1784-1820.] THE POETS-SHELLEY-KEATS-NARRATIVE POEMS. 121 neglect as ordinarily falls to the lot of intrusive mediocrity. In 1812, at the age of twenty, Shelley printed his "Queen Mab." In 1821, he was drowned. in the Mediterranean. In these ten years of a feverish and often unhappy existence, he produced a body of poetry "remarkable for its quantity, but much more wonderful for the quality of the greater part of it."* Few were his contemporary admirers. He was denounced and dreaded. At war with many of the institutions of society; an unbeliever in Christianity, but with a vague belief of an over-ruling power, and of the soul's immortality; his rash opinions, confirmed by something like persecution; it was reserved for another age to understand the rare qualities of his genius. Shelley has been called "the poet of poets." His highest excellences are scarcely capable of rousing enthusiasm in ordinary readers, now that he is read. Keats published two volumes of Poems in 1817; his third volume appeared a few months before his death in 1821. The inspiration of Keats, like that of Shelley, was fitted to attract fervent votaries, but only amongst a comparatively small class-those "of imagination all compact." The narrative facility of Scott, the splendid declamation of Byron, were elements of popularity which were wanting in these masters of a subtler art. The narrative character, by which a great portion of the verse of this period had established its hold upon the popular mind, was now adopted by writers whose earlier productions were more in conformity with the tastes of a generation passing away. Campbell had a wider reputation than any contemporary at the beginning of the century, created by his "Pleasures of Hope" and his noble lyrics. In 1809, he produced " Gertrude of Wyoming." Rogers appeared to revive from a sleep of twenty years, when, in 1814, he published "Jaqueline," in conjunction with the "Lara" of Byron. His "Pleasures of Memory" appeared in 1792. He returned to his characteristic style in the "Italy" of 1822. Leigh Hunt, whose Juvenile Poems appeared in 1802, and whose poetical faculty had been subsequently displayed in graceful verse, light or serious, in 1816 took his place amongst the narrative poets by his "Story of Rimini." Moore, the wittiest of satirists, the most elegant of song-writers, published "Lalla Rookh" in 1817. Crabbe,-who, when he published a volume of "Poems" in 1807, was hailed "with the same sort of feeling that would be excited by tidings of an ancient friend, whom we no longer expected to see in this world,t-in that volume reprinted "The Village." His new productions, which included "The Parish Register," were principally of a narrative character. In 1810 came "The Borough," with the same marked feature of the recent poetical school; in 1812, "Tales; " and in 1819, "Tales of the Hall." It is in these novelets in verse of Crabbe that we must look for such occasional delineations of manners as have made the prose novels of Fielding and Smollett most valuable studies of the times in which they flourished. The life of the country town and its. neighbourhood, half a century ago, has coarser and harder features than would now offer themselves, even in the least refined classes. The sea-going population of the "Borough" are "a bold, artful, surly, savage race,' smugglers, wreckers, bribed electors. They dwell where there are dung * Craik, "English Literature," vol. ii. p. 496. 122 CRABBE'S LATTER DELINEATION OF MANNERS. [1784-1820. heaps before every door, in the "infected row we term our street." There "riots are nightly heard." Within their hovels all is filth and indecency. Books there are none, but ballads on the wall, abusive or obscene. borough was then a watering-place,—and had a "Season." There are few of its visitors now who would be content with "The brick-floor'd parlour which the butcher lets." Ald The Mayor of the Borough, a prosperous fisherman, did not know in the painful accumulation of wealth, that money would multiply at interest. He was not alone in his ignorance. The race of hoarders was common in every district at the beginning of the century. The neighbouring Squire comes once a month to the "Free and Easy Club," to be the hero of the night. The rector, doctor, and attorney meet, in pleasant conviviality, to talk over parish affairs and politics,-election zeal, and "The murmuring poor who will not fast in peace." In such meetings there was ever a dictator,-a "Justice Bolt,❞—whose passion was that of "teaching " "Those who instruction needed not, or sought;" -in more recent times a malady most incident to Scots. The attorney then thought that he could best thrive in encouraging litigation. The apothecary, "all pride and business, bustle and conceit," was protected in his neglect of the poor by a "drowsy bench." The parish priest, who heeded not the summons to a pauper's bed,* had not yet been roused out of his indifference by the presence near his church of "Sects in Religion." Romanists, Baptists, Swedenborgians, Universalists, Jews, were found in the country town; but most prevailing were the "Methodists, of two kinds, Calvinistic and Arminian." "Sects in Religion? Yes, of every race We nurse some portion in our favoured place; And you might ask, 'how think we for the year ?'” In the "Edinburgh Review," of 1816, Jeffrey attributed the creation of an effectual demand for more profound speculation and more serious emotion than were dealt in by the writers of the former century, to the agitations of the French revolution, the impression of the new literature of Germany, and "the rise or revival of a more evangelical spirit in the body of the people.”† The direct relations of this "more evangelical spirit" to our lighter literature are not very manifest; but its indirect effect may be traced in the general abandonment in prose works of fiction of the grossness which still lingered in the delineations of social life which came after those of the great humourists who were passing away when George III. ascended the throne. This may be partly attributed to the reformation of manners, which had unquestionably been produced by the same religious influences steadily The picture of "the jovial youth" who thought his duty was comprised in his "Sunday's task," is found in Crabbe's early poem of "The Village." + Essays," vol. i. p. 167. 1784-1820.] MORE EVANGELICAL SPIRIT IN THE BODY OF THE PEOPLE. ; 123 working amongst a portion of the upper and middle classes. In 1787, Wilberforce entered in his Journal a solemn record of what he deemed one of the great objects of his life: "God has set before me the reformation of my country's manners." His other great object, the abolition of the Slave Trade, had been accomplished; and a visible change had taken place in the general aspects of society-in all of the community except some of the very high, and many of the very low-before the close of his career of practical benevolence in 1833. The "more evangelical spirit"-which many good and earnest men condemned as sectarian, had penetrated into the Church. A writer who has described the various phases of this transition period of religion, with a natural affection for the somewhat exclusive society amidst which he was reared, but with a generous catholicity of mind, has shown the difficulty of discriminating between the senses of two appellations, "Orthodox" and "Evangelical." He says, "The knot would perhaps have been best cut, by defining an Orthodox clergyman as one who held, in dull and barren formality, the very same doctrines which the Evangelical clergyman held in cordial and prolific vitality." * The "prolific vitality" fortunately took the form of association. Societies were formed for grappling with open immorality, and for mitigating some of the more obvious evils of vice and ignorance. The Theological Literature of this awakening period presented a novel aspect. The spirit of polite unbelief, which England had imparted to France in the beginning and middle of the eighteenth century, had travelled back from France to England towards the end of that century, in the grosser forms of denunciation and ribaldry. Dignitaries of the Church applied themselves to put down "The Age of Reason" with gentle argument— apologetical rather than confiding. The great and fashionable, who shuddered at the notion that those beneath them should have their faith shaken and their morals corrupted by atheistical and licentious writers, did not wholly stand on the outside of the circle to whom the Royal Proclamation of 1787 against Vice was addressed. The private offences, in the support of whose official interdiction Wilberforce founded a society, were, profanation of the Lord's Day, swearing, drunkenness. The great gave their Sunday card parties, and Sunday concerts, long after Hannah More published, in 1796, her "Estimate of the Religion of the Fashionable World," and Wilberforce, in 1797, his "Practical Christianity." "The Clapham Sect" strove manfully against these anomalies, amidst hypocritical assent and covert ridicule. Some of this ridicule was deserved. It has been candidly acknowledged that "the spirit of coterie" was amongst them. They "admired in each other the reflection of their own looks, and the echo of their own voices." It is this quality that now renders "Colebs in Search of a Wife "-one of the most popular books of the class of religious novels, of which this production of Hannah More was the first example-the most tedious of homilies pretending to be amusing. What has been called "the unquenchable thirst for spiritual excitement" exposed well-meaning crowds, who had a perpetual craving for the fountains of platform eloquence, to manifest a spirit of intolerance and exclusiveness which detracted largely from their honest * Sir James Stephen, "Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography," vol. ii. p. 155. 124 THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. [1784-1820. enthusiasm for schemes of benevolence. Advertisements in Magazines of Sectarian doctrines, announcing the establishment of a Margate Hoy, set on foot for the accommodation of religious characters; of an eligible residence, in a neighbourhood where the Gospel is preached in three places within half a mile; and of a serious man-servant wanted who can shave ;-such announcements as these, with which half a century has made us more familiar, were new and strange objects of ridicule in 1808. Mackintosh, who looked with a real satisfaction at the public religious advocacy of such measures as the removal of slavery, the amendment of the criminal laws, and the general circulation of the Bible-himself a frequent speaker at Anniversaries of Bible Societies-was fully alive to the mistake of these pretensions to peculiar sanctity which have operated so injuriously on the true interests of religion. He thus makes a note in his Diary of 1818: "They have introduced a new language, in which they never say that A. B. is good, or virtuous, or even religious, but that he is an Advanced Christian." † The orthodox Divinity of this period was distinguished for its scholarship and speculative ability rather than for the spiritual gifts claimed for another school. Of those who maintained the intellectual reputation of the English Church, Paley was the foremost. Of pulpit orators, England could claim no one supreme. Chalmers, whose oratorical powers commanded the admiration of our most accomplished parliamentary speakers, was also the most admired, and deservedly so, of those who committed their eloquence to the calm judgment of the closet. His " Astronomical Discourses," published in 1816, rivalled the novels of Walter Scott in their fascinations for all readers. Scotland produced another writer of Sermons, Hugh Blair, whose popularity for a while was far greater than that of any modern divine of the Church of England. Feeble and elegant, they excited no profound emotions; but were generally welcomed as agreeable reading for family Sunday evenings. Of a very different character was the preaching of Robert Hall, the Baptist minister, a man who redeemed Dissent from the imputation of ignorance and vulgarity that attached to pulpits filled by uneducated men, who left their proper vocations to be gospel lights. Sound thinkers such as Robert Hall were calculated to shame the orthodox divines who, in too many instances, were opposed to the spread of Education. In a sermon, preached in 1810, on "The Advantages of Knowledge to the Lower Classes," he says, "If there be any truth in the figure by which society is compared to a pyramid, it is on them its stability chiefly depends; the elaborate ornaments at top will be a wretched compensation for the want of solidity for the lower parts of the structure.” It was one of the objects of the crusade against "Vice" carried on by the school of "Advanced Christians," to imitate the old Puritans in their undiscriminating hatred of the Stage. This hatred was a little out of season, for Comedy, happily ceasing to reflect the worst private manners, had become decorous. The goddess of dulness had driven the imps of licentiousness off the boards; although their unholy revels were encouraged in the saloons. This shamelessness was certainly enough to make good men sometimes regard the theatres as dangerous for their sons. But is was scarcely sufficient to justify 1784-1820.] WRITERS FOR THE STAGE. 125 that tasteless hatred of all theatrical representations, which equally proscribed "Hamlet" and "Tom and Jerry," and thought that there would be contamination in beholding the sublime impersonations of Mrs. Siddons, or in listening to the majestic rhetoric of John Kemble. Their proscription of the stage was not lessened when Miss O'Neil and Edmund Kean came to maintain the succession of great tragedians. It is remarkable that, with such actors as the patent theatres possessed in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and with all the affluence of the poetry of that era, no original tragedy was produced that could hold its place, even by the side of the still popular scenes of Rowe and Otway. The poetical tendencies of the age were not dramatic; the most popular of its poets wrote many tragedies; but "it may be doubted whether there is, in all lord Byron's plays, a single remarkable passage which owes any portion of its interest or effect to its connection with the characters or the action."* The same may be said of the dramas of Coleridge. Scott's three attempts at poetical dialogue were utter failures. The poets who wrote plays did not conceive them in the spirit of plays to be acted. Mr. Milman's "Fazio," which was not written for the stage, was better adapted to the stage, and had a greater success than any other works of a living poet, in the hands of the actors, who seized upon it before the existence of the law of dramatic copyright. In the same era, when manners were sufficiently marked to offer valuable studies of the social life of the upper classes, there was no worthy successor to Sheridan. Had there been a comic writer who could have carried forward some portion of the brilliant wit of "The School for Scandal," to have shown us the "dandies" of the Regency-a race whose foppery was not less intellectual than that of the sparkling heroes of Congreve and Vanbrugh—we might have had preserved to us a picture of manners which have wholly departed in the lazy affectation of the exclusive class in more recent days. The manners which the stage presented were made up of traits of character derived from the peculiar aptitudes of the comic actors-the Irishman, the Yorkshireman, the rakish right-honourable, the sentimental tradesmanall drawn to a pattern of the most approved mode of flattering the honest, patriotic, and somewhat obtuse middle class, who were the great supporters of the theatre. John-Bullism was in the ascendant; and there was no surer way to an Englishman's heart than to stimulate his national pride, and represent his fireside as the seat of all the virtues. If the classic Comedy had passed away,—if Apollo, coming to the "Feast of the Poets," mistook "Reynolds and Arnold, Hook, Dibdin and Cherry," for "the waiters"-the Novel, at the beginning of the century, was beginning to assert its legitimate claims to be the reflector of manners as well as "the mender of hearts." The prose fictions of Godwin and Holcroft were written for the development of political doctrines. "Caleb Williams" is not a fiction of actual life; although a most forcible protest against some of the grosser forms of injustice and oppression which prevailed in a social state. professing to be based upon the legal rights of all conditions of men. “Hugh Trevor" is a mild infusion of the principles that placed its author in a dangerous position, from which he was saved by the eloquence of Erskine. Macaulay, "Essays," vol. i. p. 346. |