A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 22

And again:

"I put my hat upon my head And walked into the Strand; And there I met another man Whose hat was in his hand."

This is quoted by Wordsworth,[36] who compares it with a stanza from "The Children in the Wood":

"Those pretty babes, with hand in hand, Went wandering up and down; But never more they saw the man Approaching from the town."

He says that in both of these stanzas the language is that of familiar conversation, yet one stanza is admirable and the other contemptible, because the _matter_ of it is contemptible. In the essay supplementary to his preface, Wordsworth a.s.serts that the "Reliques" was "ill suited to the then existing taste of city society, and Dr. Johnson . . . was not sparing in his exertions to make it an object of contempt": and that "Dr.

Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labors . . . that, though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos (as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of 'Sir Cauline' and by many other pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of 'The Hermit of Warkworth,'

a diction scarcely distinguishable from the vague, the glossy and unfeeling language of his day." Wordsworth adds that he esteems the genius of Dr. Percy in this kind of writing superior to that of any other modern writer; and that even Burger had not Percy's fine sensibility. He quotes, in support of this opinion, two stanzas from "The Child of Elle"

in the "Reliques," and contrasts them with the diluted and tricked-out version of the same in Burger's German.

Mr. Hales does not agree in this high estimate of Percy as a ballad composer. Of this same "Child of Elle" he says: "The present fragment of a version may be fairly said to be now printed for the first time, as in the 'Reliques' it is buried in a heap of 'polished' verses composed by Percy. That worthy prelate, touched by the beauty of it--he had a soul--was unhappily moved to try his hand at its completion. A wax-doll-maker might as well try to restore Milo's Venus. There are thirty-nine lines here. There are two hundred in the thing called the 'Child of Elle' in the 'Reliques.' But in those two hundred lines all the thirty-nine originals do not appear. . . On the whole, the union of the genuine and the false--of the old ballad with Percy's tawdry feebleness--makes about as objectionable a _mesalliance_ as in the story itself is in the eyes of the father."[37] The modern ballad scholars, in their zeal for the purity of the text, are almost as hard upon Percy as Ritson himself was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216--"a fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and tinkering in "Sir Cauline"--which Wordsworth thought exquisite--they regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old balladry and a considerable talent of imitation."

From the critical or scholarly point of view, these strictures are doubtless deserved. It is an editor's duty to give his text as he finds it, without interpolations or restorations; and it is unquestionable that Percy's additions to fragmentary pieces are full of sentimentalism, affectation, and the spurious poetic diction of his age. An experienced ballad amateur can readily separate, in most cases, the genuine portions from the insertions. But it is unfair to try Percy by modern editorial canons. That sacredness which is now imputed to the _ipsissima verba_ of an ancient piece of popular literature would have been unintelligible to men of that generation, who regarded such things as trifles at best, and mostly as barbarous trifles--something like wampum belts, or nose-rings, or antique ornaments in the _gout barbare et charmant des bijoux goths_.

Percy's readers did not want torsos and sc.r.a.ps; to present them with acephalous or bobtailed ballads--with _cetera desunt_ and constellations of asterisks--like the ma.n.u.script in Prior's poem, the conclusion of which was eaten by the rats--would have been mere pedantry. Percy knew his public, and he knew how to make his work attractive to it. The readers of that generation enjoyed their ballad with a large infusion of Percy. If the scholars of this generation prefer to take theirs without, they know where to get it.

The materials for the "Reliques" were drawn partly from the Pepys collection at Magdalen College, Cambridge; from Anthony Wood's, made in 1676, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; from ma.n.u.script and printed ballads in the Bodleian, the British Museum, the archives of the Antiquarian Society, and private collections. Sir David Dalrymple sent a number of Scotch ballads, and the editor acknowledged obligations to Thomas Warton and many others. But the nucleus of the whole was a certain folio ma.n.u.script in a handwriting of Charles I.'s time, containing 191 songs and ballads, which Percy had begged, then still very young, from his friend Humphrey Pitt, of Prior's-Lee in Shrops.h.i.+re. When he first saw this precious doc.u.ment, it was torn, unbound, and mutilated, "lying dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlor, being used by the maids to light the fire." The first and last leaves were wanting, and "of 54 pages near the beginning, half of every leaf hath been torn away."[39] Percy had it bound, but the binders trimmed off the top and bottom lines in the process. From this ma.n.u.script he professed to have taken "the greater part" of the pieces in the "Reliques." In truth he took only 45 of the 176 poems in his first edition from this source.

Percy made no secret of the fact that he filled _lacunae_ in his originals with stanzas, and, in some cases, with nearly entire poems of his own composition. But the extent of the liberties that he took with the text, although suspected, was not certainly known until Mr. Furnivall finally got leave to have the folio ma.n.u.script copied and printed.[40]

Before this time it had been jealously guarded by the Percy family, and access to it had been denied to scholars. "Since Percy and his nephew printed their fourth edition of the 'Reliques' from the ma.n.u.script in 1794," writes Mr. Furnivall in his "Forewords," "no one has printed any piece from it except Robert Jamieson--to whom Percy supplied a copy of 'Child Maurice' and 'Robin Hood and the Old Man' for his 'Popular Ballads and Songs' (1806)--and Sir Frederic Madden, who was allowed--by one of Percy's daughters--to print 'The Grene Knight,' 'The Carle of Carlisle'

and 'The Turk and Gawin' in his 'Syr Gawaine' for the Bannatyne Club, 1839." Percy was furiously a.s.sailed by Joseph Ritson for manipulating his texts; and in the 1794 edition he made some concessions to the latter's demand for a literal rescript, by taking off a few of the ornaments in which he had tricked them. Ritson was a thoroughly critical, conscientious student of poetic antiquities and held the right theory of an editor's functions. In his own collection of early English poetry he rendered a valuable service to all later inquiries. These included "Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry," 1791; "Ancient Songs," 1792; "Scottish Songs," 1794; "Robin Hood," 1795; besides editions of Laurence Minot's poems, and of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," as well as other t.i.tles.

He was an ill-tempered and eccentric man: a vegetarian, a free-thinker, a spelling reformer,[41] and latterly a Jacobin. He attacked Warton as well as Percy, and used to describe any clerical antagonist as a "stinking priest." He died insane in 1803. Ritson took issue with the theory maintained in Percy's introductory "Essay on the Ancient Minstrels," viz.: that the minstrels were not only the singers, but likewise the authors of the ballads. But Ritson went so far in his rage against Percy as to deny the existence of the sacred Folio Ma.n.u.script, until convinced by abundant testimony that there was such a thing. It was an age of forgeries, and Ritson was not altogether without justification in supposing that the author of "The Hermit of Warkworth"

belonged in the same category with Chatterton, Ireland, and MacPherson.

Percy, like Warton, took an apologetic tone toward his public. "In a polished age, like the present," he wrote, "I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity and many artless graces, which, in the opinion of no mean critics, have been thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties." Indeed how should it have been otherwise? The old ballads were everything which the eighteenth century was not. They were rough and wild, where that was smooth and tame; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary pa.s.sions of human nature. They did not moralize, or philosophize, or sentimentalize; were never subtle, intellectual, or abstract. They were plain English, without finery or elegance. They had certain popular mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of speech or rhetorical artifices like personifications, periphrasis, ant.i.thesis, and climax so dear to the Augustan heart. They were intent on the story--not on the style--and they just told it and let it go for what it was worth.

Moreover, there are ballads and ballads. The best of them are n.o.ble in expression as well as feeling, unequaled by anything in our medieval poetry outside of Chaucer; unequaled by Chaucer himself in point of intensity, in occasional phrases of a piercing beauty:

"The swans-fethers that his arrowe bar With his hart-blood they were wet."[42]

"O c.o.c.ks are crowing a merry mid-larf, A wat the wild fule boded day; The salms of Heaven will be sung, And ere now I'll be missed away."[43]

"If my love were an earthly knight, As he's an elfin gray, A wad na gie my sin true love For no lord that ye hae."[44]

"She hang ae napkin at the door, Another in the ha, And a' to wipe the trickling tears, Sae fast as they did fa."[45]

"And all is with one chyld of yours, I feel stir at my side: My gowne of green, it is too strait: Before it was too wide."[46]

Verse of this quality needs no apology. But of many of the ballads, Dennis' taunt, repeated by Dr. Johnson, is true; they are not merely rude, but weak and creeping in style. Percy knew that the best of them would savor better to the palates of his contemporaries if he dressed them with modern sauces. Yet he must have loved them, himself, in their native simplicity, and it seems almost incredible that he could have spoken as he did about Prior's insipid paraphrase of the "Nut Brown Maid." "If it had no other merit," he says of that most lovely ballad, "than the having afforded the ground-work to Prior's 'Henry and Emma,'

this ought to preserve it from oblivion." Prior was a charming writer of epigram, society verse, and the humorous _conte_ in the manner of La Fontaine; but to see how incapable he was of the depth and sweetness of romantic poetry, compare a few lines of the original with the "hubbub of words" in his modernized version, in heroic couplets:

"O Lord, what is this worldes blisse That changeth as the mone!

The somer's day in l.u.s.ty May Is derked before the none.

I hear you say farewel. Nay, nay, We departe not so soon: Why say ye so? Wheder wyle ye goo?

Alas! what have ye done?

Alle my welfare to sorrow and care Shulde change if ye were gon; For in my minde, of all mankynde, I love but you alone."

Now hear Prior, with his Venus and flames and G.o.d of love:

"What is our bliss that changeth with the moon, And day of life that darkens ere 'tis noon?

What is true pa.s.sion, if unblest it dies?

And where is Emma's joy, if Henry flies?

If love, alas! be pain, the pain I bear No thought can figure and no tongue declare.

Ne'er faithful woman felt, nor false one feigned The flames which long have in my bosom reigned.

The G.o.d of love himself inhabits there With all his rage and dread and grief and care, His complement of stores and total war, O cease then coldly to suspect my love And let my deed at least my faith approve.

Alas! no youth shall my endearments share Nor day nor night shall interrupt my care; No future story shall with truth upbraid The cold indifference of the nut-brown maid; Nor to hard banishment shall Henry run While careless Emma sleeps on beds of down.

View me resolved, where'er thou lead'st, to go: Friend to thy pain and partner of thy woe; For I attest fair Venus and her son That I, of all mankind, will love but thee alone."

There could be no more striking object lesson than this of the plethora from which English poetic diction was suffering, and of the sanative value of a book like the "Reliques."

"To atone for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems," and "to take off from the tediousness of the longer narratives," Percy interspersed a few modern ballads and a large number of "little elegant pieces of the lyric kind" by Skelton, Hawes, Gascoigne, Raleigh, Marlowe, Shakspere, Jonson, Warner, Carew, Daniel, Lovelace, Suckling, Drayton, Beaumont and Fletcher, Wotton, and other well-known poets. Of the modern ballads the only one with any resemblance to folk-poetry was "The Braes o' Yarrow" by William Hamilton of Bangour, a Scotch gentleman who was "out in the forty-five." The famous border stream had watered an ancient land of song and story, and Hamilton's ballad, with its "strange, fugitive melody," was not unworthy of its traditions. Hamilton belongs to the Milton imitators by virtue of his octosyllabics "Contemplation."[47] His "Braes o' Yarrow" had been given already in Ramsey's "Tea Table Miscellany," The opening lines--

"Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride, Busk ye, busk ye, my winsome marrow"--

are quoted in Wordsworth's "Yarrow Unvisited," as well as a line of the following stanza:

"Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the gra.s.s, Yellow on Yarrow's bank the gowan: Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowin'."

The first edition of the "Reliques" included one acknowledged child of Percy's muse, "The Friar of Orders Grey," a short, narrative ballad made up of song s.n.a.t.c.hes from Shakspere's plays. Later editions afforded his longer poem, "The Hermit of Warkworth," first published independently in 1771.

With all its imperfections--perhaps partly in consequence of its imperfections--the "Reliques" was an epoch-making book. The nature of its service to English letters is thus stated by Macaulay, in the introduction to his "Lays of Ancient Rome": "We cannot wonder that the ballads of Rome should have altogether disappeared, when we remember how very narrowly, in spite of the invention of printing, those of our own country and those of Spain escaped the same fate. There is, indeed, little doubt that oblivion covers many English songs equal to any that were published by Bishop Percy; and many Spanish songs as good as the best of those which have been so happily translated by Mr. Lockhart.

Eighty years ago England possessed only one tattered copy of 'Child Waters' and 'Sir Cauline,' and Spain only one tattered copy of the n.o.ble poem of the 'Cid.' The snuff of a candle, or a mischievous dog, might in a moment have deprived the world forever of any of those fine compositions. Sir Walter Scott, who united to the fire of a great poet the minute curiosity and patient diligence of a great antiquary, was but just in time to save the precious reliques of the Minstrelsy of the Border."

But Percy not only rescued, himself, a number of ballads from forgetfulness; what was equally important, his book prompted others to hunt out and publish similar relics before it was too late. It was the occasion of collections like Herd's (1769), Scott's (1802-03), and Motherwell's (1827), and many more, resting on purer texts and edited on more scrupulous principles than his own. Futhermore, his ballads helped to bring about a reform in literary taste and to inspire men of original genius. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, all acknowledged the greatest obligations to them. Wordsworth said that English poetry had been "absolutely redeemed" by them. "I do not think there is a writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the 'Reliques.' I know that it is so with my friends; and, for myself, I am happy that it is so with my friends; and, for myself, I am happy in this occasion to make a public avowal of my own."[48] Without the "Reliques," "The Ancient Mariner," "The Lady of the Lake," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Stratton Water," and "The Haystack in the Floods" might never have been. Perhaps even the "Lyrical Ballads" might never have been, or might have been something quite unlike what they are. Wordsworth, to be sure, scarcely ranks among romantics, and he expressly renounces the romantic machinery:

"The dragon's wing, The magic ring, I shall not covet for my dower."[49]

What he learned from the popular ballad was the power of sincerity and of direct and homely speech.

As for Scott, he has recorded in an oft-quoted pa.s.sage the impression that Percy's volumes made upon him in his school-days: "I remember well the spot where I read these volumes for the first time. It was beneath a huge plantain tree in the ruins of what had been intended for an old-fas.h.i.+oned arbor in the garden I have mentioned. The summer day sped onward so fast that, notwithstanding the sharp appet.i.te of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was, in this instance, the same thing; and henceforth I overwhelmed my school-fellows, and all who would hearken to me, with tragical recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I could sc.r.a.pe a few s.h.i.+llings together, I bought unto myself a copy of these beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book so frequently, or with half the enthusiasm."

The "Reliques" worked powerfully in Germany, too. It was received in Lessing's circle with universal enthusiasm,[50] and fell in with that newly aroused interest in "Volkslieder" which prompted Herder's "Stimmen der Volker" (1778-79).[51] Gottfried August Burger, in particular, was a poet who may be said to have been made by the English ballad literature, of which he was an ardent student. His poems were published in 1778, and included five translations from Percy: "The Child of Elle" ("Die Entfuhrung"), "The Friar of Orders Grey" ("Graurock"), "The Wanton Wife of Bath" ("Frau Schnips"), "King John and the Abbot of Canterbury" ("Der Kaiser und der Abt"), and "Child Waters" ("Graf Walter"). A. W. Schlegel says that Burger did not select the more ancient and genuine pieces in the "Reliques"; and, moreover, that he spoiled the simplicity of the originals in his translations. It was doubtless in part the success of the "Reliques" that is answerable for many collections of old English poetry put forth in the last years of the century. Tyrwhitt's "Chaucer"

and Ritson's publications have been already mentioned. George Ellis, a friend and correspondent of Walter Scott, and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, who was sometimes called "the Sainte Palaye of England,"

issued his "Specimens of Early English Poets" in 1790; edited in 1796 G.

L. Way's translations from French _fabliaux_ of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and printed in 1805 three volumes of "Early English Metrical Romances."

It is pleasant to record that Percy's labors brought him public recognition and the patronage of those whom Dr. Johnson used to call "the great." He had dedicated the "Reliques" to Elizabeth Percy, Countess of Northumberland. Himself the son of a grocer, he liked to think that he was connected by blood with the great northern house whose exploits had been sung by the ancient minstrels that he loved. He became chaplain to the Duke of Northumberland, and to King George III.; and, in 1782, Bishop of Dromore in Ireland, in which see he died in 1811.

This may be as fit a place as any to introduce some mention of "The Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius," by James Beattie; a poem once widely popular, in which several strands of romantic influence are seen twisted together. The first book was published in 1771, the second in 1774, and the work was never completed. It was in the Spenserian stanza, was tinged with the enthusiastic melancholy of the Wartons, followed the landscape manner of Thomson, had elegiac echoes of Gray, and was perhaps not unaffected, in its love of mountain scenery, by MacPherson's "Ossian." But it took its t.i.tle and its theme from a hint in Percy's "Essay on the Ancient Minstrels."[52] Beattie was Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen. He was an amiable, sensitive, deeply religious man. He was fond of music and of nature, and was easily moved to rears; had "a young girl's nerves," says Taine, "and an old maid's hobbies." Gray, who met him in 1765, when on a visit to the Earl of Strathmore at Glammis Castle, esteemed him highly. So did Dr.

Johnson, partly because of his "Essay on Truth" (1770), a shallow invective against Hume, which gained its author an interview with George III. and a pension of two hundred pounds a year. Beattie visited London in 1771, and figured there as a champion of orthodoxy and a heaven-inspired bard. Mrs. Montagu patronized him extensively. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait, with his "Essay on Truth" under his arm, and Truth itself in the background, an allegoric angel holding the balances in one hand, and thrusting away with the other the figures of Prejudice, Skepticism, and Folly. Old Lord Lyttelton had the poet out to Hagley, and declared that he was Thomson come back to earth, to sing of virtue and of the beauties of nature. Oxford made him an LL.D.: he was urged to take orders in the Church of England; and Edinburgh offered him the chair of Moral Philosophy. Beattie's head was slightly turned by all this success, and he became something of a tuft-hunter. But he stuck faithfully to Aberdeen, whose romantic neighborhood had first inspired his muse. The biographers tell a pretty story of his teaching his little boy to look for the hand of G.o.d in the universe, by sowing cress in a garden plot in the shape of the child's initials and leading him by this gently persuasive a.n.a.logy to read design in the works of nature.

The design of "The Minstrel" is to "trace the progress of a Poetical Genius, born in a rude age," a youthful shepherd who "lived in Gothic days." But nothing less truly Gothic or medieval could easily be imagined than the actual process of this young poet's education. Instead of being taught to carve and ride and play the flute, like Chaucer's squire who

"Cowde songes make and wel endite, Juste and eek daunce, and wel purtraye and write,"

Edwin wanders alone upon the mountains and in solitary places and is instructed in history, philosophy, and science--and even in Vergil--by an aged hermit, who sits on a mossy rock, with his harp beside him, and delivers lectures. The subject of the poem, indeed, is properly the education of nature; and in a way it antic.i.p.ates Wordsworth's "Prelude,"

as this h.o.a.ry sage does the "Solitary" of "The Excursion." Beattie justifies his use of Spenser's stanza on the ground that it "seems, from its Gothic structure and original, to bear some relation to the subject and spirit of the poem." He makes no attempt, however, to follow Spenser's "antique expressions." The following pa.s.sage will ill.u.s.trate as well as any the romantic character of the whole: