Macpherson, Chatterton, Gray, Crabbe, Cowper, Smart

From The Penguin Short History of English Literature, by Stephen Coote.

Scots literary critics such as Hugh Blair (1718-1800) were now concerned with the working of the creative imagination, while Blair himself had also been impresssed with the Fragmentsw of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language (1760) by James Macpherson (1736-96). Blair had just been appointed Regius Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh—essentially the first professor of English literature—and he was a scholar of formidable range. Though he was living in a great age of contemporary Gaelic poetry, Blair seems to have been interested less in this than in the lure held by Macpherson's volume which appeared to suggest that some of his fragments of Gaelic poetry belonged to an epic describing the ancient wars of Fingal. In 1762, Macpherson, who clearly had some knowledge of the Gaelic ballads, obligingly produced his Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books: together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal, Translated from the Gaelic Language.

Macpherson's poem was a learned forgery or pastiche that took Europe by storm. Here, it was widely believed, was a new Homer, a bard who had emerged from a primitive society with an epic that was both tender and sublime. Genuine publications such as Percy's Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763) and Evan Evans's Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards (1764) went largely unread while the public surrendered to more heady pleasures. 'Weep on the rocks of roaring winds, O maid of Inistore! Bend thy fair head over the waves, thou lovelier than the ghost of the hills, —when it moves, in a sun beam, at noon, over the silence of Morven! He is fallen! thy youth is low! pale beneath the sword of Cuthullin!"

Another literary forgery also created an imagined past. Between 1768 and 1770, Thomas Chatterton (1752-70) imagined a medieval version of his native Bristol centred on the monk Thomas Rowley and his circle. Seven years after Chatterton's suicide, the great Chaucerian scholar Thomas Tyrwitt edited the poems, and controversy raged about their authenticity. Though there are clear traces of eighteenth-century sentiment in poems such as 'An Excelente Balade of Charitie' (and many of the discerning immediately saw through them) the pathos of Chatterton's early death was, for later generations, to provide an image of the dreaming artist crushed by a heedless society. Further, Chatterton's metrical experiments were to influence Coleridge and Scott, just as the novel play on vowels and consonants in the 'Mynstrelles Songe' from Aella: A Tragycal Enterlude was to beguile Keats.

Many traits in the verse of this period are brought together in the work of one of the finest poets of the late eighteenth century: Thomas Gray (1716-71). While on the Grand Tour with Horace Walpole (1717-97)—that central figure in contemporary taste—Gray had crossed the mighty valley of the Grande Chartreuse and been suitably impressed by the sublime. When Gray and Walpole had parted, Gray returned to the scene alone and was moved to write his Latin 'Alcaic Ode'. Here an intense response to the sublime is joined to the private sensibility of the learned poet in retreat. this is a central feature in some of Gray's finest work, and was to be deepened by a pressing awareness of human anguish. This last is particularly clear in three poems Gray wrote in 1742 after his friend West's early death: the 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College', the 'Ode to Adversity' and the 'Sonnet on the Death of Richard West'.

The Eton College ode is prefaced by a Greek epigraph that may be translated: 'I am a man, a sufficient cause for being unhappy.' It is this learned, suffering voice of experience which describes the innocent pardise of a boyhood like Gray's own, setting it amid Gothic beauty and balancing its heedless joy against personifications of anguish suggestive of the tragic sublime and a conventional moral wisdom as old as Sophocles. In the 'Ode to Adversity', the Greek tragedians are again an inspiration, while the language, as in the 'Ode to Spring', i tis consciously learned and artificial.

The 'Ode to Spring' especially reveals a tissue of borrowing from Milton and others, and suggests that Gray's poetry requires not only an alert sensibility but what, amid the many concerns discussed in his correspondence (and, with Horace Walpole, Gray was one of the masters of the eighteenth-century letter), the poet called 'a long acquaintance with the good writers ancient and modern'. In Gray's poetry, the learned and literary imagination, spurred by allusion, rises to revelation of the sublime. This required a heighened diction. 'The language of the age is never the language of poetry', Gray declared, but at is best—as in the 'Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard West'—such artifice is not pursued to the point of frigid mannerism. Here, the terse expression of 'lonely anguish' is so intense that it sunders the poet from the familiar concepts of his art. The desolation is thereby all the more acute.

Gray was capable of burlesquing his learned manner as he shows in his 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes'. In the 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' (1751) however he created a work which, in Dr. Johnson's words, 'abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo'. The 'Elegy' remains one of the best loved of English poems. The melancholy meditation in the Gothic churchyard is uttered by an intense sensibility that rounds the subtle play of vowel sounds into seemingly timeless description. The felicitous melancholy (so superior to Young's strained labourings) is then contrasted to luminous images of life and love which make existence itself—however evanescent and hard done by—all the more precious. From this contrast arise those lines especially praised by Dr. Johnson for their originality and univeral pathos:

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey

This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,

Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

Nor cast one longing lingering look behind? 

Such awareness is the right even of the virtuous poor, but its throbbing intensity is the particular province of the poet. The concluding section of the 'Elegy' presents Gray's first full image of his conception of the poet as the familiar of nature and the frenzy of inspiration, the victim of inevitable death and the representative of unworldly integrity. 

In 'The Progress of Poesy' (written 1751-4, published 1757), Gray revealed his conventional belief (expressed by Thomson among others) that truly inspired poetry is a life-enhancing source of peace and joy intimately connected with political liberty—with 'the unconquerable Mind and Freedom's holy flame'. As the ode develops, so Gray Shows how Poesy, retreating to Rome after the collapse of ancient Greek democracy, eventually alighted in England to inspire Shakespeare, Milton and Dryden. Gray consciously places himself in the tradition, cruelly aware of a dwindling order of merit yet satirically contracting his own integrity to the enfeebled and corrupting power of 'the Great' of his day.

In 'The Bard: A Pindaric Ode' (1757), this equation of inspired poetry with a free nation becomes Gray's principal subject. His central figure of the Druid was not a fortuitous choice, for the Druids were seen as patriot poet-priests and spokesmen of a 'Gothic liberty'. These were themes readily joined to the contemporary interest in the ancient resources of the northern European tradition. Gray himself—as part of a never completed history of English poetry—translated a number of Scandinavian fragments, suggesting their association with the sublime byh calling such pieces as 'The Descent of Odin' and 'The Fatal Sisters' (1757) odes. A visit to Scotland had rekindled his awareness of the natural sublme, while he was inspired to complete 'The Bard' by the visit of a blind Welsh harper to Cambridge where Gray had spent the greater part of his life in scholarly retreat.

'The Bard' fuses these interests in one magnificent set piece based on the now disproved idea that, although Edward I supposedly slaughtered the Welsh bards in 1283, their works, as Gray wrote in his notebooks, 'still remain, the Language (tho' decaying) still lives, and the art of their versification is known and practised to this day among them'. It was an art also practised by Gray himself in the internal rhymes of the Bard's speech as, having prophesied theruin of Edward's house and the revival of poetry with the coming of the Welsh Tudors, the last of the priestly line hurls himself from his precipice to the freedom of death:

'... Enough for me: with joy I see
the different doom our fates assign.
Be thine despair and sceptered care;
To triumph, and to die are mine.'
He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height
Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.

Prophecy and the sublime, poetry, freedom and the imaginative resources of history are here joined in one powerful image. 'I felt myself the Bard,' Gray declared, and through his widely influential metaphor he could say things he couldnever utter in his own person.

A number of Gray's poems such as 'The Candidate' (1764), written against the corrupt Earl of Sandwich's election to the Hight Stewardship of Cambridge University, show the force of his satirical venom. This incident was also the subject of a similarly entitled poem by the prolific Charles Churchill (1732-64), a political radical who is perhaps best known for his Rosciad (1761), a satire on the acting profession. Other satirists such as Christopher Anstey (1724-1805) in his New Bath Guide (1766), a collection of verse letters which uses the anacreontic metre of Gray's 'The Candidate', took satire in the direction of light verse.

An altogether more profound vein of moral commentary is to be found in the work of George Crabbe (1754-1832), a poet who, in his long career, was admired by figures as diverse as Jane Austen and Byron. The Village (1783), with its depiction of poverty in the bleak Suffolk coast, marks Crabbe's out as an original poetic sensibility, the work of a man who used the conventions of the heroic couplet show his local world. 'As Truth will have it, but as Bards will not'. Crabbe's gift of observation led him to describe the lives neither of the rich nor of pastoral poverty but of the 'middling classes'. This was a new realm for poetry where, Crabbe believed,

more originality, more variety of fortune, will be met with because, on the one hand, they do not live in the eye of the world, and, therefore, are not kept in awe by the dread of observation and indecorum; neither, on the other hand, are they debarred by their want of means from the cultivation of mind and the pursuits of wealth and ambition, which are necessarily to the development of character displayed in the variety of situations to which this class is liable.

The Parish Register  (1803) is a series of sketches of village manners, but it is 'Peter Grimes' from The Borough (1810) that shows Crabbe's ability to unite psychological drama with description and unobtrusive moral suggestion. Drunken sadism, the exploitation of children and their deaths while in Grimes's hideous employ lead to his psychological exile and spiritual collapse. Crabbe's presentation of this state through landscape description is powerful, profound and precise:

There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide,
There hang his head, and view the lazy tide
In its hot slimy channel slowly glide;
Where the small eels that left the deeper way
From the warm shore, within the shallows play;
Where gaping mussels, left upon the mud,
Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood;—
Here dull and hopeless he'd lie down and trace
How sidelong crabs had scrawled their crooked race;
Or sadly listen to the tuneless cry
Of fishing gull or clanging golden-eye . . . 

Another considerable poet began his career with satire before being obliged by periods of spiritual despair into some of the most profound areas of eighteenth-century religious poetry. In 1782, William Cowper (1731-1800) published his Table-Talk. Cowper's satirirst figure is specifically Christian in the values by which he measures a corrupt society. Rather more successful however is The Task (1785). This is a poem covering a miscellany of subjects and modes from Miltonic parody and mock-georgic, through fresh natural description (often moralized, as it is again in 'Yardley Oak' and 'The Poplar-Field'), to social comment on the local poor and the abuses of the slave trade. We are throughout aware of Cowper's Christian humanitarianism, an awareness sometimes heightened by the spiritual reflections of Cowper the 'stricken deer', a man living in precious domestic cheerfulness and peeping out at the world 'through loopholes of retreat'.

Cowper himself wrote that The Task was not composed 'to serve occasions of poetic pomp', and its combination of detailed domesticity and nervous personal revelation (characteristics found again in his sometimes sprightly letters) is also seen in a more moving form in the couplets of 'On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture Out at Norfolk' (1790, published 1798). This combination of detailed local description and personal reflection was to influence a later generation of poets—Coleridge especially—but it is neither here nor in his comic mock ballad 'The Diverting History of John Gilpin' that Cowper's finest powers lay. His spiritual melacholia made him an excellent poet of religious experience. He collaborated with John Newton (1725-1807) in the Olney Hymns (1779), for example, Cowper himself writing two of the best known: 'God moves in a mysterious way' and the more personal 'Oh for a closer walk with God'.

Both these works reveal a faith longed for and finally won through a surrender to divine mercy, but it is as the poet of religious despair—of the anguished voice convinced of the soul's damnation—that Cowper is seen at his most powerful and experimental. The Sapphic stanzas of 'Hatred and vengeance'—often known as 'Lines Written during a Period of Insanity'—grate on the ear with the terror of a man 'fed with judgement, in a fleshly tomb'. The most fearful of these works however is 'The Castaway'. Based on an incident in Richard Walter's Voyage round the World . . . by George Anson (1748), Cowper's nightmare picture of death by drowning is given a terrible personal application in the final stanzas: 

No voice divine the storm allayed,
    No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effective aid,
    We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulphs than he.

The scholarly investigarion of past literature which inspired so many poets was also to affect one of the greatest and most original of eighteenth-century hymn writers: Christopher Smart (1722-71). Smart knew the lectures delivered by Robert Lowth (1710-87) at Oxford on the sacred peotry of the Hebrews and was familiar with Lowth's investigation of the parallelism in the Psalms especially. In the last decade of his life, after writing much conventional work and while restrained in a lunatic asylum for religious mania, Smar wrote A Song to David (1763) and Jubilate Agno or 'Rejoice in the Lamb' (1759-63, published 1939). Both poems rhapsodically praise the wisdom of God in the creation.

Cowper's despair and Smart's exaltation are far removed from the blandness of much eighteenth-century Anglicanism. Dissent, too, had become moribund, and the spiritual vacuum was filled by a new voice: 'I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.' These are the words of John Wesley (1703-91), whose Journal (1739) records his spiritual trials, his fervent open-air preaching and his highly influential brand of emotive Puritanism stripped of radical politics. Methodism, originally designed as a spiritual exercise within the Anglican Church, was intensely moral, socially conservative and thrift-conscious, yet emotional to the point of hysteria, anti-intellectual and even philistine in its attitudes. It was to become, nonetheless, a force of profound social cohesion, especially among those of the middle and working classes to whom other institutions remained closed. 

Wesley himself combined the theological force of a Luther with the administrative genius of a Calvin, and along with his innumerable wermons, he and his brother Charles (1707-88) were the authors of some 3,000 hymns. These include 'Love divine, all loves excelling' and 'Hail the day that sees him rise'. Along with a wealth of other Nonconformist work, the hymns of the later eighteenth century reveal the exceptional influence of popular verse in creating social and religious attitudes.

Blake, William

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