up in susceptibility to Nature; and his Banwell Hill is a sort of feebler Prelude, setting forth this education.

I was a child when first I heard the sound
Of the great Sea!—'Twas night, and journeying far,
We were belated on our road, 'mid scenes
New and unknown,—a mother and her child …
When, as the wheels went slow, and the still night
Seem'd listening, a low murmur met the ear,
Not of the winds:—my mother softly said,
‘Listen! it is the Sea!’ With breathless awe,
I heard the sound, and closer press'd her hand.

Thence he was transferred to the care of Joseph Warton, who set before him a severity of standard in literature, and introduced him to our older authors. After this followed a period of wandering and unrest; while in later life he became an active supporter of the Established Church, his Banwell Hill corresponding, from this point of view, to the teaching of the Excursion, and his prose pamphlets being the counterpart of the theological discourses of Coleridge.

Bowles, however, was something much more than merely analogous in development to these two poets. He exercised a direct poetical influence upon them, as upon others of the earlier writers of the Romantic movement. The first and best known of his formative works was the volume originally published in 1789, with the title Fourteen Sonnets written chiefly on Picturesque Spots during a Journey. The occasion of these sonnets was a disappointment in love—not, as Gilfillan states in his edition, his rejection by a niece of Sir Samuel Romilly, on the ground of his lack of means, though that also befell him; but rather—as, indeed, appears from passages in his poems—the loss of the lady of his affections through death. In consequence, Bowles journeyed for some time through the north of England, Scotland, and parts of the Continent; and sought to console himself with the composition of his sonnets.

The work, therefore, was the result of a real and sensitive experience. As he himself has said, ‘These Sonnets were originally composed in my solitary hours; when, in youth a wanderer among distant scenes, I sought forgetfulness of the first disappointment in early affections. This is nothing to the public; but it may serve in some measure to obviate the common remark on melancholy poetry, that it has been very often gravely composed, when possibly the heart of the writer had very little share in the distress he chose to describe. But there is a great difference between natural and fabricated feelings, even in poetry.’ Bowles had, therefore, in the immediate inspiration of his work, that primary quality of Romantic poetry—the actual emotions of the heart. And it was this which caught the attention, and won the loyalty, of Coleridge. ‘Bowles and Cowper of the then living poets’, says the Biographia Literaria, ‘were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction.’ And in a letter to Thelwall, he writes, ‘Bowles, the most tender, and with the exception of Burns, the only always natural poet in our language.’ Such a reintroduction to Nature, the province of the Romantic poet, was peculiarly valuable to Coleridge at that time; in fact, as he himself says, it was of ‘radical good.’ His mind, bewildered in metaphysics and theological controversy, had lost all interest in particular facts; poetry itself had become insipid. From his ‘preposterous pursuit’, however, he was now ‘auspiciously withdrawn chiefly by the genial influence of a style of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr. Bowles.’

How immediate and decisive the new impression was upon Coleridge, may be gathered from his own familiar words:—

I had just entered on my seventeenth year [he says], when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me by a schoolfellow … My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author.

Nor did this fiery enthusiasm readily burn itself out. At Bristol in 1795, we are told, ‘his stock subjects of conversation were Bishop Berkeley, David Hartley, and Mr. Bowles, whose sonnets he delighted in reciting.’ In 1796—seven years after the publication of the sonnets—Coleridge, writing to Thelwall, speaks of Bowles as ‘the god of his idolatry’, and presents Mrs. Thelwall with a copy of the poems, inscribed, ‘I entreat your acceptance of this volume, which has given me more pleasure, and done my heart more good than all the books I ever read, excepting my Bible.’ In the next year, having all but finished his tragedy, Osorio, Coleridge took it over from Bristol to Shaftesbury to submit it to the criticism of his ‘god’. This was their first meeting; and it is now that Cottle places the beginning of some disillusionment in their relations—at any rate, on Coleridge's part. Possibly Coleridge found that his ‘most high god’

                    Scourged him, not as one
That smites a son,

for in subsequent years we find him wondering what Bowles thought of the first chapter of his Biographia—‘if, indeed, he collated the passages concerning himself, with his own speeches, &c., concerning me.’

Still as late as 1814-8, during his residence at Calne, Coleridge was frequently with Bowles, Bremhill being near. But now the last and fatal coolness arose between them. Positions being for the moment reversed, the idol condescended to the acolyte; or, in plain English, Bowles offered his poems to Coleridge for correction. ‘Alas!’ says Coleridge, ‘I injured myself irreparably with him by devoting a fortnight to the work.’ That was indeed, we may cry out, to take the matter more seriously than friendship permits. And the result may be predicted. ‘He took the corrections,’ adds Coleridge, ‘but never forgave the corrector.’ ‘He took the corrections’—almost we might believe him to have been assuredly ‘god-like.’

One other instance of relationship between the poets may be recorded. It was Bowles who started what Cottle protests to have been a myth in regard to the composition of the Religious Musings. This poem, says Bowles, ‘was written, “non inter sylvas academi,” but in the tap-room at Reading.’ But as Bowles had no personal acquaintance with Cottle at the time, we must accept the word of Cottle, who states, ‘It was written partly at Stowey, partly on Redcliff Hill; and partly in my parlour.’

With another of the Lake poets, Bowles was brought into personal relation. ‘Soon after this third edition [of the sonnets] came out,’ he states, ‘my friend, Mr. Cruttwell, the printer, wrote a letter saying that two young gentlemen, strangers, one a particularly handsome and pleasing youth, lately from Westminster School, and both literary and intelligent, spoke in high commendation of my volume. … From one of them, after he himself had achieved the fame of one of the most virtuous and eloquent of the writers of his generation, I received a first visit at my parsonage in Wiltshire upwards of forty years afterwards! It was Robert Southey.’ And Bowles goes on to pay a compliment to personal appearance with a niceness and limitation that is now little practised. ‘We parted in my garden last year,’ he writes, ‘when stealing time and sorrow had marked his still manly and most interesting countenance.’ But while we are upon the subject of Southey, it is worth remarking that Southey's wife, Caroline Bowles, was not of the same family as our poet. Bowles himself somewhat stiltedly alludes to her thus: ‘my namesake—no otherwise related than by love of kindred music.’

Of contact with Wordsworth, Bowles has left no similar narration. But there is testimony to the outward effect of the sonnets upon the northern poet. Four years after their publication, in 1793, Wordsworth ‘first met with them’, says the late Mr. Dykes Campbell, ‘as he was starting on a walk, and kept his brother waiting on Westminster Bridge until, seated in one of its recesses, he had read through the little quarto.’ We have evidence, also, of the meeting of the two poets.

But, in reality, the influence of Bowles upon the more famous of the Romantic School is not to be traced to any accidents of circumstance. Far away from the West Country, Charles Lamb reminds Coleridge of ‘the little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat’ where they had ‘sat together through the winter nights beguiling the cares of life with Poesy’; and where much of their conversation had centred on Bowles. In the same letter he speaks of one among Coleridge's poems as ‘the most exquisite and Bowles-like of all.’ And elsewhere, like Coleridge, he couples together Bowles and the New Testament.

This influence of the paler light upon his brilliant contemporary has excited astonishment in the camps of the critics. ‘The poems produced before the author's twenty-fourth year,’ said Sara Coleridge in the edition of 1852, ‘devoted as he was to the “soft strains” of Bowles, have more in common with the passionate lyrics of Collins and the picturesque wildness of the pretended Ossian, than with the well-tuned sentimentality of that Muse which the over-grateful poet has represented as his earliest inspirer.’ And Traill follows in the same vein. One explanation of Coleridge's susceptibility Canon Ainger finds in the moral quality of Bowles's melodious verse. At a critical point in Coleridge's life, he suggests, his moral nature was touched. And this theory is borne out by Coleridge's own introduction of 1796. Speaking of sonnets generally, he says: ‘Easily remembered from their briefness, and interesting alike to the eye and the affections, these are poems which we can “lay up in our heart and our soul,” and repeat them “when we walk by the way, and when we lie down, and when we rise up”. Hence the Sonnets of Bowles derive their marked superiority over all other Sonnets; hence they domesticate with the heart, and become, as it were, a part of our identity.’ And a letter from Lamb in 1796 further confirms the suggestion: ‘Coleridge, I love you for dedicating your poetry to Bowles. Genius of the sacred fountain of tears, it was he who led you gently by the hand through all this valley of weeping; shewed you the dark-green yew trees, and the willow shades.’

Coleridge, in speaking of the sonnets, has said, ‘Surely never was a writer so equal in excellence!’ Accepting, therefore, this criticism, it is of the less moment which of the series we select for consideration. But, perhaps, that termed, “Influence of Time on Grief” may not least admirably illustrate that ‘exquisite delicacy of painting’ and the ‘tender simplicity’ which Coleridge has noted:—

O Time! who know'st a lenient hand to lay
          Softest on Sorrow's wound, and slowly thence
          (Lulling to sad repose the weary sense)
The faint pang stealest unperceived away;
On thee I rest my only hope at last,
          And think, when thou hast dried the bitter tear
          That flows in vain o'er all my soul held dear,
I may look back on every sorrow past,
And meet life's peaceful evening with a smile:—
          As some lone bird, at day's departing hour,
          Sings in the sunbeam, of the transient shower
Forgetful, though its wings are wet the while:—
Yet ah! how much must that poor heart endure,
Which hopes from thee, and thee alone, a cure!

The image of the bird is worthy of all Coleridge could say of it for tenderness and delicacy. Nor is this, from the description of the ‘matin bird’ in another sonnet, inferior in its own quality:—

Or marks the clouds, that o'er the mountain's head
In varying forms fantastic wander white.

Such a modulation of the metre, and placing of the word ‘white’, come only from clear senses and an intimate vision. It is possible to see the uncertain visitations of the clouds in the fall and liftings of the rhythm. Nor less excellent, in the earlier picturesque manner, and with something of the light of Turner, is this:—

Of rivers winding wild, and mountains hoar,
Or castle gleaming on the distant steep!

The sonnet quoted above in its entirety, is characteristic, too of Bowles on the technical side. ‘Charlotte Smith and Bowles’, said Coleridge, ‘are they who first made the sonnet popular among the present English: I am justified therefore by analogy in deducing its laws from their compositions.’ But legislation by such deductions would not satisfy the rigid historical critic. For Bowles himself says of his art: ‘I confined myself to fourteen lines, because fourteen lines seemed best adapted to unity of sentiment. I thought nothing about the strict Italian model.’ And it will be observed that there is no rigid demarcation of octave and sestet. Indeed, here, as in most of Bowles's work, there is, strictly speaking, nothing of sestet and octave at all. The emotion flows on; and the melancholy sententiousness of the poet is reflected in the use of the closing couplet. Yet neither is it, of course, of the Shakespearian form. Though there comes no turn of sentiment between octave and sestet, the division is marked in the rhyme arrangements. And Bowles occasionally has his sestet correct according to the less strict Italian model, and once even with the rigorous law of the two rhymes. Yet as a rule he deviates from the Italian sestet by introducing the couplet. Moreover, even in the octave he is not Shakespearian, observing a different rhyme arrangement.

But to say this is not to differentiate Bowles from the later romantic poets. Wordsworth very frequently departs from the Italian scheme. In his sonnet, for example,

The world is too much with us,

although he preserves the turn in the sentiment, he yet begins his sestet in the middle of the line,

                                                            Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn.

And the form that Bowles uses, like all poetry worthy the name, has an integral relation to the subject. He has a thought that is really twofold; but the proportions are not equal. It has not turned when the sestet is reached; but the turning is anticipated in the rhyme-arrangement, and is finally made in the couplet.

A second sonnet may be quoted, from its interest to lovers of more recent poetry. It is termed “The Approach of Summer”:—

How shall I meet thee, Summer, wont to fill
          My heart with gladness, when thy pleasant tide
          First came, and on the Coomb's romantic side
Was heard the distant cuckoo's hollow bill!
Fresh flowers shall fringe the margin of the stream,
          As with the songs of joyance and of hope
          The hedgerows shall ring loud, and on the slope
The poplars sparkle in the passing beam;
The shrubs and laurels that I loved to tend,
          Thinking their May-tide fragrance would delight,
With many a peaceful charm, thee, my poor friend,
          Shall put forth their green shoots, and cheer the
                    sight!
But I shall mark their hues with sadder eyes,
And weep the more for one who in the cold earth lies!

The octave—if it be not fancy—seems to speak not only the sentiments, but with something of the actual voice, of the author of Thyrsis. Both, of course, rest on a common model; but it is more than this to use the same vocal tones. Nor is that a small thing when the other poem is one which Swinburne has set beside the Lycidas and the Adonais. This sonnet has the additional interest of closing upon an alexandrine—a feature unusual in this form of composition, but found also in Coleridge.

Professor Vaughan has remarked of Coleridge's characterization of Bowles's poetry—‘mild and manliest melancholy’—that it is not very aptly said. Of the mildness, the suffusion as over an autumnal landscape,

Some softened notes, to Nature not untrue,

as Bowles himself describes it, and of the melancholy, there can be no doubt: the manliness alone, it may be presumed, is in question. And if we look to the Sonnets only, this doubt may, perhaps, be justified. But from the other poems which Coleridge mentions, passages confirmatory of his epithet may be quoted, as this from the Monody at Matlock:—

                    Yet the bleak cliffs so high
(Around whose beetling crags, with ceaseless coil,
And still-returning flight, the ravens toil)
Heed not the changeful seasons as they fly,
Nor spring, nor autumn: they their hoary brow
Uplift, and ages past, as in this now,
The same deep trenches unsubdued have worn,
The same majestic frown, and looks of lofty scorn.
                    So Fortitude, a mailèd warrior old,
Appears: he lifts his scar-intrenched crest:
The tempest gathers round his dauntless breast:
He hears far-off the storm of havoc roll'd:
The feeble fall around: their sound is past:
Their sun is set: their place no more is known:
Like the wan leaves before the winter's blast
They perish:—He unshaken and alone
Remains—his brow a sterner shade assumes,
By age ennobled, whilst the hurricane,
That raves resistless o'er the ravaged plain,
But shakes unfelt his helmet's quiv'ring plumes.

That passage, by any standard, is, I venture to affirm, almost magnificent, though its originality may be impaired by obligations to Milton. Certainly it does not require the admonitory words addressed to the prospective disciple in the Biographia: ‘The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgement of its contemporaries.’ And though there is a diffuseness and weakness about much of Bowles, in places there is a concentration and energy not unworthy of the masters—as here, to an old man:—

          But standing thus, time-palsied, and forlorn,
Like a scathed oak, of all its boughs bereft,
God and the grave are thy best refuge left.

The last line has the Shakespearian ring.

If, then, we ask of Bowles's influence on Coleridge, what it really was, and how it came to be, we may find it in his loyalty to truth and Nature and in his sense of the worth and dignity of man in his primary relations, which was the leaven of the Lyrical Ballads and the watchword of the Wordsworthian prefaces. Bowles has himself stated his own standard of poetry, and his conception of his achievement. ‘It is a consolation’, he writes at the end of his life, ‘that, from youth to age, I have found no line I wished to blot, or departed a moment from the severer taste which I imbibed from the simplest and purest models of classical composition.’ And if Bowles could point Coleridge to the study of the older models, and summon him also to the contemplation of natural emotions and the use of natural words; if he could call him up, as Coleridge says, ‘from delving in the unwholesome mines of metaphysic lore’, where he was digging out such metal of poetry as this:—

Contemplant Spirits! ye who hover o'er
With untired gaze the immeasurable fount
Ebullient with creative Deity!

and set him in the sweet sylvan paths where he was to hear

                                                                      The hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune,

or lead him to those dread waters whence coming he might say,

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemèd there to be,—

then Bowles might well take credit for service done to the purest and most exalted conceptions of the Muses, and for a gift to English poetry, as Swinburne would say, ‘beyond praise and beyond thanksgiving.’

But this, perhaps, was not all the gift. Whatever the original stimulus of Bowles upon Coleridge, it seems clear that Bowles had, in reality, as Tennyson said of himself in relation to Shakespeare, no conception of the mind-processes which went to create the most characteristic work of the greater poet. The Ancient Mariner bears no tangible traces of the Sonnets or the other poems. But with regard to Wordsworth, usually accounted the more self-dependent mind, the case may be different. For in Bowles we have something of the doctrine and the actual manner of Wordsworth's greatest work.¹ Thus in the Sonnets there is an approximation to the idea of Nature as a sympathetic Being:—

The waving branches that romantic bend
          O'er thy tall banks, a soothing charm bestow;
          The murmurs of thy wand'ring wave below
Seem to his ear the pity of a friend.

And the parallelism is yet clearer in these lines from the Monody at Matlock:—

                                                  Nor may I, sweet stream!
From thy wild banks and still retreats depart
(Where now I meditate my casual theme)
Without some mild improvement on my heart
Pour'd sad, yet pleasing! so may I forget
The crosses and the cares that sometimes fret
Life's smoothest channel.

That is the very sentiment of the Lines at Tintern Abbey; and the movement of the metre is strangely similar—a fact the more remarkable because the Monody is in rhyme, though it reads like blank verse. Now the Monody was written in 1791, the Lines at Tintern not till 1798. Or, again, take from the same Monody this passage, of Matlock High Tor:—

                                                            He the winter dark
Regardless, and the wasteful time that flies,
Rejoicing in his lonely might, defies.

‘Rejoicing in his lonely might’ is of the essence of Wordsworth's most imaginative utterance. Or take this, from St. Michael's Mount:—

The tall ship moves not on the tranquil brine;
Around, the solemn promontories shine;
No sounds approach us, save, at times, the cry
Of the grey gull, that scarce is heard so high!
The billows make no noise, and on the breast
Of charmed Ocean, Silence sinks to rest!

Those verses, and especially

Around, the solemn promontories shine,

produce the effect of the unearthliness of the silence of sea and land, bright, and flashing like a shield, that vertigo of stillness, if we may profanely term it, which is the peculiar property of the Elegiac Stanzas on Peele Castle. Yet Wordsworth's poem was written in 1805, but that of Bowles as early as 1798. Finally we quote this passage from Coombe Ellen:—

Stranger! if Nature charm thee—if thou lovest
To trace her awful steps, in glade or glen,
Or under covert of the rocking wood,
That sways its murmuring and mossy boughs
Above thy head; now, when the wind at times
Stirs its deep silence round thee, and the shower
Falls on the sighing foliage—hail her here
In these her haunts; and wrapt in musings high,
Think that thou holdest converse with some Power
Invisible and strange.

That is dated September, 1798—the month in which the Lyrical Ballads appeared. It may, therefore, owe something to their authors: on the other hand, it may be due to the stirrings of the spirit of the same period.

These coincidences of doctrine and manner in the case of Bowles and Wordsworth claim attention. It is not, of course, that Wordsworth could owe the bulk of his work, or the supreme excellence of his highest things, to Bowles. The haunting harmony of this,

                                                                                                              The sound
Of far-off torrents charming the still night,

and the mystery of that unapproachable line,

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone—

these things are beyond the reach of Bowles. Nor is it suggested that Wordsworth's originality is impaired, in any appreciable degree, by these coincidences. From the time when he saw the darkening of the boughs and leaves of the oak against the sky in his evening walk between Hawkshead and Ambleside, his own debt was to the direct observation of Nature. But it is, at least, worthy of remark that these poems of Bowles were antecedent to those of Wordsworth; and that both Bowles and his works were known to him. It may, therefore, be reasonably contended that Bowles was a definitely formative influence upon Wordsworth, just as (to bring together the smaller and the greater) Southey confessed that for almost forty years he endeavoured to form himself on the ‘sweet and unsophisticated style of Bowles.’

If we come now to sum up the position of Bowles in English poetry, we shall mark it best by regarding him first as the successor in the work of his masters, the Wartons. Thus, speaking of Joseph Warton, he says, ‘No one excelled him in pure critical taste, and an accurate appreciation of whatever was truly poetical. To his criticisms, and to those of his brother Thomas Warton, we are indebted, in some respects, I sincerely believe, for a juster idea of genuine poetic excellence.’ And again:—

                                                                                Thy cheering voice,
O Warton! bade my silent heart rejoice,
And waked to love of Nature: every breeze,
On Itchin's bank, was melody: the trees
Waved in fresh beauty.

But if we would seek the genesis of Bowles's manner as seen in the Sonnets, we must go to Thomas Warton. It is found in the Sonnet to the river Lodon:—

Ah! what a weary race my feet have run,
Since first I trod thy banks with alders crown'd,
And thought my way was all thro' fairy ground,
Beneath thy azure sky, and golden sun:
Where first my Muse to lisp her notes begun!
While pensive Memory traces back the round,
Which fills the varied interval between;
Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene.
Sweet native stream! those skies and suns so pure
No more return, to cheer my evening road!
Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure,
Nor useless, all my vacant days have flow'd,
From youth's gay dawn to manhood's prime mature;
Nor with the Muse's laurel unbestow'd.

That might be Bowles himself, save that it is less musical. And to the Wartons, no doubt, Bowles owed that interest in the picturesque which inspired his Grave of the Last Saxon, his ballad of “The Cid,” and his prose Annals of Lacock Abbey.

From the Wartons, again, the inheritance of romantic poetry may be traced primarily to Milton. This Bowles points out in a prose passage; and the influence on his verse is only too apparent:—

                                                                                                    Yet once more
I call her, and once more her converse sweet,
'Mid the still limits of this wild retreat,
I woo.

Indeed, Bowles throughout his poetry is much too directly reminiscent, and incorporates too much from others. But the influences on his work are not confined to Milton. We have Shakespearian echoes; and, more interesting, this exquisite song, adapted in rhythm from The Maid's Tragedy:—

Lay me where the willows wave,
          In the cold moon-light;
Shine upon my lowly grave,
          Sadly, stars of night!

And the imitations of Spenser are apparent,

An ancient man appeared in amice gray.

So, too, before Keats, he has ‘paly’, ‘gleamy’, and ‘beamy’; and he makes reference to Browne's Britannia's Pastorals. And there are in his verses strange words—‘blood-boltered’ from Shakespeare, ‘pinnets’, and ‘rivel'd’. He seems, too, to have handed on the word ‘succinct’ from Pope to its beautiful use by Landor. And he makes mention of the kraken.

Bowles, therefore, has in his poetry virtually all the elements of the Romantic school. As time went on, he in his turn became indebted to others of that group. There are, in the Banwell Hill, the mannerisms of The Excursion. And this owes its debt to Endymion:—

In the great world there was not one beside
For whom he cared, since his own mother died.

But that is only to say that he took, as well as gave, in the great interchange of ideas of his time. His own attitude towards his contemporaries, and the vicissitudes he witnessed, may be read in the Advertisement to his Saint John in Patmos:—

Since these were written, I have lived to hear the sounds of other harps, whose masters have struck far more sublime chords, and died. I have lived to see among them females of the highest poetical rank, and many illustrious masters of the lyre, whose names I need not specify, crowned with younger and more verdant laurels, which they yet gracefully wear. Some who now rank high in the poet's art have acknowledged that their feelings were first excited by these youthful strains, which I have now with melancholy feelings, revised for the last time.

So much, then, for the practice of poetry. We turn now to Bowles's statement of its principles. The prolonged and bitter controversy in which Bowles engaged on this subject arose, of course, from his edition of Pope, published in 1806, in ten volumes. For this he received £300; and thus experienced, Byron declared, ‘how much easier it was to profit by the reputation of another, than to elevate his own.’

Of the duties of an editor, Bowles took a moral view. ‘I suppressed with indignation’, he says, ‘the Imitation of Horace, which I believe he wrote—the most obscene and daring piece of profligacy that ever issued from the press, since the days of Charles the Second.’ Bowles seems to have had two reasons for the method he chose; for he speaks somewhere of his duty to society, and again he regards it as important to protect the good name of Pope.

‘Some original papers’, he says, ‘have been, for obvious reasons, omitted. Those which have been published I do not think can detract from the moral character of the writer. What man, indeed, if all the errors of his youth were severely scanned, could escape censure? In other respects the letters are natural, interesting, and creditable to his feelings.’ This method of editing is contrary, of course, to that adopted by Scott; and, from the scientific standpoint, is deplorable. Morally, however, it is intelligible, and not least in a man of Bowles's cloth. And, after all, it is only a question of degree. There are some letters of great men which all scholars prefer to study in manuscript. Nor was Bowles merely prudish. ‘If the chapter of The Double Mistress, after some hesitation, has found a place,’ the Preface says, ‘it has been on account of its exquisite humour, and because, though offensive to delicacy, it is not seductive or dangerous to principles.’

Nor, again, is it just to speak of Bowles's edition as though it were an elaborate monument erected for the set purpose of casting a shadow on Pope's memory. Thus De Quincey speaks of the malice of Bowles, adding that he had himself refrained from a like work of editing Pope through an adverse estimate of his character. And Swinburne stigmatizes ‘the successive severity of the three Anglican clergymen who have edited and defamed him as poet or as man.’ And he adds: ‘After the Reverend Mr. Warton came the Reverend Mr. Bowles, and after the Reverend Mr. Bowles comes the Reverend Mr. Elwin. “Hear them! All these against one foreigner!” cries Mr. Browning's Luria; and “See them! All these against one Liberal Catholic!” a lay student may be tempted and permitted to exclaim at sight of so many cassocked commentators opening in full cry upon the trail of this poet.’ Of the abstract question whether a man should edit who is without admiration for his subject, it is unnecessary to speak, though it may be remarked in passing that even Pope cannot always demand or obtain a Warburton to give philosophic life to his abortive speculations and spiritual rectitude to his unconscious heresies. Abstract treatment of the question is unnecessary; for Bowles had an entirely adequate appreciation of much of Pope's character and performance. Hear him. ‘With regard to powers of poetical execution, none was ever Pope's superior.’ And so of the Epistle of Eloisa, ‘I shall not be deemed as giving reluctant praise, when I declare my conviction of its being infinitely superior to everything of the kind, ancient or modern. … It is sufficient, that nothing of the kind has ever been produced equal to it for pathos, painting, and melody.’ And yet again of The Rape of the Lock: ‘He stands alone, unrivalled, and possibly never to be rivalled. All Pope's successful labour of correct and musical versification, all his talents of accurate description, though in an inferior province of Poetry, are here consummately displayed. … The Muse has, indeed, no longer her great characteristic attributes, pathos and sublimity; but she appears so interesting, that we almost doubt whether the garb of elegant refinement is not as captivating as the most beautiful appearances of Nature.’ It would be absurd, in the face of remarks like that, to maintain that Bowles had not a high admiration of certain sides of Pope's genius.

And the same holds true, though to a less extent, of his examination of Pope's moral character. Thus he can say, ‘That he was a most dutiful and affectionate son, a kind master, a sincere friend, and, generally speaking, a benevolent man, is undoubted.’ And it must be pointed out that Bowles assumes Johnson's Life to be in the reader's hands. This disposes of Roscoe's hypothesis—‘if we were implicitly to receive our impressions of the character of Pope from the representations of Mr. Bowles.’ For Bowles makes no pretension to have produced a definitive edition in saecula saeculorum, or to have sealed up the mortal remains of Truth. Anything he may add is to be taken as supplementary to the Lives of the Poets. And in these additional remarks, Bowles notes only one characteristic that has been untouched by Johnson—Pope's licentiousness. But for the other features, his vanity, jealousy, animosity and love of stratagem, they have been commented on, and in much stronger terms, by Johnson. In one place, the representative and dictator of eighteenth-century opinion says that ‘Pope had been flattered till he thought himself one of the moving powers in the system of life.’ Elsewhere he remarks, ‘Pope was reduced to sneak and shuffle, sometimes to deny, and sometimes to apologize; he first endeavours to wound, and is then afraid to own that he meant a blow.’ Nor, apart from Johnson, is Bowles unique, either among friends or enemies, in his estimate of Pope's character. De Quincey says, ‘Simply and constitutionally, he was incapable of a sincere thought or a sincere emotion.’ And that eminent eighteenth-century scholar, the late Sir Leslie Stephen, calls Pope a ‘liar and a hypocrite’. But charges such as these will, in many eyes, outweigh the one of ‘indecent, and sometimes profane, levity’, which Bowles advances. Why Byron was to turn so hotly on Bowles for his accusation of licentiousness, it is easy to see, and may be premised now. It was the same reason which stirred Byron's indignation at Bowles's pity for Pope on the ground that he could attract no affection because of his deformity. And the latter charge was to Byron the more hateful, because it stung him more closely. The secret sympathy of Byron with Pope, it is impossible not to suspect, lay not least in the fact that Byron also was deformed, and, being inordinately proud, was proportionately sensitive. That phenomenon of psychology was one of the chief motive powers in the Byron and Bowles controversy, as it may have produced the original warp in all Byron's character and performance. But that Bowles was without charity, cannot be pretended. Otherwise he could not have written:—

If these and other parts of his character appear less amiable, let the reader constantly keep in mind the physical and moral causes which operated on a mind like his: let him remember his life, ‘one long disease’; the natural passions, which he must have felt in common with all the world, disappointed; his tenderness thrown back on his heart, only to gather there with more force, and more ineffectual wishes; his confined education, intrusted chiefly to those who were themselves narrow-minded; his being used from the cradle to listen only to the voice of partial indulgence; of tenderness, almost maternal, in all who contemplated his weakness and his incipient talents. When he has duly weighed these things, and attended to every alleviating circumstance that his knowledge of the world, or his charity, may suggest, then let him not hastily condemn what truth compels me to state; but let him rather, without presuming on his own virtues, lament the imperfection of our common nature, and leave the judgement to Him, ‘who knoweth whereof we are made, who remembereth we are but dust.’

Parts of that summary may, to some ears, bear the sound of unctuousness. But it was an ethical language that would not have been alien to Fielding himself; and, at least, it is idle to pretend that it is the utterance of mere bile and animus.

But more, perhaps, than the formal Life and Character of Pope, the running commentary which Bowles suffixed to the text may have exasperated the headier among the disciples of Pope. Thus we find such bitter-sweet appendices as these: ‘I shall say nothing of this precious complimentary epistle, which appears as laboured as it is contemptible’; ‘this is all very well said; but is it the exact truth?’ ‘this is very much in the strain of Sir Fretful Plagiary’ But, on the other hand, we have footnotes of this character: ‘The modulation and change here are very beautiful’; and in the Eloisa, ‘This is the most exquisite description of the first commencement of passion, that our language, or perhaps any other, affords.’ In fact, editing is a manner of criticism that is the fairest and most illuminating of any, but from which many are deterred by its extreme laboriousness. And the question of Bowles's motives may be said to be disposed of by his postscript to the Life: ‘If it should be thought I have in some places spoken too harshly of Pope's conduct, I can only say, I should not have considered myself an honest man if I had spoken otherwise.’

It was, however, round the principles of poetic criticism laid down by Bowles that the later conflict was to be longest sustained. Bowles's main argument asserted that a Poetry which draws its images from Nature is, as such, more poetical than a Poetry deriving its images from Art; and that a Poetry treating of the passions is, as such, more poetical than a Poetry of artificial manners. But he made a reservation that the execution must be equal; a reader, he thought, might nod over the Creation of Blackmore who could remain vivaciously awake with The Rape of the Lock. Such argumentation in the abstract is perilous, and not very illuminating. As Coleridge said, of another occasion, ‘We would not have an Act of Uniformity against poets.’ Nevertheless, Bowles's main contention embodies the highest truth.

Not so, however, did all these things appear to many of the literary at that time; and out of the edition came the controversy—a conflict which extended from start to finish over nineteen years, which involved, besides Bowles, Campbell, Byron, Isaac Disraeli, Gilchrist, Roscoe, M^cDermot, Hazlitt and the Blackwood reviewers, and had scarcely died out in De Quincey's papers of 1848 and 1851.

In January, 1808, Bowles's edition was reviewed in the Edinburgh. The Review found that Bowles, ‘though untainted by the grosser heresies of the day,’ was influenced by ‘an inordinate preference of descriptive poetry’, ‘a deluge which, since the days of Thomson, had swept over the lower regions of Parnassus.’ It refused to ‘permit the bards of former days to be thus arraigned before a jury of tourists and draughtsmen, for the want of excellences of which their own contemporaries had never dreamed’. Finally, it said that the edition ‘exhibited neither the industry of a commentator,² nor the elegance of a poetical critic.’ ‘There may be’, it affirmed, ‘a few good remarks, but we sincerely think they are very few. Upon the whole we recommend to this gentleman to abstain from prose, and to think rhyme as indispensable to his appearance in public, as a bag and sword are at court.’

In 1809 came out English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Bowles was pilloried along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Walter Scott.

Hail, Sympathy! thy soft idea brings
A thousand visions of a thousand things,
And shows, still whimpering through threescore of years,
The maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers.
And art thou not their prince, harmonious Bowles!
Thou first, great oracle of tender souls?

In later years, Byron was to seek an excuse for entry into the prose controversy; yet the poet had no call to consider himself ‘dragged’ into the controversy, who could make spontaneously this censure:—

Bowles! in thy memory let this precept dwell,
Stick to thy Sonnets, Man!—at least they sell.
But if some new-born whim, or larger bribe,
Prompt thy crude brain, and claim thee for a scribe; …
If Pope, whose fame and genius, from the first,
Have failed the best of critics, needs the worst,
Do thou essay: each fault, each failing scan;
The first of poets was, alas! but man.
Rake from the ancient dunghill ev'ry pearl,
Consult Lord Fanny, and confide in Curll;
Let all the scandals of a former age
Perch on thy pen, and flutter o'er thy page;
Affect a candour which thou canst not feel,
Clothe envy in a garb of honest zeal …
Oh! hadst thou lived in that congenial time,
To rave with Dennis, and with Ralph to rhyme;
Thronged with the rest around his living head,
Not raised thy hoof against the lion dead,
A meet reward had crowned thy glorious gains,
And linked thee to the Dunciad for thy pains.

The war was resumed in 1819, when Campbell prefixed to his Specimens of the British Poets his Essay on English Poetry. In this, in reply to Bowles's elevation of images drawn from nature over those drawn from art, he states that ‘artificial objects and manners are of so much importance in fiction, as to make the exquisite description of them no less characteristic of genius than the description of simple physical appearances. … Nature is the poet's goddess; but by nature, no one rightly understands her mere inanimate face—however charming it may be—or the simple landscape painting of trees, clouds, precipices and flowers. Why then try Pope, or any other poet, exclusively by his powers of describing inanimate phenomena?’ And he adds his famous illustration from the launching of a ship of the line, as an ‘example of the sublime objects of artificial life.’ ‘All the days of battle and the nights of danger which she had to encounter, all the ends of the earth which she had to visit, and all that she had to do and suffer for her country, rose in awful presentiment before the mind; and when the heart gave her a benediction, it was like one pronounced on a living being.’

To this Bowles replied in his Invariable Principles of Poetry. He complained that Campbell had not read the contentions he attacked; for it had never been asserted that nature ‘was not moral as well as external.’ And he sums up the heads of the argument in a comprehensive passage:—

The plain course of my argument was simply this:—1st. Works of nature, speaking of those more beautiful and sublime, are more sublime and beautiful than works of art; therefore more poetical.—2nd. The passions of the human heart, which are the same in all ages, and which are the causes of the sublime and pathetic in sentiment, are more poetical than artificial manners.—3rd. The great poet of human passions is the most consummate master of his art; and the heroic, the lofty, and the pathetic, as belonging to this class, are distinguished.—4th. If these premises be true, the descriptive poet, who paints from an intimate knowledge of external nature, is more poetical, supposing the fidelity and execution equal, not than the painter of human passions, but the painter of external circumstances in artificial life; as Cowper paints a morning walk, and Pope a game of cards!

This is the ground of my argument; and your representation, leaving out the most essential part, is this: ‘He alone is a poet, who paints from works of external nature; and this knowledge of external nature must be as minute as that of a botanist and Dutch painter!’ … You have totally left out the middle of my argument, and ridiculously joined the head and the legs, like the picture of Nobody in the London shops.

The Invariable Principles let loose the floodgates of the pamphleteers; and there streamed from the press Disraeli's ‘Review of Spence's Anecdotes and Men’ in the Quarterly for July, 1820, being an attack on the Invariable Principles; Bowles's Reply to the Charges in the Quarterly (Oct. 1820), attacking Gilchrist as the supposed author; Gilchrist's Letter in reply to this Pamphlet (Dec. 1820); Bowles's “Observations,” with a “Sequel” addressed to Octavius Gilchrist, Esq. F.A.S. (Feb. 1821).

In March, 1821, appeared Byron's Letter on Bowles's Strictures—Byron, magnificent in his onset, his swagger, and his irrelevance. He deals first with the charge of licentiousness, and hints that he might bring a retaliatory attack from his knowledge of the youthful Bowles; and proceeds: ‘The truth is, that in these days the grand primum mobile of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life.’

The mention of Art affords Byron an opportunity of narrating his journeys in the Aegean, with the statement that the works of art there are more poetical than the works of nature—and for this purpose he brings us by Hymettus, Pentelicus, the wilder parts of Greece, Asia Minor, Switzerland, many scenes of Italy, Cintra in Portugal, and the Sierras of Spain. The ship of the line happily enables him to speak of swimming: ‘I look upon myself as entitled to talk of naval matters, at least to poets: with the exception of Walter Scott, Moore, and Southey, perhaps, who have been voyagers, I have swum more miles than all the rest of them together now living ever sailed.’ Finally, he enters, with a fine gust, upon a description of the great battle between Gully and Gregson, and of Cribb and Horton, ‘a fresh-coloured man’.—But the poets have ever immortal youth!

Two serious arguments Byron advances. The one is that sculpture surpasses life, and is therefore more poetical than nature. This is indeed the Aristotelian conception, though it is strange to find Byron on the side of the author of the

                              Vade mecum of the true sublime,
Which makes so many poets and some fools.

But poetry and sculpture, it may be remarked, are really sister-arts, working on the raw material of life in different spheres; and it does not follow that because sculpture is more sublime than life in its own province, its creations are therefore fitted to form the subject of the further sublimating processes of poetry.

His second serious argument is this, that ‘the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth.’ Pope, he says, is ‘the most perfect of our poets, and the purest of our moralists.’

… If any great national or natural convulsion could or should overwhelm your country in such sort as to sweep Great Britain from the kingdoms of the earth, and leave only that, after all, the most living of human things, a dead language—an Englishman, anxious that the posterity of strangers should know that there had been such a thing as a British Epic and Tragedy, might wish for the preservation of Shakespeare and Milton; but the surviving World would snatch Pope from the wreck, and let the rest sink with the people. He is the moral poet of all civilization; and as such, let us hope that he will one day be the national poet of mankind. He is the only poet that never shocks; the only poet whose faultlessness has been made his reproach. Cast your eye over his productions; consider their extent, and contemplate their variety—pastoral, passion, mock heroic, translation, satire, ethics—all excellent, and often perfect.

Now, we may exclaim with Stevenson, the buttons are off the foils!

For—to use another figure—we have here the very apotheosis of Pope. The Edinburgh, in its review of Bowles's edition, had said: ‘That Pope is not of the class of Milton and Shakespeare is indisputable; and, notwithstanding the two volumes, in which Dr. Warton thought it necessary to prove this truism, we doubt whether any critic, even during the flattery of his own age, ever thought of placing him so high.’ But, apart from Byron, the Edinburgh was wrong. Witness Goldsmith: ‘It is probable, if our countrymen were called upon to shew a specimen of their genius to foreigners, The Rape of the Lock would be the work fixed upon.’

If, then, we seek to form some judgement upon the merits of this controversy, it must be confessed that Bowles was not the man, from the artistic standpoint, to estimate the personal character and poetic value of Pope. For Bowles's deliberate opinion was this: ‘Poetry is certainly secondary to Truth.’ But, in spite of much assertion to the contrary, and of many of his own statements, as here,

Know then this truth (enough for Man to know),
Virtue alone is Happiness below,

this is not the true opinion of Pope. Pope lived for Poetry, and had no concern with Truth, apart from Poetry. ‘To follow poetry as one ought,’ he writes, ‘one must forget father and mother, and cleave to it alone.’ And again, ‘When people talk of going to church, I think of sacrifices and libations; when I see the parson, I address him as Chryses priest of Apollo; and instead of the Lord's Prayer, I begin,

God of the silver bow.'

That was the true temper of Pope, as it has been of all poets who have risen from the literal interpretation of life to the fashioning of its symbols. But to that height Bowles never attained. There is this truth in Byron's charge of ‘cant’, that Bowles has about him an unpleasant tang of superiority. How otherwise could he have been guilty of this: ‘Let me take this opportunity of vindicating a respectable class of men, the English Poets’? The fundamental quality of Pope's mind was missed, therefore, by Bowles. It was missed by Byron, no less, in his prose criticisms, and realized by him only through intuition, in the whole tone of his Don Juan. But it was realized by the Edinburgh reviewer: ‘It appears to us, we confess, that Pope's, or any other man's character as a poet, must depend upon ‘his art and powers’ solely, and in no degree upon the subject he has selected.’ And it was realized by Roscoe in his edition of 1824, where he maintains in like manner the theory of Art for Art.

Pope, however, freed though he was from the literal interpretation of life and capable of fashioning symbols, fashioned only the symbols of negation.

Behold the child, by nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier play-thing gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold amuse his riper stage,
And beads and pray'r-books are the toys of age:
Pleas'd with this bauble still, as that before,
Till tir'd he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er.

That is the philosophy of the vanity of man, and it is the note of Byron's Childe Harold and Manfred.

Men some to pleasure, some to business take,
But every woman is at heart a Rake.

That is the philosophy of disillusionment; and it is the note of Don Juan.

But we have only to set these passages over against the works of the Romantic poets, to see that theirs were positive symbols. The Ode on the Intimations of Immortality speaks far otherwise of human destiny than the Essay on Man. The Prometheus Unbound is a paean, not of human limitation, but of human perfectibility. And the faith of Keats,

Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty: that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,

is a faith in which poets may call up spirits of radiant life and splendour, not phantoms of death and night.

It was for this cause, then, that Bowles contended. For it is the virtue of the positive symbol that it is taken by the literal interpreter of life for his Truth. So that Bowles's argument was in reality this, that there is a worth and beauty of the symbol; that the principles of art are not the fluctuating slaves of fashion, nor, as Byron affirmed, is it now Homer, and now Virgil, once Dryden, and since Walter Scott; but rather those principles are invariable. Or, if change there be, then is it such as the succession of night given for human weakness to follow day. It was for this truth that Bowles, in his degree, did battle; and his effort was the gift he has left, and the reason for our gratitude. For Poetry, which Plato and Shelley proclaimed to be a divine madness, he too knew for celestial and unchanged. So that not without offering was he to the Muses in the day when, turning from the imagination of disillusionment and the vanity of human wishes, they unscaled their eyes at the unfailing fountains of Beauty and Love, and renewed their youth of immortal aspiration.

Notes

1. Compare Akenside:—

   How gladly I recall your well-known seats
   Beloved of old, and that delightful time
   When all alone, for many a summer's day,
   I wander'd through your calm recesses, led
   In silence by some powerful hand unseen.

2. In support of the Edinburgh, one curious inaccuracy on the part of Bowles may, indeed, be noted. Cf. his Pope, vol. ix, p. 391 (London, 1806):—‘Pope, when Swift was alive, professed he had a heart and a fortune for both, but mentions him, after his death, with no other words than “Dr. Swift.”’ Swift, of course, survived Pope some eighteen months.