No More Learning

In all, he was not more
than six months at school, and, when he left, at the age of seven,
he had only 'advanced so far as to get into the class that read the
Bible'; and, in writing, he was able only to scrawl the letters,
nearly an inch in length. ' In his early years, his poetic tendencies
did not receive any instruction or fostering influence except that
derived from his peasant mother's imperfect recital of ballads
and fairy tales. From his eighth year, his hours from daybreak to
sunset were spent in the fields as a herdboy and, later, as a
shepherd. Until his eighteenth year, the only verses that he had
seen in print were the metrical Psalms of David, and, when he
obtained access to The Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace
and The Gentle Shepherd, he could make very slow progress in
reading them: “The little reading that I had learned,' he says,
>


## p. 238 (#260) ############################################

238
[CH.
Lesser Scottish Verse
6
'I had nearly lost, and the Scottish dialect quite confounded
me. ' While a shepherd with Laidlaw, of Blackhouse, he was, how-
ever, supplied by him with a number of books, which, he says, he
‘began to read with considerable attention’; and, ‘no sooner,' he
relates, ‘did I begin to read so as to understand them, than, rather
prematurely' (he was, however, twenty-six years of age) 'I began
to write. ' His first compositions were songs and ballads made up
for the lassies to sing in chorus. ' 'I had no more difficulty,' he
naïvely tells us, ‘in composing them than I have at present, and
I was equally well pleased with them. His main difficulty was in
writing them out after he had composed and corrected them in his
mind; he had no method of learning to write save by following
the Italian alphabet’; and, with laborious toil, he could not do
more than 'four or six lines at a sitting. ' So isolated was he in
his southern solitudes, that, he says, the first time I heard of
Burns was in 1797, the year after he died,' when a half-daft man
came to him on the hill and surprised and entranced him by
repeating to him Tam o' Shanter. This 'formed,' so he writes,
'a new epoch of my life. Every day I pondered on the genius
and fate of Burns. I wept and always thought with myself what
is to hinder me from succeeding Burns ? '
The ambition of Hogg-recorded by him with characteristically
ingenuous vanity-may well seem rather extravagant. His career
as a poet, remarkable though it was, cannot be said to entitle him to
rank as a second Burns. Save that, like Burns, he was. a Scottish
peasant, he has very little in common with him. He lacks his pre-
decessor's marked intellectuality as well as his strongly passionate
temperament. Emotion, imagination, a good musical ear, a faculty
for riming, a strong sympathy with nature, created by years of
solitary converse with her, were his principal gifts. He had an
excellent eye for scenery, and his descriptions are remarkably fine
and truthful; but he is somewhat superficial; the vigour and
penetration of Burns are beyond him. As he possessed, however,
a peculiarly lightsome and joyful disposition, his hardships, dis-
appointments and misfortunes did not, as in the case of Burns, give
him any very deep concern.
One may think ſhe writes], on reading over this memoir, that I have worn
out a life of misery and wretchedness; but the case has been quite the reverse.
I never knew either man or woman who has been so universally happy as I
have been; which has been partly owing to a good constitution, and partly
from the conviction that a heavenly gift, conferring the powers of immortal
song, was inherent in
soul.
The wide difference in the individualities of Burns and Hogg is
my


## p. 239 (#261) ############################################

x]
James Hogg
239
shown in their relations with Edinburgh. Lacking the personal
prestance of Burns, Hogg could not attain there to the great personal
success commanded by Burns; his rustic simplicity, combined with
his vanity and certain eccentricities of manner, partly created by his
early circumstances, even made him a kind of butt in the higher
literary circles of which he was proud to be reckoned a member ;
and, to many, he is now best known by the unfair caricature of him
as the irrepressible ‘Shepherd,' in Noctes Ambrosianae. But,
unlike Burns, he made a definite attempt, and, considering his ante-
cedents, with quite marvellous success, to establish himself as a
littérateur in Edinburgh. Having lost, in farming, the money gained
by the publication of The Mountain Bard, he, as late as 1810—when
he was forty years of age-set out to the capital on his adventurous
quest. 'I tost,' he writes, 'my plaid about my shoulders, and
marched away to Edinburgh, determined, since no better could be,
to push my fortunes as a literary man. ' He even set up, as he puts
it, for 'a connoisseur in manners, taste and genius,' by founding
a weekly critical journal The Spy; and, fresh from wielding his
shepherd's crook in the wilds of Ettrick, essayed to supply literary
guidance and direction to the enlightened denizens of the metro-
polis. This paper-a literary curiosity of which, unhappily, no
copy is now known to survive—written three-fourths by himself,
was carried on for more than a year; and, largely for his own
mental discipline, he set on foot a debating society, the Forum,
where his speeches must have been sufficiently amusing. But,
by his publication of The Queen's Wake, he more than surprised
even his warmest admirers. “Od,' said one of his vernacular
acquaintances, 'wha wad hae thought there was as muckle in that
sheep's head o' yours ? ' It firmly established his reputation as
a poet; but, owing to the failure of his publishers, his fortunes
were yet to seek, when the duke of Buccleuch bestowed on him
the farm of Altrive in Yarrow, at a nominal rent. Here, until his
death in 1835—with occasional visits to Edinburgh and the lakes
- he continued to spend a life in which farming and sports were,
not in a pecuniary sense very successfully, but, otherwise, happily
enough, combined with literary labours, his conviction of his
supreme success in which made him blissfully content with his,
from a worldly point of view, comparatively humble lot: 'Yes,' so
he wrote in his old age :
Yes-I hae fought and won the day;
Come weel, come woe, I care na by;
I am a King! My regal sway
Stretches o'er Scotia's mountains high


## p. 240 (#262) ############################################

240
[ch.
Lesser Scottish Verse
And o'er the fairy vales that lie
Beneath the glimpses of the moon,
Or round the ledges of the Sky
In twilight's everlasting noon.
The poetry of Hogg is more akin to that of Scott than that of
Burns. Properly, he does not belong to the Scottish poetic school
.
of the revival. His poetic powers were first nourished by, and
received their special bent from, old border tales and ballads.
He was nearly thirty years of age before he had even heard of
Burns; and if, latterly, he was well read in Scottish vernacular
verse, he, while employing a kind of Scots in certain of his pieces,
did not make any use of the old traditional Scottish staves. Long
before he had studied the vernacular bards, he had become
acquainted with the works of various English poets. Thus, unlike
Burns, he never had, in a literary sense, any strong vernacular
bias; and, since a great period of poetic revival had now begun,
both in Scotland and England, he, necessarily, received from it
much stimulus and guidance; in fact, it was with these later poets
he loved to be classed, and he reckoned himself by no means the
least of the brilliant galaxy. While, therefore, his verse, like himself,
displays, now and again, a certain naïve rusticity, and is occasion-
ally marred by superficial solecisms, it is not only distinguished
by the native charm derived from his early nurture on adventurous
ballad tales and fairy lore, and from his mode of life as a solitary shep-
herd in a beautiful pastoral region, but, also, bears tokens of cultured
refinement. Unlike Burns, he wrote English verse with perfect
facility. His excessive fluency, his extempore voluminousness, his
inability to condense—due, partly, to his insufficient mental dis-
cipline in early life—is, in truth, the occasion of his chief literary
sins as a writer both of prose and verse; his larger poems as well
as his ballads are, generally, too long drawn out. Yet, he has his
passages of high inspiration. The concluding portion of The Witch
of Fife in The Queen's Wake is a quaintly unique specimen of
fantastic eeriness, touched with humour, e. g. the flight of the
bewitched old man from Carlisle:
>
His armis war spred and his heid was hiche,
And his feite stack out behynde;
And the laibis of the auld manis cote
War wauffing in the wynde.
And aye he nicherit, and aye he flew,
For he thochte the ploy sa raire;
It was like the voice of the gainder blue,
Quhan he flees throw the ayr.
1


## p. 241 (#263) ############################################

x]
James Hogg
241
Bonny Kilmeny—which most critics unite to praise-in the same
poem, is in a quite different vein. Though it has certain superficial
faults, he here succeeds with delicate imaginative art in invoking
to admirable purpose the old mystic fairy spells, faintly preserved
in what remains of the old ballad stories of tradition. Many, also, of
the ballad imitations in the same poem, though lacking in concise-
ness, have much spirit; the eleventh bard's song, The Fate of
Macgregor (Macgregor, Macgregor remember our Foemen'), is,
also, a splendidly vivid and impressive recital, and the poem
abounds in finely descriptive passages, somewhat after the manner
of Scott, with others more airily mystical. In Mador of the Moor,
he employs the Spenserian stanza with perfect success: he tells
us, in characteristic fashion, that he 'had the vanity to believe,
that he was going to give the world a new specimen of this stanza
in its proper harmony'; and, if the story is badly constructed, the
narrative flows on with perfect ease and smoothness. He is, also,
pretty near the truth when he remarks, with his usual self-satisfac-
tion, “There is no doubt whatever that my highest and most
fortunate efforts in rhyme are contained in some of the descrip-
tions of nature in that poem'; and the remark applies more
particularly to the delineation of the hunting episodes, the
mountain and river scenery and the weather effects in canto I.
In the rather fantastic Pilgrims of the Sun, he attempts more
daring imaginative flights, but not always quite happily; and, in
the long historic poem Queen Hynde, he still more mistook his
powers, notwithstanding his firm opinion that it was the best
epic poem that ever had been produced in Scotland. '
The reputation of Hogg now rests, mainly, on The Queen's Wake,
and several of his shorter pieces. In 1810, he published The Forest
Minstrel, two-thirds of which were written by himself, and the rest
by his acquaintances, including the pathetic Lucy's Flittin by
William Laidlaw, Scott's steward. Of the songs in this volume,
Hogg himself frankly says: 'In general they are not good,
but the worst of them are all mine, for I inserted every ranting
rhyme that I had made in my youth, to please the circles about the
firesides in the evening. Such was the shepherd's own opinion of
what were, in present day slang, uncommon good 'folk songs';
and, on the whole, his opinion of them is correct. They are, most
of them, merely ranting rhymes,' much better versified and
written and cleverer than the average example of their genus, but,
on the whole, best fitted for the appreciation of those for whom
they were primarily intended. On the other hand, there is
16
E. L, XI.
CH. X.


## p. 242 (#264) ############################################

242
[Ch.
Lesser Scottish Verse
admirable spirit and fire in such later war odes and Jacobite songs
as M Kinnon, Rise Rise Lowland and Highland Man, Lock the
Door Lauriston, Cam Ye by Athol and The Gathering of the
Clans; his grotesque sketch of the wicked village of 'Balmqu-
happle,' in Fife, is quite worthy of Burns; and, while his love songs,
for the most part, are a little cold and commonplace, 0 Weel Befa'
(in The Haunted Glen : not the longer version of the song) and
When the Kye comes Hame are charmingly fine pastorals; though
the most perfect of his lyrics and of his shorter pieces is The
Skylark, itself sufficient to justify his proud conviction that he
possessed in his soul the gift of immortal song.
John Leyden, like Hogg, the son of a shepherd, was associated
with him in supplying Scott with ballad versions for The Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border; and he also contributed to it two imitation
ballads, Lord Soulis and The Cout of Keeldar, an Ode to Scottish
Music, and The Mermaid; and he wrote a few lyrics for The
Scots Magazine, which he edited for some months in 1802. Before
proceeding, in 1803, as a surgeon to India—where he afterwards
held the chair of Hindustani in Bengal and distinguished himself
by his linguistic and ethnological researches—he wrote, as a sort
of farewell, a long reminiscent poem Scenes of Infancy, somewhat
after the manner of Thomson, which, though tastefully written, can
hardly be termed poetical. The Mermaid is his only poem which
displays true poetic glamour.
Allan Cunningham, a native of Dumfriesshire—who, though of
middle-class descent, became a stonemason, but, later, was secre-
tary to the sculptor Chantrey, and combined with his secretarial
duties miscellaneous literary work for the magazines and pub-
lishers—supplied Richard Hartley Cromek with most of the pieces
and information contained in his Remains of Nithsdale and
Galloway Song (1810); its poetic contents being mainly fabricated
by him, though, in some cases, he merely modified traditional
versions of old songs. In 1820, he published a drama, Sir Marma-
duke, which, though praised by Scott as poetry, did not find
acceptance on the stage; and, in 1833, The Maid of Elvar, a
rustic epic in twelve parts. His Songs of Scotland Ancient and
Modern (four volumes, 1825), include some of his own compositions.
In his imitations of the older minstrelsy, Cunningham showed
varied dexterity, his attempts including traditional ballads, love
lyrics, Jacobite songs and plaintively pious covenanting effusions,
though their fictitious character becomes evident enough on a
careful perusal. The Young Maxwell, for example, is too much
Robert
a


## p. 243 (#265) ############################################

x]
Allan Cunningham
243
o
>
a mere echo of ballads in general; Hame Hame, Hame is too
prettily sentimental for an original Jacobite song ; She's Gane to
dwell in Heaven is far too elaborately refined in expression to
express the sentiments of the average pious peasant; and the
heroine of Bonie Lady Anne, evidently, never had any existence
in Nithsdale or elsewhere. Several, however, both of his acknow-
ledged and unacknowledged pieces, enjoy a wide popularity-among
them the humorous John Grumlie, a condensed revision of The
Wyfe of Auchtirmwychty; the funnily vituperative, if not very
witty, Wee, Wee German Lairdie; My Nannie 0, a kind of
modified version of the song by Burns and quite as good
as the original, and the classic sea-song A Wet Sheet and a
Flowing Sea.
Thomas Mounsey Cunningham, an elder brother of Allan, is
now best known by his Hills o' Gallowa, which, when it appeared
anonymously, was attributed to Burns, but only echoes some of his
mannerisms. In 1797, Cunningham's Hairst Kirn (harvest home)
appeared in Brash and Reid's Poetry Ancient and Select, and he
contributed to Hogg's Forest Minstrel, The Scots Magazine and
The Edinburgh Magazine.
William Tennant, a native of Anstruther, who, in 1834, became
professor of oriental languages in St Andrews university, pub-
lished, in 1812, while a schoolmaster at Denino, in Fife, his Anster
Fair, a kind of móck heroic description, in English verse, of
that now discontinued rural gathering, not lacking in cleverly
humorous or even in poetic touches. His The Dingin doon 0
The Cathedral descriptive of the destruction of St Andrews
cathedral by the reformation mob—and his Tangier's Giant are
good specimens of graphic vernacular; but his Thane of Fife, and
his two dramas Cardinal Bethune and John Baliol, all in English,
are now quite forgotten.
Of the songs and other pieces of the still less important versifiers
of the later period which have escaped oblivion, it may suffice to
mention the rapturous and rather finely imaginative Cameronian's
Dream of John Hyslop; Robert Gilfillan's plaintive emigrant song
O Why Left I my Hame; the weird Brownie of Blednock by
William Nicholson, known as the Galloway poet'; William Glen's
Wae's me for Prince Charlie ; and the grotesque masterpiece
Kate Dalrymple, at one time claimed for professor Tennant, but
now known to be by William Watt, a Lothian poet, who also
wrote the picturesque Tinkler's Waddin.
By the side of the purely secular verse of the revival there also
a
77721
6
162


## p. 244 (#266) ############################################

244
Lesser Scottish Verse [CH. X
>
a
flourished intermittently a kind of school of sacred verse of which
the earliest and most elaborate specimen is Blair's Grave, noted
elsewhere? A chronic controversy still prevails in Scotland as to
the authorship of several of the metrical paraphrases of Scripture
adopted by the general assembly of the church of Scotland in
1781. Two students of humble birth, Michael Bruce and John
Logan, studied together at Edinburgh university Bruce died in
1767, at the age of twenty-one; and, in 1770, Logan published,
from papers supplied by the family, Poems on Several Occasions
by Michael Bruce, with the information that with a view to make
up a miscellany some poems wrote by different authors are in-
serted. ' In 1781, Logan, now minister of South Leith parish,
published a volume of poems containing an improved version of
The Cuckoo, which had appeared in Bruce's volume, and a number
of the paraphrases adopted by the church of Scotland. The
Cuckoo and the paraphrases have been claimed for Bruce; but
Logan's Braes of Yarrow and other poems in the volume show as
great poetic aptitude as any pieces by Bruce. In 1783, Logan's
tragedy Runnamede was accepted for Covent garden theatre, but
was condemned by the censor on account of its political allusions.
Among Bruce's poems is one on loch Leven, after the manner of
Thomson, and an Elegy on Spring, a pious farewell to nature in
view of his approaching death from consumption. James Grahame,
à native of Glasgow, who, finally, became curate at Sedgefield,
Durham, published various volumes of verse, including the dramatic
poem Mary Queen of Scots (1801), and The Birds of Scotland
(1806), but is best known by his meditative poem The Sabbath
(1804), in blank verse, in which commonplace musing and pattern
sentiments are conjoined with elegant and tasteful, if rather
tedious, description.
Our record closes with Robert Pollok’s Course of Time, pub-
lished in 1827, a long elaborate dissertation in blank verse,
modelled upon Milton, on human destiny, which professor Wilson
considered, though not a poem, 'to overflow with poetry,' and
which, at one time, enjoyed much popularity in more serious
circles, but which has now ceased to be read.
1 See ante, vol. ix, p. 167.


## p. 245 (#267) ############################################

CHAPTER XI
THE PROSODY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
In dealing with the subject of the present chapter, the pro-
cedure of our last chapter on that subject has to be directly
reversed. We had, there, to give account of complicated and
largely changing practice, with hardly any contemporary theory to
accompany it-with almost no theory in a developed and extant
form. In the present case, a very short survey of the practice will
suffice. But we shall have to take into consideration a body of
prosodic study, no member of which is of very great interest in
itself, but which practically founded that study in English literature.
Yet, if the space allotted to metrical practice at the time is
small, it is not because that practice is negligible. On the
contrary, the sentence in our earlier chapter that ‘it established in
the English ear a sense of rhythm that is truly rhythmical’ de-
serves repetition and emphasis. So strongly was this establishment
based, buttressed and built upon, that it practically survived all
the apparent innovations in practice of the nineteenth century
itself, and has only been attacked in very recent years and, as yet,
with no real success. But it was, almost, of the nature of this
process that the prosodic exercises of the eighteenth century should
be comparatively few and positively simple. With the exception of
the rhythmical prose-verse or verse-prose of Ossian, which, with its
partial derivative, that of Blake, may be left to separate treatment
later, and of the recovery of substitution by Chatterton, which
may also be postponed, almost the entire practical prosody
of the period confines itself to two main, and a very few sub-
ordinate, forms, all of which are governed by one general prosodic
principle. This principle directs the restriction of every line-
with the fewest and most jealously guarded licenses--to a fixed
number of syllables, the accentual or quantitative order of which
varies as little as possible. Over the decasyllabic couplet, the
sovereign of the prosodic seas at this time, over its attendant
frigate the octosyllabic, over the not very numerous lyrical
1 Ante, vol. viii, chap. ix.


## p. 246 (#268) ############################################

246 The Prosody of the Eighteenth Century [CH.
fly-boats that complete the squadron, this flag of syllabic and
accentual regularity floats-only one or two privateer or picaroon
small craft daring to disregard it.
The heroic couplet of Dryden, already sufficiently discussed,
underwent, in the earliest years after Dryden's death, changes
which, considering the natural tendencies of humanity, may be
called inevitable. By his own almost inimitable combination
of skill and strength, and by the mechanical devices of triplet
and Alexandrine, Dryden himself had kept off the monotony
which the regular stopped couplet invites. But the invitation
was sure to be accepted by others; indeed, they might plead that
they were only realising the ideal of the form. As Waller and
others before Dryden, wittingly or unwittingly, had hit upon the
other devices of sententious balance and a split in the individual
lines, and of pendulum repetition in the couplets : so, after
Dryden, first Garth and then Pope, no doubt with their eyes
open, rediscovered these ; and the extraordinary craftsmanship
of Pope carried the form to its highest possible perfection. If
--and it is difficult to see how the assertion can be denied the
doctrine expressed in various ways but best formulated by De
Quincey that ‘nothing can go wrong by conforming to its own
ideal' be true, the couplet of Pope, in and by itself, is invulnerable
and imperishable.
But it very soon appeared that a third adjective of the same
class, which indicates almost a necessary quality of the highest
poetic forms, could not be applied to it. It was not inimitable.
The admitted difficulty, if not impossibility, of deciding, on internal
evidence, as to the authorship of the books of The Odyssey trans-
lated by Pope himself, as compared with those done by Fenton
and Broome, showed the danger; and the work of the rest of the
century emphasised it. Men like Savage, Churchill and Cowper went
back to Dryden, or tried a blend of Dryden and Pope; men like
Johnson and Goldsmith new-minted the Popian couplet, in the one
case by massive strength, in the other by easy grace of thought
and phrase and form. But the dangers of monotony and of
convention remained ; and, towards the end of the period, they
were fatally illustrated in the dull insignificance of Hoole and the
glittering frigidity of Darwin.
From one point of view, it is not fanciful or illogical to regard
all other serious, and most other light, measures of this time as
escapes from, or covert rebellions against, this supremacy of a
single form of heroic ; but, as has been pointed out above, one


## p. 247 (#269) ############################################

-
XI] Popular Forms of Verse
247
metre stands in somewhat different case. The octosyllabic couplet
had been little practised by Dryden, though, when he tried it, he
showed his usual mastery; and it evidently did not much appeal
to Pope. But Butler had established it with such authority that,
till well into the nineteenth century, it was called specifically
'Hudibrastic'; and two of the greatest verse writers of the early
eighteenth, Swift and Prior, had used it very largely and very
successfully, so that it could not be regarded as in any way in-
significant, oldfashioned, or contraband. It was, in fact, as much
the recognised metre of the century for light or brief narrative
and miscellaneous purposes not strictly lyrical, as the heroic was
for
graver and larger work. But, as Dyer showed early and others
later, it served—owing to the earlier practice of Milton more
especially—as a not ineffectual door for smuggling in variations
of line-length and foot-arrangement which were contraband, but
of very great value and efficacy.
Another of these centres of free trade in verse was the
Spenserian stanza. The dislike of stanzas of all kinds which, as
we saw, grew during the seventeenth century, was, as shown below,
seriously formulated at the beginning of the eighteenth, and may
be said to have been more or less orthodox throughout its course.
But the exceptional charm of Spenser broke through this; and
no small body of imitations—bad enough, as a rule, but saved by
the excellence of at least part of The Castle of Indolence, and,
perhaps, The Schoolmistress, as well as by the influence, if not the
intrinsic merit, of The Minstrel—found its way into print.
The most formidable rival, however, of the heroic was blank
verse. The practice of this inevitably arose from, and, in most
instances, continued to be the imitation of, Milton, which, sparse
and scanty for the first generation after his death, grew more
abundant as the eighteenth century itself went on and, in
The Seasons, almost ceased to be mere imitation. Fine, however,
as Thomson's blank verse is, and sometimes almost original, it
suffered not a little, while all the blank verse of the century
before Cowper's latest suffered more, from undue generalisa-
tion in almost all cases, and in most from positive caricature,
of Milton's mannerisms. The worst of these (so far as prosody
is concerned) was the exaggeration of his occasional, and always
specially effective, use of the full stop in the interior of a verse
by chopping up line after line in this fashion to an extent
ridiculous to the eye and mind, and destructive of all harmony
to the ear. The practitioners of blank verse, also, too often agreed


## p. 248 (#270) ############################################

248 The Prosody of the Eighteenth Century [CH.
with its enemy Johnson that, if it was not ‘tumid and gorgeous,' it
was mere prose; and, though they frequently failed to make it
gorgeous, they almost invariably succeeded in making it tumid.
Even in Yardley Oak, Cowper's masterpiece of the form, these
defects exist : and the eighteenth century strain in Wordsworth
himself never completely freed itself from them.
It is, however, in lyric measures that the limitations of this
period of more or less rigid drill show themselves most. In what
has been called 'the greater ode,' the terrible irregular 'Pindarics'
of the later seventeenth century continued; but they gradually
died out, and the establishment of stricter forms (in which respect
Congreve is not to be forgotten), speedily and luckily inspired
with fuller poetic spirit by Gray and Collins, did much to appease
the insulted ghost of the great Boeotian. In smaller and lighter
work, the adoption of the anapaest by Prior was almost as fortunate
as his patronage of the octosyllable, and we have not a few grace-
ful trifles—'free' in no evil sense-not merely by Prior himself but
by Gay and by Byrom, by Chesterfield, Pulteney, Shenstone and
others.
Still, as a rule, the lyric poet of the eighteenth century was
confined, or confined himself, to very few metres. Stiff and
sing-song 'common’ or ballad measure; rather better, but too
uniform, long' measure oroctosyllabic quatrains alternately
rimed ; and (somewhat curiously) the old romance-six or rime
;
couée (8 8 6 886 a abccb) with occasional decasyllabic quatrains,
of which the great Elegy is the chief, will probably account for
three-quarters, if not even more, of the lyrical verse of the
period; and almost the whole of it displays that submission to
a cast-iron law of syllabic number and accentual distribution to
which reference has been made. The reason of this we shall
understand better when we have surveyed the preceptist or theo-
retical literature of prosody which, almost for the first time since
the Elizabethan period, makes its reappearance.
For if, during this period, practical prosody enjoyed or suffered
from a kind of stationary state, it was very much the reverse
with prosodic theory. It is, in fact, from the second year of the
eighteenth century that attempts to deal with English prosody as
a subject practically date. Gascoigne's examination was too slight,
Puttenham's too ineffectually systematised, the studies of the other
Elizabethans, directed too much to one particular, and for the
most part non-essential, point (classical versing) and all too little
historical ; while the, possibly, more pertinent treatises of Jonson
6


## p. 249 (#271) ############################################

6
XI]
The Theorists. Bysshe 249
and Dryden are not extant, and the very distribution or trend of
them is only to be guessed.
In 1702, there appeared, written or compiled by an obscure
person by name Edward Bysshe, an Art of Poetry, which (after
a custom set on the continent for some considerable time past
and already followed here by Joshua Poole) consisted principally
of a riming dictionary and an anthology of passages containing
similes and so forth. The book became popular and was often
reprinted (at first with considerable additions) during the century.
The bulk of it has long been mere waste-paper; indeed, a riming
dictionary may be said to be, in itself, almost the greatest achieved,
if not the greatest possible, insult to the human understanding.
But its brief introduction, 'Rules for Making English Verses,' is
one of the two or three most important points de repère of the
whole subject; though, even at the present day, and even by
serious students of prosody, that importance is sometimes denied
and oftener belittled. It has even been said that Bysshe merely
represents the traditional view'; to which it can only be replied
that exhaustive examination of every previous treatment of the
subject has failed to discover any expressed tradition of the kind
or any sign that such tradition had 'materialised itself' to anybody
outside an extremely variable practice.
What Bysshe does is to formulate, with extraordinary fidelity,
a system of versification to which the practice of the foregoing
century had certainly been more and more tending, but which had
never been expressed in theory before. His own principle is
strictly syllabic. There are no feet in English-merely a certain
number of syllables. Moreover, he would preferentially admit
only verses of ten (with an extra one for double rimes), eight and
seven ; though he does not absolutely exclude others. These
syllables, in a heroic, must be arranged so that there is a pause at
the fourth, fifth or sixth, and a strong accent on the second, fourth
and sixth. So absolutely devoted is he to syllables and accents
that he only approaches verses of triple (dactylic or anapaestic)
t' fime (while he uses none of these terms), by the singularly round-
about way of describing them as 'verses of nine or seven syllables
with the accent on the last,' and dismisses them as “low,''burlesque'
and disagreeable, unless they occur in 'compositions for music. '
He is, of course, a severe advocate of elision: the 'e' of the article
must always be cut off before a vowel; 'violet' is, or may be, 'vi'let. '
But he disapproves of the seventeenth century practice of eliding
such vowels as the 'y' of 'by. As for stanzas of intermixed rime
6
9


## p. 250 (#272) ############################################

250 The Prosody of the Eighteenth Century [[
CH.
>
(i. e. Spenserian, rime royal, etc. ), ‘they are now wholly laid aside'
in longer poems.
Now, this gives us a miserably restricted prosody; but, in the
first place, it is the prosody of the eighteenth century, and, in the
second place, it had never been thus formulated before.
But, although hardly any poets except Chatterton and Blake
(for Gray and Collins themselves do not show any formal rebellion)
were rebels to this until Southey and Coleridge broke it down at the
end of the century, the preceptive prosodists—who, in most cases,
were not poets at all—by no means showed equal docility, although
their recalcitrance was seldom of the right kind. Pope, indeed, in
almost his only prosodic passage, the early Letter to H. Cromwell
(1710), follows Bysshe literally in some points, virtually, in almost
all. On the other hand, Pope's enemy Gildon (who, like Dennis,
has of late years been ‘taken up’in some quarters) revolted against
Bysshe's syllables and accents, and, though in a vague manner,
introduced a system of employing musical terms and notes to
prosody-a specious proceeding which has had many votaries since.
He, also, with John Brightland and one or two more, started
another hare—the question of accent v. quantity—which has been
coursed ever since, and which, also, will probably never be run
down. This latter point attracted much attention, especially as it
connected itself with a contemporary discussion, to which Foster,
Enni Gally and others contributed, on classical accentuation. Henry
Pemberton was so ferocious a champion of accentuation that he
would have rewritten Milton, altering, for instance
And towards the gate rolling her bestial train
into
And rolling towards the gate her bestial train.
Edward Mainwaring followed the musical line, and began a
practice, frequently revived to the present day, of turning the
heroic topsy-turvy and beginning with an anacrusis or single
syllable foot
And | mounts exſulting on triumphant | wings.
The catalogue of eighteenth century prosodists, thenceforward, is
a long one, and it cannot be said that a thorough student of the
subject is justified in neglecting even one of the following:
Harris (Hermes Harris), Say, Lord Kames, Lord Monboddo, Webb,
Abraham Tucker, Herries, Thomas Sheridan, Steele, Tyrwhitt,
Young, Nares and Fogg. But, with some notice of Steele and
i Nov. 25. This was the subject of one of Pope's extraordinary falsifications. He
changed it into one to Walsh dated four years still earlier.


## p. 251 (#273) ############################################

XI]
Joshua Steele
251
Young, we may pass here to half-a-dozen others (four of whom
are of general interest and one of real importance)Shenstone,
Gray, Johnson, John Mason, Mitford and Cowper.
Joshua Steele undoubtedly exercised great influence on many
prosodic students, some of whom acknowledged it and some did
not, while he has been recently hailed as 'a master' by authorities
who deserve respect. Yet, these same authorities, strangely enough,
acknowledge that Steele's actual scansion is ‘utterly wild. ' It is
not incumbent on a survey like the present to attempt the re-
conciliation, or at any length to expose the incompatibility, of two
such statements. It is, perhaps, sufficient to say, on the first head,
that Steele’s ‘mastery' seems to be shown in the fact that, for the
first time, he proclaimed verse to be essentially matter of musical
rhythm, and applied musical methods frankly and freely to the
notation of metre; that he discarded syllabic feet; and that he
gave the metrical franchise to pauses as well as to spoken syllables.
As to the second head, it should be still more sufficient to state that
he allowed from six to eight 'cadences’ in a heroic line; that he
scans a famous verse
0 | happiness | our | being's | end and I aim
and starts Paradise Lost as
Of | Man's | first disobedience and the fruit.
By what logic it can be contended that a system which leads
to such “monstrosities' (the word is that of an admirer of Steele)
as this is ‘masterly,' some readers, at any rate, will find it
difficult to imagine. Either Steele's scansions are justified by his
principles or they are not.
If they are, these principles are self-
condemned ; if they are not, the perpetrator of the scansions must
have been a man of so loose a way of thinking that he cannot be
taken into serious consideration. In either case, he cannot have
.
had an ear; and a prosodist without an ear may surely be asked
to 'stand down. ' There is much of a similar kind to be said of
Young. On the other hand, Tyrwhitt, in his justly famous edition of
Chaucer, showed himself a real prosodist and, early as it was, came
to very sound conclusions by the simple process of taking the
verse first and getting it satisfactorily scanned. Of the rest, most
are chiefly remarkable for curiosities of a theory which always
neglects large parts of English poetry, and sometimes sets at
naught even the practice that it recognises. Perhaps the best is
Johnson's despised “Sherry,' whose prosody is, certainly, in many
points heretical, if Johnson's own is orthodox.
6


## p. 252 (#274) ############################################

252 The Prosody of the Eighteenth Century [CH.
Wrong as they generally went, fruitless as were, too often, their
attempts, flitting shadows in an arid desert as some may think
them, history cannot entirely omit these enquirers; but she cer-
tainly turns to a few others with some satisfaction. Shenstone,
Gray, Johnson and Cowper were poets? who turned their attention
definitely to prosody. Mason (John, not William) and Mitford
were prosodists who, in the first case, at least, appreciated the
beauty of poetry, and, in the second, made large excursions into
the more than contemporary history of it. Shenstone's actual
poetical value may not be very high ; but the merest glance at the
variety of his poetical forms should prove something of a tell-tale
about him, and his prose works, if only in a few scattered observa-
tions, emphasise the warning. He seems to have been the very
first person in the century who definitely perceived the wanton
asceticism of unvarying elision and sighed for the dactyl,' as he
called it; he is the first, also, who laid express stress on the value
of 'full' rimes and the colouring force of particular phrases.
Gray, a much greater poet and not himself much of a practitioner
of trisyllabics, was, on the other hand, the first to recognise the
presence and the continuity of the trisyllabic foot in generally
disyllabic metres from middle English downward; and he exhibits
in his (unfortunately fragmentary) Metrum many other signs of
historic knowledge and metrical vision. Johnson, in his prosodic
remarks on Milton, Spenser and a few others, is, professedly, at
least, of the straitest sect of believers in fixed syllabism, regular
iambic arrangement and middle caesura. Yet, as is constantly the
case with him in other departments of criticism, he shows, in an
almost Drydenian manner, his consciousness of the other side ;
and, indeed, gives that side practically all it can ask by admitting
that perfect 'purity,' though, as enforced above, the most complete
harmony of which a single verse is capable,' is, if preserved con-
tinuously, not only ‘very difficult' but 'tiresome and disgusting';
and that variation of the accents, though ‘it always injures the
harmony of the line,' compensates the loss by relieving us of this
tyranny. He did not extend the same indulgence to what he calls
elision,' that is to say, the presence of extra syllables or trisyllabic
feet; or to pauses far from the centre. But the concession as to
'pure' and 'mixed' measures was itself a Trojan horse. If, the
nearer you approach to purity and perfection, in one part of the
6
1 Goldsmith devoted one of his essays to the subject, and some have thought it
valuable. In form, it is as agreeable as everything its author wrote: to the present
writer, its matter seems smatter, insufficiently veiled by motherwit.


## p. 253 (#275) ############################################

xi]
John Mason
253
system, the more likely your result is to be tiresome and disgusting,
it will go near to be thought shortly that the system itself is
rotten somewhere.
Although it would be rather dangerous to say what book of his
own time Johnson had not read, there is not, to the knowledge of
the present writer, any sign in his Works or in his Life, of his having
come across the speculations on prose, verse and elocution of John
Mason, which were published in three little tracts shortly before
The Rambler appeared. The author was a nonconformist minister
(which would not have pleased Johnson), and a careful and in-
telligent student of the classics (which, to some extent, might have
reconciled him). He certainly, however, would have been inclined
to regard Mason as a most pestilent nonconformist in prosody.
Mason is somewhat inclined to musical views, but very slightly ;
and he adopts what some think the illegitimate, others the sensible,
plan of evading the accent v. quantity logomachy by laying it
down that 'that which principally determines English quantity is
the accent and emphasis. ' But his great claim to notice, and, in
the opinion of at least the present writer, to approval, is that he
absolutely refuses the strict decasyllabic limitation and regular
accentual distribution, with their consequences or corollaries of
elision, forced caesura towards the centre, and so forth. He calls
attention to the positively superior ‘sweetness' of lines of even
twelve or fourteen syllables; and, to accommodate this excess, he
not only admits feet, but feet of more than two syllables, as well
as a freely movable caesura and other easements.
In the case of Mitford, also, musical considerations and musical
methods1 stand rather where they should not, assisted by some
superfluous considerations of abstract phonetics; but here, also,
they do little harm. And, here (at least in the second edition of
his work), there is what is not in Mason, what is not in any other
prosodist of the eighteenth century except Gray, and only frag-
mentarily in him, a regular survey of actual English poetry from the
time that its elements came together. Even now, more than a
century after the second edition and nearly a century and a half
1 Little room as there is here for quotations, two sentences of his book, 2nd edn,
p. 111, should be given, inasmuch as they put briefly and in Mitford's clear and
intelligible language the source of myriad confusions at that time and since :
'Five bars are perhaps never found forming an integral portion of an air or tune.
The divisions of modern musical air run mostly in two or rather four bars, and multi-
plications of four. '
Nothing more should be necessary for showing to anyone acquainted with actual
English poetry, that its laws, though they may, in part, coincide with, are essentially
independent of, those of modern music.
>


## p. 254 (#276) ############################################

254 The Prosody of the Eighteenth Century [CH.
after the first, this indispensable basis for prosodic enquiry has
been provided in scarcely more than two other books on the
subject. His is, of course, partial and not always sufficiently in-
formed; though it is most usefully supplemented by enquiries
into metre as it exists outside English in both ancient and modern
languages. He dwelt too much on accent; he confused vowel
and syllabic quantity; and he allowed extra-metrical syllables-a
constant indication of something wrong in the system, which, in
his case, was probably brought about partly by his musical
ideas, and partly by the syllabic mania of the time still existing
in him. But he constantly comes right in result, even when the
right-coming is not quite easy to reconcile with some of his
principles; and there is no doubt that this is mainly due to his
study of English poetry at various times and of English poetry
in comparison with ancient and modern examples in other tongues.
Last of all--for the remarks to be referred to belong, like most
of his practice, and, for the same unhappy reason, in the main,
to a very late period in his life—we must mention Cowper. His
letters, like those of Southey afterwards, show that he might have
written consecutively on prosody in a very interesting fashion; but
it
may be doubted whether he had cleared his mind quite enough
on the subject. All know his attack on Pope; or, at least, on the
zanies of Pope, with their 'mechanic art' and rote-learnt tunes. His
prose allusions to the subject are of the same gist, but show the
uncleared confusion. The statement that Milton’s ‘elisions lengthen
the line beyond its due limits' may seem to a modern reader sheer
nonsense-equivalent to saying that if, in correcting a proof, you
cut out a line here and a line there you lengthen the page. But,
of course, by 'elisions,' he meant the syllables which the arbitrary
theory of his time supposed to be elided. Yet he laid down the
salutary rule that without attention to quantity good verse cannot
possibly be written’; he declared his faith in ‘shifting pause and
cadence perpetually,' and he knew that, by following this practice
(which, it should be remembered, Johnson had denounced as the
methods of the declaimer'), you could make blank verse ‘susceptible
of a much greater diversification of manner than verse in rime'
a point which, with others in reference to 'blanks,' occupies
most of his letters to Thurlow. He never completed a system
to match his practice ; but, like this, his theory, such as it was,
evidently looked backward to Milton, and forward to the great
poets who were boys or not yet born when Cowper seriously began
to write.
>
>
6
6
>


## p. 255 (#277) ############################################

xi]
Summary
255
To some extent, of course, the impoverished state of actual
prosody at the time may be taken as an excuse for the prosodic
theorists, though it would be very unfair to blame the poets them-
selves for the sins of these others. Prosodists saw around them
practically nothing but one limited side of the possibilities of
English verse ; and the extent to which this had to do with their
errors can hardly be exaggerated. But it was perfectly open to
them to look back if they chose, and a few of them did choose ;
while, of those who did, still fewer showed themselves able to read
the open lessons which authors no more recondite than Shake-
speare and Milton had for them. Moreover-and, strange as it
may seem, the phenomenon has repeated itself by no means
seldom since, and is fully in view at the present day-the
majority of them had evidently no taste whatever for poetry
as poetry. It was a machine to be taken to pieces, not a
body of beauty to be appreciated.
And so, though, in any case, the calling back into fresh existence
of the older and more varied poetry, and the calling into new exist-
ence of a poetry more varied still, would have antiquated their
enquiries, they failed even to give due value or due explanation to
what they had. For, as has been set forth already, they had
something, and no small thing, in their own poets—the positive
and practically indestructible establishment of definite rhythm.
As Chaucer and, in regard to line-grouping, if not to line-making,
Spenser, as Shakespeare and Milton, in both, once more stand
irremovably as witnesses for liberty and variety in metre, so
Dryden and Pope and Johnson, nay, even Collins and Gray, stand
for order and regularity. We wanted both sets of influences, and
we had now got them.
It will thus be seen that, from the strictly historical point of
view, this period is of no small importance in regard to the par-
ticular matter treated in this chapter. It is the first in which any
considerable number of persons busied themselves with the attempt
to analyse and systematise the principles of English versification.
It is true that, with hardly more exceptions than Gray and John
Mason to whom Shenstone and Tyrwhitt, perhaps, also, Sheridan,
may, to some extent, be joined, they came for the most part, to
wrong conclusions ; but the reason why they so came is clear.
In no case, except in those of Gray partially, and Mitford more
fully, did students of prosody, at this time, study English poetry
as it had actually existed and base their conclusions on the
results of that examination. Generally, they took the restricted
>


## p. 256 (#278) ############################################

256 The Prosody of the Eighteenth Century [CH. XI
prosody of their own time as the perfection of all that was
possible in the subject. In some particular cases, of which
Steele’s is the most remarkable, they attacked the matter alto-
gether a priori, and in the worst sense of that much abused
term. They, then, endeavoured to construct an abstract science of
prosody starting from assumed axioms and postulates, with de-
ductions from which actual verse had to be accommodated as it
best (or worst) might. No two writers may, at first sight, seem to
stand farther apart than Bysshe and Steele; yet, when they are
impartially examined, the faults which have been pointed out in
them will be found to be equally present though differently dis-
tributed, and to be equally due to the same fundamental error of
beginning with the rule, instead of with that from which the rule
must be extracted. They can be convicted out of the mouth of him
who, to most of them, was the greatest of poets and prophets-of
Pope himself. They would not discover,' they would not do
anything but "devise. '


## p. 257 (#279) ############################################

CHAPTER XII
THE GEORGIAN DRAMA
Though the last forty years of the eighteenth century produced
few English plays of primary importance, the period is among the
most interesting in the history of the national theatre. Its study
shows how complex and perishable are the conditions of dramatic
excellence, and explains why one of the chief glories of the English
muse sank, for at least a century, beneath the level of literature.
Paradoxical as it may sound, the decay of the drama was partly
due to the advance of the actor. In the days of Betterton' and
Barton Booth”, the best player was, in a sense, an intermediary, and
the attention of spectators could be held only if characters and
situations appealed directly to their understanding. With the
coming of Havard, Macklin, Garrick, Mrs Clive, Spranger Barry,
Foote, Yates, Mrs Abington and King, success no longer depended
on the excellence of a play. The stage began to offer a new and
non-literary attraction. It was enough for the dramatist to give
a 'cue for passion’; he need only serve as a collaborator, as one
whose work was half finished till presented by a trained performer.
O'Keeffe's success depended so largely on Edwin's interpretations
that when the actor died the playwright was expected to fail.
Colman the younger's Eustace de St Pierre was a mere outline till
6
e Bensky gave it life, and Cumberland's O'Flaherty, in The West
Indian, was hardly more than a hint out of which Moody, following
a
the example of Macklin's Sir Callaghan in Love à-la-mode, de-
veloped the stage Irishman. When older and greater plays were
being performed, the public was still chiefly attracted by the novelty
of the acting. Abel Drugger was enjoyed because of Weston's by-
play, and Vanbrugh's character of Lord Foppington was almost
forgotten in Woodward's impersonation of it. True inspiration
was still, of course, the best material on which the player could
work, as Garrick found in performing Richard III or Macklin in his
new interpretation of Shylock. But, even in the revival of old plays,
1 1635—1710.
3 In The Siege of Paris.
17
d. 1733.
E L. II.
CH. XII.


## p. 258 (#280) ############################################

258
[ch.
The Georgian Drama
the masterpieces of the Elizabethan drama were altered to suit
the powers of the actor. When Hamlet was reedited by Cibber,
and Lear by Nahum Tate, playwrights must have perceived that
literary talent was no longer a necessity. It became even rarer
as the theatre rose in public estimation. Thanks to actors, plays
had longer runs, and people paid more to see them. Those who
contributed towards the production of these fashionable enter-
tainments began to prosper, and the more dramatists enjoyed the
luxuries of conventional society, the less they retained touch with
the tragedy and comedy of real life. Quin' was the last of the old
school, and Macklin was the first to bring his own personality into
his interpretations? . But the conflict between classical literature
and dramatic taste was undecided, till Garrick's genius showed that
gesture, pose and facial expression were so effective that even the
dumb-show of ballet-pantomimes could please an audience more
tban old-time rhetorics. An apparently trivial change in the
arrangement of the theatre drew the drama further from literature.
To give actors more space and to obviate interruptions, spectators
were removed from the stage in 17624, and, as the loss of these
seats would have fallen heavily on the recipient of a benefit, the
auditorium was lengthened. Thus, although the 'apron' still pro-
jected a few feet into the auditorium, the business of the play
had no longer the advantage of taking place among onlookers.
Before 1765, Drury lane was chiefly illuminated by chandeliers,
though candle-footlights had already been introduced. Garrick,
on returning from his continental tour, engaged the services of
Barthélémon, whose violin won success for many worthless pieces,
and ordered Parisian scenery and lamp-footlights from Jean
Monnet The concentration of light threw into relief the
9
6
1 1693—1756.
2 •I spoke so familiar Sir, and so little in the hoity-toity tone of the tragedy of
that day, that the manager told me that I had better go to grass for another year or
two. ' Macklin, alluding to Rich, who had dismissed him from Lincoln's Inn fields.
See Kirkman, J. , Memoirs of the Life of Charles Macklin (1799).
8 Noverre, in Lettres sur les Arts, testifies to Garrick's skill in pantomime. Walpole,
in describing Glover's Boadicea, gives conclusive evidence of the importance of acting
when he says . Then there is a scene between Lord Sussex and Lord Cathcart, two
captives, which is most incredibly absurd : but yet the parts are so well acted, the
dresses so fine, and two or three scenes pleasing enough, that it is worth seeing. ' To
George Montagu, 6 December 1753.
4 See Knight, Joseph, David Garrick (1894), pp. 183 f.
5 19 September 1763–27 April 1765.
6 Connected, at different times, with the Opéra-Comique and the Théâtre de la
Foire. Garrick also ordered costumes from M. Boquet, dessinateur d'habits à l'opéra.
See Jullien, A. , L'Histoire du Costume au Théâtre (1880).


## p. 259 (#281) ############################################

XII] Eighteenth Century England 259
performer's face and enabled his looks and movements to express
what had formerly needed monologues and asides. When the
proscenium, which had been introduced at the restoration, and
footlights had completely separated the player from his audience,
the performance became spectacular. Actors were now like figures
in a picture, and the dramatist learnt that one of his first tasks
was to manoeuvre them into poses and situations. Experience
eventually taught authors how to preserve dramatic fitness amid
these altered requirements ; but, for several generations, the conse-
quence was a misuse of asides, parentheses, sudden entrances,
mistaken identities and other stage effects of like nature.
Despite these temptations, authors and actors might have
succeeded, as at Hamburg and Weimar, in producing art without
sacrificing literature, if it had not been for the public. Georgian
audiences were no longer representative of the nation. The puritan
prejudice against the theatre, revived in the Bible society aboli-
tionists and the low church evangelical party, and many thoughtful
men, such as the Wesleys, John Newton, Cowper, Wilberforce
and Zachary Macaulay, abstained on principle from an institution
which preached a fictitious code of honour and was considered
the favourite resort of the irreligious. Many more stayed away
because the habits of eighteenth century England were essentially
domestic. It was an age of household furniture, tea-drinking and
sensibility. Men and women spent evenings at home discussing
ethics, writing long, intimate letters or testing each other's gift
of sentimental conversation. When the inevitable reaction came,
it led people from the playhouse towards nature and the open
air.
If the drama had few charms for more thoughtful and sober-
minded citizens, it irresistibly attracted the beau monde. Lovers
of social display, who were gratified by the ‘jubilee-masquerade'
at Ranelagh and by the Richmond fireworks, had begun to look for
the same kind of excitement in the theatre. As performances
were generally restricted to two or three houses, theatregoers
enjoyed that sense of exclusiveness and monopoly which is dear
to leaders of society. Soon, it became a social distinction to meet
and be seen at these assemblies, till Hannah More admits that
one of the chief pleasures was 'the show of the Spectators:. '
1 Walpole, letters to H. Mann, 3 and 17 May 1749.
. With the exception of a few unauthorised attempts (quickly suppressed) to open
theatres, dramatists and actors were confined, during this period, to Drury lane and
Covent garden in the season and to the Hay in the summer months.
3 Preface to Tragedies.
17-2


## p. 260 (#282) ############################################

260 The Georgian Drama [ch.
People went early to get seats when it was known that the
Gunnings would be among the audience, and, in the sixties, the
popularity of the royal family could be gauged by the warmth
of their reception at the theatre. Besides, the enterprise of the
great actor-managers made these entertainments one of the
principal town topics which people of fashion could not afford to
ignore. Not to have judged Garrick, Macklin, Foote, Lewis,
Mrs Siddons or Kemble in their latest róle, not to have sat as
arbiter over the contending merits of Drury lane and Covent
garden”, was a mark of provincialism. While the leisured classes
bestowed their patronage, they also imposed their prejudices and
traditions. The desire to cultivate selfrespect and courtesy, which
is noticeable so far back as the revolution, had gradually grown,
during the eighteenth century, into a meticulous observance of
outward forms. Every man of breeding was expected to be a
drawingroom diplomatist, who could win his way by his personality
and conversation. Together with the cult of social conformity,
there had gradually developed such a horror of vulgarity that any
display of natural feelings was considered ungentlemanly. Lord
Chesterfield reminds his son that to laugh aloud was bad manners,
and that to quote an oldfashioned proverb was to betray familiarity
with coachmen. The nineteenth century horror of indelicacy
or coarseness now begins to appear. Johnson reproved Hannah
More for reading Tom Jones, some of the bluestockings rejected
Tristram Shandy, Bowdler expurgated Shakespeare and Gibbon.
A class dominated by such ideals might excel in many provinces
of literature, from oratory to letter-writing; but, when the glamour
of social distinction drew them to the theatre, their taste proved
too artificial for the appreciation of real tragedy and comedy. Good
acting always won their favour; but, even Shakespeare had partially
to be rewritten for them by Thompson, Garrick and Kemble.
The older school still preferred comedies full of the humorous
vagaries and witty conversations of their own rather trivial lives,
or tragedies which flattered their sense of literary propriety by
observing the unities, amidst arid rhetoric and blank verse. By
the second half of the century, a more serious and emotional
atmosphere began to predominate in high society. This newer
phase is something more than a continuation of the ideals reflected
1 Walpole to H. Mann, 23 March 1752.
? E. g. , in 1750, Barry and Mrs Cibber played in Romeo and Juliet at Covent garden
and Garrick and Miss Bellamy at Drury lane. In 1760, Miss Brent played Polly in
The Beggars' Opera at Covent garden and Mrs Vincent played in the same piece at
Drury lane. Goldsmith, in The British Magazine, discussed their rival merits.


## p. 261 (#283) ############################################

a swoon.
XI] Characteristics of the Audiences 261
in Steele's sentimental comedies. People did not abate one jot
of their respect for gentility; but they were anxious to take
themselves and the theatre more seriously. They rigidly observed
their father's and grandfather's cult of selfpossession ; but they
also affected strong and sensitive passions. Their ideal was to
repress powerful emotions beneath a refined, or even mincing,
manner, till the breaking point was reached in floods of tears or in
As contact with the hard and varied realities of life was
still considered to such a degree illbred that even the bailiff's scene
in The Good-Natur'd Man was censured, people had to look to
domestic incidents for pathos and passion. A look, a gesture, or a
silence was, for them, charged with sentiment. They waxed tearful
or melancholy over the spectacle of a woman preserving her
inbred elegance under persecution and insult. They loved to
contemplate the tenderness of paternal or filial instinct, and
dramatists were wont to introduce sudden recognitions between a
parent and a long-lost child, in order to give an emotional turn to
their plays. Their dramatic ideas centred in the morality of the
drawingroom or the domestic circle. Even wickedness (except
when the exigencies of the plot required a melodramatic villain)
was a temporary lodger in a conscience-stricken breast; even
humour was appreciated only when a rugged but domesticated
character, such as a Scottish servant, almost travestied virtue by
an uncouth exterior.
Such was the class which gave the theatre its tone. But the
spectators who packed Drury lane and Covent garden were not
entirely composed of sentimentalists. The Mohawks, whom
Swift feared and Steele censured, had their descendants under
George III. Bullies in the pit, like footmen in the gallery, seemed
to have followed occupants of the boxes in matters of dramatic
taste; but they still regarded actors as lawful victims of their arro-
gance and insolence. On one occasion, they demanded that Moody
should beg their pardon on his knees for some imagined disrespect,
and such was their tyranny that, when Sheridan put Macbeth on
the stage, he feared a riot because Mrs Siddons omitted the candle
which their favourite Mrs Pritchard always carried in the sleep-
walking scene. The wouldbe playwright had other discouragements
to face besides dependence on an oversensitive, narrowminded and
intolerant public. Before the end of the century, plays sometimes
enjoyed a run of from twenty to sixty nights, and, as there were
not more than two theatres open at the same time, the un-
known author had often to suffer humiliations and to descend


## p. 262 (#284) ############################################

262 The Georgian Drama [CH.
to intrigues before his work could be accepted! Yet, neither
the generation of Walpole nor that of Burke lacked students of
human nature possessed of creative genius, who, like Goldsmith
and Sheridan, might possibly have surmounted all these difficulties
if a more direct path to the heart of the nation had not already
been found.
The drama's decline was the novel's opportunity. Ever since
the days of Lyly and Greene, prose fiction had become a possible
rival of the theatre; but the Elizabethan public was too gregarious,
and had inherited too deep a love of spectacle, to care to see life
through the unsociable medium of a book. After the revolution,
the influence of the theatre waned; but the middle class was
making its first acquaintance with culture, and, like all beginners,
required its lessons in a dogmatic, unequivocal form, such as
essays, satires and treatises. It was not till the middle of the
century that people seemed to have mastered the principles of
social ethics and began to enquire how those ideas applied to the
complex tangle of character and destiny. No doubt, the drama,
under favourable conditions, could have satisfied this curiosity.
Figaro is as effective as Roderick Random, and Minna von
Barnhelm shows what the stage could have made of The History
of Amelia. But the novel was better adapted to the speculations
of the time. The drama deals with crises in the lives of its chief
characters and, thus, is suited to an age of action or of transition,
when people are interested in the clash between old traditions and
new ideas. In the novel, life is treated like a piece of complex
machinery, to be pulled to pieces, carefully examined and then
patiently put together again. Thus, the novel is best adapted to
a generation which has already made up its mind about the frame-
work of society, and is now puzzling over the accidents of birth
and temperament which prevent many individuals from fitting
into the scheme.