POETRY AT THE DEATH OF

SHAKESPEARE.

POETRY AT THE DEATH OF

SHAKESPEARE.

THE time seems to have arrived at last, when we may contemplate without passion that precise, mundane, and rhetorical order of poetry which is mainly identified in our minds with the names and practice of Dryden, of Pope, and of Johnson. The school of writers who cultivated this order-and those who emphasize their faults admit that they did institute a school-have commonly been described as the classical, because their early leaders claimed to emulate and restore the grace and precision of the poets of antiquity, to write in English as Horace and Ovid were then supposed to have written in Latin, that is to say, with a polished and eclectic elegance. The prestige of these classical versemen was first attacked, in the middle of the eighteenth century, by Gray and Chatterton; and their influence received blow upon blow until the close of the century, when the efflorescence of the naturalistic

*Horace will our superfluous Branches prune,
Give us new rules, and set our Harp in tune,
Direct us how to back the winged Horse,
Favour his flight and moderate his force.

Waller to Roscommon, 1684.

poets, first from within, as in Crabbe, and then much more decisively from without, as in Wordsworth and Coleridge, destroyed it altogether. To the first and second generation after this revolution in taste, the classical species of poetry seemed no poetry at all. Dryden and Pope, who had been enthroned so long in secure promise of immortality, felt their shrines shaken as by an earthquake. It became the fashion to say that these men were no poets at all, and Keats, in a curious passage of his youth, made himself the daring spokesman of this heresy.

"Yes, a schism

Nurtured by foppery and barbarism

Made great Apollo blush for this his land.

Men were thought wise who could not understand

His glories; with a puling infant's force
They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse,
And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-soul'd!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd
Its gathering waves-ye felt it not. The blue
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer night collected still to make
The morning precious: Beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of,-were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile; so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!

That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,

And did not know it,-no, they went about,
Holding a poor, decrepit standard out,

Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau !"*

In these lines Keats has so admirably summed up the convictions of the first half of the present century with regard to the classical poetry, that I need make little comment upon them, further than to point out that with the tact of a great writer he has contrived to condemn the practice he is attacking, no less by the form in which he clothes his ideas, than by the ideas themselves. The passage I have just quoted does not merely satirize the poetry which is presently coming under our consideration, but it is written in extreme formal opposition to it :

"The blue

Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew

Of summer night collected still to make
The morning precious."

That sentence is a cluster of what the French call enjambements, stridings-over; although we have so much of the thing in our literature, we have no word for it in English. It has been proposed to pronounce the French word as though it were English, enjambments, but this is hideous. My friend, Mr. Austin Dobson, with whom I was talking over the subject of this volume, proposed to me the term

*From Sleep and Poetry, 11. 181-206, published in the Poems of 1817.