CHAPTER II AN ERA OF TRANSITION Thomson-Gray-Collins-Blake—Cowper-Crabbe THE advance of civilisation is like that of an incoming tide. Between the wave that reaches far up the strand and the wave that succeeds to reach still further, there is a lull, and partial recoil. The history of literature, too, is a chronicle of wave-periods and lull-periods. Movements of thought and of society are the strong spiritual winds and the deep currents of passion that stir the surface and impel the waves of the ocean of literature. The spirit and temper of an epoch are minutely betrayed in the poetry produced by it, for literature is in reality history written by historians who write of their own times. Yet it is not a record of events, events are usually of small significance in themselves, but of the manner in which events come about, a record of the mental, spiritual and moral life of the world. The power of English literature,' wrote Matthew Arnold, 'is in its poets.' It is a true word, and a torch to light us far on an enquiry into the character and genius of the nation. The English people, a mixed race, despite its turn for the practical life, and its splendid development of that turn and devotion to it as distinct from the turn leading to the field of abstract thought, has always kept a place in its heart for the message of the poet. It has not reverenced, as other peoples, the musician or the painter or the sculptor, but the poet has never failed to awaken the deeper affections of its nature. In no other of the fine arts, save poetry, can it claim to have the lead, to have given birth to originative or stimulating ideas, or to have shown any superiority in its workmanship, either of delicacy or compass; its achievement in poetry is unrivalled and unique. Our present business is a consideration of a single group of poets who have contributed to the greatness of England's intellectual honour; but to read a character aright we must know something of its lineage; to understand the prevailing mood of any period, we must trace it, as we would a stream, to its sources. What first strikes upon the ear of a student of English literature, is the diversity of tone in the poetry of different epochs. He catches a new accent in each succeeding age. In Chaucer, it is the note of the emancipated imagination, which for long centuries had pined in the monastic cell, or languished in the stifling air of narrow creeds. We catch the music of fresh delight in the outside world under the open heaven. When the busy lark, the messenger of day, salutes the grey morning in her song, it is 'Farewell my book and my devocioun!' The same note of the pure imagination, but the imagination become passionate, is heard in Marlowe : 'Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!' In Shakespere, it is the imaginative reason that is at work. When in the person of Macbeth he realises the profound world-weariness that overcomes even that stout soldier as he sees the high hopes of his ambition, for which he has renounced so much, fail him, it is not easy to miss the note of the imaginative reason :— 'To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day And all our yesterdays have lighted fools Let us compare these familiar passages with others no less familiar to the readers of Dryden and Pope, and observe the new accent: or, 6 'Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long.'. 'In squandering wealth was his peculiar art, Beggared by fools, whom still he found too late, He had his jest and they had his estate ;' Envy will merit as its shade pursue, But like a shadow prove the substance true.' With Dryden and Pope it is no longer the emancipated imagination, or the impassioned imagination, or the imaginative reason; it is clearly the festival of the quick intelligence. In 'Absalom and Achitophel,' or 'The Essay on Criticism,' we recognise at a glance a brilliant expression of acknowledged truths, a clear, forcible rendering of definite organised chains of reasoning; in a word, reason presides over the mind of the authors. A bright, keen, intellectual seizure of the points of an argument, or the salient and telling features of a character or of an object— these give the piquant flavour to the verse of Pope and Dryden. We feel, as we read, that the minds which appear in it are alert and alive in a very marked degree, ready, as a clever debater is, to seize instantaneously upon a weak point in an opponent's argument, to discover the joint in the harness, and equally ready and capable of pressing home against it every point of his own argument, with an emphasis derived from arrangement and precision, and all the penetrative force of wit and epigram. As individual minds differ, so do races differ; and so does each race differ from itself at different stages of its history. During the fervid Elizabethan period, with its enthusiastic delight in human nature, and the pursuits and ambitions of men, little attention was bestowed on style for its own sake. The dramatists wrote straight out of the rich stores of their observation, and Nature guided their hands, making unnecessary the studied arrangement and careful polish, the graces of style indispensable to a literature whose subjectmatter lacks vital interest, and needs to be made attractive and enhanced in value by a critical art. No one who compares the subjects of Elizabethan poetry with those of Restoration times can miss the essential difference there exhibited. In Shakespere's day the nation thought and < moved as one man; it was aroused by the same interests, undivided allegiance was given by it to the same pursuits. But after the Civil War parties in religion, political parties and social distinctions drew sharp dividing lines among the people, throwing them into groups that thought and felt differently upon almost all important questions. The unity of the nation's life was broken in upon, and an age of controversy ensued. In such an age there is no space for the exercise of the imagination; it was imperative that the reign of reason should begin. The literature produced by such an age will inevitably be its mirror; it will be argu mentative and didactic, possessed of the characteristics of a literature of debate, satirical, personal, direct. It will be occupied by questions of society or of the state rather than with the emotions or passions of individuals. Hamlet will be impossible for it, Lear will be out of place in it. We shall have rather many philosophical and scientific treatises, essays innumerable in prose and verse, and satires directed against public bodies and parties. Both subject-matter and style are revolutionised as we pass from the poetry of Elizabeth to that of Charles. The poet no longer writes out of his own observation and heart; he puts into carefully constructed verse a series of selected ideas upon any theme offered to him. He writes poems to order; he is no longer forced to write by the thoughts and emotions surging up in uncontrollable waves. While Pope was still alive, James Thomson published his poem of 'The Seasons.' The possibilities of poetry in the school of the elder poet were exhausted. There was no more to be said about the subjects whence his inspiration was drawn, and they had never been sources of a very fervent inspiration. The fine madness which rightly should possess a poet's brain' was a tradition of the past. Pope drove a very docile pair of poetic steeds, and was so perfect an exponent of his art, that their management came dangerously near to being a mere mechanic art,' and to drive tolerably no very remarkable feat. 'I chose verse,' he tells us in his 'Design for an Essay on Man,' 'because I found I could express ideas more shortly than in prose itself.' Precisely. And the result proved the wisdom of his choice. Never were ideas more concisely or more pointedly expressed. But there are two things noticeable about them. First, they are common-place ideas, conventional, and such as, repre |