poem so much on a level, so perfectly in one note, so exquisitely in tone. And how exquisite is the tact of Gray! In the poem as it was written, at the end there were two stanzas, one about the poet : 'Him have we seen the greenwood side along, While o'er the heath we hied, our labour done, It was pretty, but it had a particularity of its own; it By hands unseen are showers of violets found ; One must not blame a poet for what he has deleted; but what are we to think of the poetical standard of an age the chief glory of which, writing the elegy on man, stops to paint this lovely little Christmas card? There is another and more important omission. There was an early stanza now commonly printed by editors without the tact of the poet as the fourth :— 'Hark! how the sacred calm that breathes around, Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease; In still small accents whispering from the ground, No; this had to go-for the poem was about Finis. D speaks for every man. It voices with perfect propriety, and without the intrusion of a single individual thought, the one deeply felt feeling that every man has in contemplating a graveyard. I do not say that there is any man who has not at times other feelings. Who is there so presumptuous as to say he knows that behind the curtain there is nothing? Who is there, by his own hypothesis ephemeral, who is prepared to say he knows that to no issue there is lived our perplexing life? Indeed, I think that most men in their common thoughts assume themselves immortal and look beyond the grave. One is alive and one remembers life, those who made it what it was, and those bright eyes, not to shine forever, that cheer it now; and one's mounting spirit moves. One sees beyond as in a vision, and death, no longer dulling the horizon, slips down beneath one's feet. But in the quiet of a churchyard, coming suddenly on it from the city's hum, in Greyfriars on an August day, or by a playing-ground in Chelsea, somewhere nestling near a lowland hill-the contrast between my own present life and those slabs, or rolls of turf-it is this that immediately affects me. Life is a going on, a tumult, an upstanding; and here is something beneath one, lying prone, surrounded by an oppressive quiet, and willy-nilly brought to rest. Gay lovers, and young maidens, and old chilly men who asked for another year. I think so and I am sorry for them 'For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd, Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?' You feel it quivering into poetry, the beautiful equable reflection stirring by its own intensity towards the highest speech of man, that form of speech which affects us like the light; and you know, as you hear, that there are greater and more illuminating flights of the human spirit than prose can find words for-strange trembling outbursts of the panting soul about whose dread passage into silence this Elegy was written and to unnumbered ages will speak. BURNS THE eighteenth-century movement in Poetry destroyed itself, and had the course of political history continued undisturbed, Pope's verses would still have been replaced by Scott's. The genius of literature never commits suicide, and the knot into which Poetry had tied herself would have been untied by causes purely literary. The instrument the eighteenth century had fashioned-an instrument which, like a club in a fable, grew in its hands-proved ultimately too unwieldy for use. To write on selected subjects in a selected style was not permanently possible. The road ended in a cul-de-sac it was necessary to try again, and to hark back to another opening. We can see the tangle untwining itself in some of the poetry of Cowper, in some of the poetry of Burns, in some of the poetry of Scott. Cowper, at his best a poet of a singular simplicity, no doubt often chooses subjects, such as the public-school system,1 that have rather a social and educational than a poetical interest, but his place in literary history is due to his many efforts to free himself from the bondage of the eighteenth-century subject. His subjects often have a merely natural, playful, or pathetic appeal, and this humanising of the subject is the more 1 Tirocinium. notable as it is by no means always accompanied with an equal freedom from the eighteenth-century manner.1 Cowper often cuts himself free from the eighteenthcentury subject, less often from the eighteenth-century style. Burns also, essentially romantic though his true genius is, betrays traces of the tradition. He is less in bondage to the eighteenth-century style, yet in his younger days is quite as frequently a prey to the eighteenth-century subject. A whole department of his poetry depends for its interest upon political, moral, or social considerations. Burns cut himself largely free from the eighteenth-century style, without freeing himself at all in the same degree from the eighteenth-century subject. If we wish to see the purely literary emancipation complete an emancipation, I mean, to which nothing but literary causes had contributed-we must turn to some of the poetry of Scott. The introductions to the several cantos of Marmion present us with a poet, though with no political impetus behind him, dealing with natural subjects without the aid of artifice. Such was the course of poetry. Literary causes working alone produced this result-would in fact, had they been left to work alone, have produced just this result over the whole field of activity. Without the Revolutionary ideas, Glover and Erasmus Darwin would have died, and introductions to Marmion and 1 See the famous 'Rose,' where the eighteenth-century style is so marked we almost fail to observe that the subject is both slightly pathetic and exceedingly delicate, e.g.: 'And the tear that is wiped with a little address May be follow'd perhaps by a smile.' |