Walpole replied civilly, thanking his correspondent for what he had sent and for his offer of communicating his manuscripts, but disclaiming any ability to correct Chatterton's notes. "I have not the happiness of understanding the Saxon language, and, without your learned notes, should not have been able to comprehend Rowley's text." He asks where Rowley's poems are to be found, offers to print them, and pronounces the Abbot John's verses "wonderful for their harmony and spirit." This encouragement called out a second letter from Chatterton, with another and longer extract from the "Historie of Peyncteynge yn Englande," including translations into the Rowley dialect of passages from a pair of mythical Saxon poets: Ecca, Bishop of Hereford, and Elmar, Bishop of Selseie, "fetyve yn Workes of ghastlienesse," as ecce signum:
"Nowe maie alle Helle open to golpe thee downe," etc.
But by this time Walpole had begun to suspect imposture. He had been lately bitten in the Ossian business and had grown wary in consequence. Moreover, Chatterton had been incautious enough to show his hand in his second letter (March 30). "He informed me," said Walpole, in his history of the affair, "that he was the son of a poor widow . . . that he was clerk or apprentice to an attorney, but had a taste and turn for more elegant studies; and hinted a wish that I would assist him with my interest in emerging out of so dull a profession, by procuring him someplace." Meanwhile, distrusting his own scholarship, Walpole had shown the manuscripts to his friends Gray and Mason, who promptly pronounced them modern fabrications and recommended him to return them without further notice. But Walpole, good-naturedly considering that it was no "grave crime in a young bard to have forged false notes of hand that were to pass current only in the parish of Parnassus," wrote his ingenious correspondent a letter of well-meant advice, counseling him to stick to his profession, and saying that he "had communicated his transcripts to much better judges, and that they were by no means satisfied with the authenticity of his supposed manuscripts." Chatterton then wrote for his manuscripts, and after some delay—Walpole having been absent in Parish for several months—they were returned to him.
In 1769 Chatterton had begun contributing miscellaneous articles, in prose and verse, to the Town and Country Magazine, a London periodical. Among these appeared the eclogue of "Elinoure and Juga,"[10] the only one of the Rowley poems printed during its author's lifetime. He had now turned his pen to the service of politics, espousing the side of Wilkes and liberty. In April, 1770, he left Bristol for London, and cast himself upon the hazardous fortunes of a literary career. Most tragical is the story of the poor, unfriended lad's struggle against fate for the next few months. He scribbled incessantly for the papers, receiving little or no pay. Starvation confronted him; he was too proud to ask help, and on August 24 he took poison and died, at the age of seventeen years and nine months.
With Chatterton's acknowledged writings we have nothing here to do; they include satires in the manner of Churchill, political letters in the manner of Junius, squibs, lampoons, verse epistles, elegies, "African eclogues," a comic burletta, "The Revenge"—played at Marylebone Gardens shortly after his death—with essays and sketches in the style that the Spectator and Rambler had made familiar: "The Adventures of a Star," "The Memoirs of a Sad Dog," and the like. They exhibit a precocious cleverness, but have no value and no interest today. One gets from Chatterton's letters and miscellanies an unpleasant impression of his character. There is not only the hectic quality of too early ripeness which one detects in Keats' correspondence; and the defiant swagger, the affectation of wickedness and knowingness that one encounters in the youthful Byron, and that is apt to attend the stormy burst of irregular genius upon the world; but there are things that imply a more radical unscrupulousness. But it would be harsh to urge any such impressions against one who was no more than a boy when he perished, and whose brief career had struggled through cold obstruction to its bitter end. The best traits in Chatterton's character appear to have been his proud spirit of independence and his warm family affections.
The death of an obscure penny-a-liner, like young Chatterton, made little noise at first. But gradually it became rumored about in London literary coteries that manuscripts of an interesting kind existed at Bristol, purporting to be transcripts from old English poems; and that the finder, or fabricator, of the same was the unhappy lad who had taken arsenic the other day, to anticipate a slower death from hunger. It was in April, 1771, that Walpole first heard of the fate of his would-be protégé. "Dining," he says, "at the Royal Academy, Dr. Goldsmith drew the attention of the company with an account of a marvelous treasure of ancient poems lately discovered at Bristol, and expressed enthusiastic belief in them; for which he was laughed at by Dr. Johnson, who was present. I soon found this was the trouvaille of my friend Chatterton, and I told Dr. Goldsmith that this novelty was known to me, who might, if I had pleased, have had the honor of ushering the great discovery to the learned world. You may imagine, sir, we did not all agree in the measure of our faith; but though his credulity diverted me, my mirth was soon dashed; for, on asking about Chatterton, he told me he had been in London and had destroyed himself."
With the exception of "Elinour and Juga," already mentioned, the Rowley poems were still unprinted. The manuscripts, in Chatterton's handwriting, were mostly in the possession of Barrett and Catcott. They purported to be copies of Rowley's originals; but of these alleged originals, the only specimens brought forward by Chatterton were a few scraps of parchment containing, in one instance, the first thirty-four lines of the poem entitled "The Storie of William Canynge"; in another a prose account of one "Symonne de Byrtonne," and, in still others, the whole of the short-verse pieces, "Songe to Aella" and "The Accounte of W. Canynge's Feast." These scraps of vellum are described as about six inches square, smeared with glue or brown varnish, or stained with ochre, to give them an appearance of age. Thomas Warton had seen one of them, and pronounced it a clumsy forgery; the script not of the fifteenth century, but unmistakably modern. Southey describes another as written, for the most part, in an attorney's regular engrossing hand. Mr. Skeat "cannot find the slightest indication that Chatterton had ever seen a MS. of early date; on the contrary, he never uses the common contractions, and he was singularly addicted to the use of capitals, which in old MSS. are rather scarce."
Boswell tells how he and Johnson went down to Bristol in April, 1776, "where I was entertained with seeing him inquire upon the spot into the authenticity of Rowley's poetry, as I had seen him inquire upon the spot into the authenticity of Ossian's poetry. Johnson said of Chatterton, 'This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.'"
In 1777, seven years after Chatterton's death, his Rowley poems were first collected and published by Thomas Tyrwhitt, the Chaucerian editor, who gave, in an appendix, his reasons for believing that Chatterton was their real author, and Rowley a myth.[11] These reasons are convincing to any modern scholar. Tyrwhitt's opinion was shared at the time by all competent authorities—Gray, Thomas Warton, and Malone, the editor of the variorum Shakspere, among others. Nevertheless, a controversy sprang up over Rowley, only less lively than the dispute about Ossian, which had been going on since 1760. Rowley's most prominent champions were the Rev. Dr. Symmes, who wrote in the London Review; the Rev. Dr. Sherwin, in the Gentleman's Magazine; Dr. Jacob Bryant,[12] and Jeremiah Milles, D.D., Dean of Exeter, who published a sumptuous quarto edition of the poems in 1782.[13] These asserters of Rowley belonged to the class of amateur scholars whom Edgar Poe used to speak of as "cultivated old clergymen." They had the usual classical training of Oxford and Cambridge graduates, but no precise knowledge of old English literature. They had the benevolent curiosity of Mr. Pickwick, and the gullibility—the large, easy swallow—which seems to go with the clerico-antiquarian habit of mind.
Nothing is so extinct as an extinct controversy; and, unlike the Ossian puzzle, which was a harder nut to crack, this Rowley controversy was really settled from the start. It is not essential to our purpose to give any extended history of it. The evidence relied upon by the supporters of Rowley was mainly of the external kind: personal testimony, and especially the antecedent unlikeliness that a boy of Chatterton's age and imperfect education could have reared such an elaborate structure of deceit; together with the inferiority of his acknowledged writings to the poems that he ascribed to Rowley. But Tyrwhitt was a scholar of unusual thoroughness and acuteness; and, having a special acquaintance with early English, he was able to bring to the decision of the question evidence of an internal nature which became more convincing in proportion as the knowledge necessary to understand his argument increased; i.e., as the number of readers increased, who knew something about old English poetry. Indeed, it was nothing but the general ignorance of the spelling, flexions, vocabulary, and scansion of Middle English verse, that made the controversy possible.
Tyrwhitt pointed out that the Rowleian dialect was not English of the fifteenth century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic words of very different periods and dialects. The orthography and grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used the termination en in the singular of the verb, was alone enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the syntax, diction, idioms, and stanza forms were modern; that if modern words were substituted throughout for the antique, and the spelling modernized, the verse would read like eighteenth-century work. "If anyone," says Scott, in his review of the Southey and Cottle edition, "resists the internal evidence of the style of Rowley's poems, we make him welcome to the rest of the argument; to his belief that the Saxons imported heraldry and gave armorial bearings (which were not known till the time of the Crusades); that Mr. Robert [sic] Canynge, in the reign of Edward IV., encouraged drawing and had private theatricals." In this article Scott points out a curious blunder of Chatterton's which has become historic, though it is only one of a thousand. In the description of the cook in the General Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," Chaucer had written:
"But gret harm was it, as it thoughte me,
That on his schyne a mormal hadde he,
For blankmanger he made with the beste."
Mormal, in this passage, means a cancerous sore, and blankmanger is a certain dish or confection—the modern blancmange. But a confused recollection of the whole was in Chatterton's mind, when among the fragments of paper and parchment which he covered with imitations of ancient script, and which are now in the British Museum,—"The Yellow Roll," "The Purple Roll," etc.,—he inserted the following title in "The Rolls of St. Bartholomew's Priory," purporting to be old medical prescriptions; "The cure of mormalles and the waterie leprosie; the rolle of the blacke mainger"; turning Chaucer's innocent blankmanger into some kind of imaginary black mange.
Skeat believes that Chatterton had read very little of Chaucer, probably only a small portion of the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales." "If he had really taken pains," he thinks, "To read and study Chaucer of Lydgate or any old author earlier than the age of Spenser, the Rowley poems would have been very different. They would then have borne some resemblance to the language of the fifteenth century, whereas they are rather less like the language of that period than of any other. The spelling of the words is frequently too late, or too bizarre, whilst many of the words themselves are too archaic or too uncommon."[14] But this internal evidence, which was so satisfactory to Scott, was so little convincing to Chatterton's contemporaries that Tyrwhitt felt called upon to publish in 1782 a "Vindication" of his appendix; and Thomas Warton put forth in the same year an "Enquiry," in which he reached practically the same conclusions with Tyrwhitt. And yet Warton had devoted the twenty-sixth section of the second volume of his "History of English Poetry" (1778,) to a review of the Rowley poems, on the ground that "as they are held to be real by many respectable critics, it was his duty to give them a place in this series": a curious testimony to the uncertainty of the public mind on the question, and a half admission that the poems might possibly turn out to be genuine.[15]
Tyrwhitt proved clearly enough that Chatterton wrote the Rowley poems, but it was reserved for Mr. Skeat to show just how he wrote them. The modus operandi was about as follows: Chatterton first made, for his private use, a manuscript glossary, by copying out the words in the glossary to Speght's edition of Chaucer, and those marked as old in Bailey's and Kersey's English Dictionaries. Next he wrote his poem in modern English, and finally rewrote it, substituting the archaic words for their modern equivalents, and altering the spelling throughout into an exaggerated imitation of the antique spelling in Speght's Chaucer. The mistakes that the he made are instructive, as showing how closely he followed his authorities, and how little independent knowledge he had of genuine old English. Thus, to give a few typical examples of the many in Mr. Skeat's notes: in Kersey's dictionary occurs the word gare, defined as "cause." This is the verb gar, familiar to all readers of Burns,[16] and meaning to cause, to make; but Chatterton, taking it for the noun, cause, employs it with grotesque incorrectness in such connections as these:
"Perchance in Virtue's gare rhyme might be then":
"If in this battle luck deserts our gare."
Again the Middle English howten (Modern English, hoot) is defined by Speght as "hallow," i.e., halloo. But Kersey and Bailey misprint this "hollow"; and Chatterton, entering it so in his manuscript list of old words, evidently takes it to be the adjective "hollow" and uses it thus in the line:
"Houten are wordes for to telle his doe," i.e.,
Hollow are words to tell his doings.
Still again, in a passage already quoted,[17] it is told how the "Wynde hurled the Battayle"—Rowleian for a small boat—"agaynste an Heck." Heck in this and other passages was a puzzle. From the context it obviously meant "rock," but where did Chatterton get it? Mr. Skeat explains this. Heck is a provincial word signifying "rack," i.e., "hay-rack"; but Kersey misprinted it "rock," and Chatterton followed him. A typical instance of the kind of error that Chatterton was perpetually committing was his understanding the "Listed, bounded," i.e., edged (as in the "list" or selvage of cloth) for "bounded" in the sense of jumped, and so coining from it the verb "to liss"=to jump:
"The headed javelin lisseth here and there."
Every page in the Rowley poems abounds in forms which would have been as strange to an Englishman of the fifteenth as they are to one of the nineteenth century. Adjectives are used for nouns, nouns for verbs, past participles for present infinitives; and derivatives and variants are employed which never had any existence, such as hopelen=hopelessness, and anere=another. Skeat says, that "an analysis of the glossary in Milles's edition shows that the genuine old English words correctly used, occurring in the Rowleian dialect, amount to only about seven per cent, of all the old words employed." It is probable that, by constant use of his manuscript glossary, the words became fixed in Chatterton's memory and he acquired some facility in composing at first hand in this odd jargon. Thus he uses the archaic words quite freely as rhyme words, which he would not have been likely to do unless he had formed the habit of thinking to some degree, in Rowleian.
The question now occurs, apart from the tragic interest of Chatterton's career, from the mystery connected with the incubation and hatching of the Rowley poems, and from their value as records of a very unusual precocity—what independent worth have they as poetry, and what has been the extent of their literary influence? The dust of controversy has long since settled, and what has its subsidence made visible? My own belief is that the Rowley poems are interesting principally as literary curiosities—the work of an infant phenomenon—and that they have little importance in themselves, or as models and inspirations to later poets. I cannot help thinking that, upon this subject, many critics have lost their heads. Malone, e.g., pronounced Chatterton the greatest genius that England had produced since Shakspere. Professor Masson permits himself to say: "The antique poems of Chatterton are perhaps as worthy of being read consecutively as many portions of the poetry of Byron, Shelley, or Keats. There are passages in them, at least, quite equal to any to be found in these poets."[18] Mr. Gosse seems to me much nearer the truth: "Our estimate of the complete originality of the Rowley poems must be tempered by a recollection of the existence of 'The Castle of Otranto' and 'The Schoolmistress,' of the popularity of Percy's 'Reliques' and the 'Odes' of Gray, and of the revival of a taste for Gothic literature and art which dates from Chatterton's infancy. Hence the claim which has been made for Chatterton as the father of the romantic school, and as having influenced the actual style of Coleridge and Keats, though supported with great ability, appears to be overcharged. So also the positive praise given to the Rowley poems, as artistic productions full of rich color and romantic melody, may be deprecated without any refusal to recognize these qualities in measure. There are frequent flashes of brilliancy in Chatterton, and one or two very perfectly sustained pieces; but the main part of his work, if rigorously isolated from the melodramatic romance of his career, is surely found to be rather poor reading, the work of a child of exalted genius, no doubt, yet manifestly the work of a child all through."[19]
Let us get a little closer to the Rowley poems, as they stand in Mr. Skeat's edition, stripped of their sham-antique spelling and with their language modernized wherever possible; and we shall find, I think, that tried by an absolute standard, they are markedly inferior not only to true mediaeval work like Chaucer's poems and the English and Scottish ballads, but also to the best modern work conceived in the same spirit: to "Christabel" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Jock o'Hazeldean" and "Sister Helen," and "The Haystack in the Flood." The longest of the Rowley poems is "Aella," "a tragycal enterlude or discoorseynge tragedie" in 147 stanzas, and generally regarded as Chatterton's masterpiece.[20] The scene of this tragedy is Bristol and the neighboring Watchet Mead; the period, during the Danish invasions. The hero is the warden of Bristol Castle.[21] While he is absent on a victorious campaign against the Danes, his bride, Bertha, is decoyed from home by his treacherous lieutenant, Celmond, who is about to ravish her in the forest, when he is surprised and killed by a band of marauders. Meanwhile Aella has returned home, and finding that his wife has fled, stabs himself mortally. Bertha arrives in time to hear his dying speech and make the necessary explanations, and then dies herself on the body of her lord. It will be seen that the plot is sufficiently melodramatic; the sentiments and dialogue are entirely modern, when translated out of Rowleian into English. The verse is a modified form of the Spenserian, a ten-line stanza which Mr. Skeat says is an invention of Chatterton and a striking instance of his originality.[22] It answers very well in descriptive passages and soliloquies; not so well in the "discoorseynge" parts. As this is Chatterton's favorite stanza, in which "The Battle of Hastings," "Goddwyn," "English Metamorphosis" and others of the Rowley series are written, an example of it may be cited here, from "Aella."
Scene, Bristol. Celmond, alone.
The world is dark with night; the winds are still,
Faintly the moon her pallid light makes gleam;
The risen sprites the silent churchyard fill,
With elfin fairies joining in the dream;
The forest shineth with the silver leme;
Now may my love be sated in its treat;
Upon the brink of some swift running stream,
At the sweet banquet I will sweetly eat.
This is the house; quickly, ye hinds, appear.
Enter a servant.
Cel. Go tell to Bertha straight, a stranger waiteth here.
The Rowley poems include, among other things, a number of dramatic or quasi-dramatic pieces, "Goddwyn," "The Tournament," "The Parliament of Sprites"; the narrative poem of "The Battle of Hastings," and a collection of "eclogues." These are all in long-stanza forms, mostly in the ten-lined stanza. "English Metamorphosis" is an imitation of a passage in "The Faërie Queene," (book ii. canto x. stanzas 5-19). "The Parliament of Sprites" is an interlude played by Carmelite friars at William Canynge's house on the occasion of the dedication of St. Mary Redcliffe's. One after another the antichi spiriti dolenti rise up and salute the new edifice: Nimrod and the Assyrians, Anglo-Saxon ealdormen and Norman knights templars, and citizens of ancient Bristol. Among others, "Elle's sprite speaks":
"Were I once more cast in a mortal frame,
To hear the chantry-song sound in mine ear,
To hear the masses to our holy dame,
To view the cross-aisles and the arches fair!
Through the half-hidden silver-twinkling glare
Of yon bright moon in foggy mantles dressed,
I must content this building to aspere,[23]
Whilst broken clouds the holy sight arrest;
Till, as the nights grow old, I fly the light.
Oh! were I man again, to see the sight!"
Perhaps the most engaging of the Rowley poems are "An Excelente Balade of Charitie," written in the rhyme royal; and "The Bristowe Tragedie," in the common ballad stanza, and said by Tyrwhitt to be founded on an historical fact: the excecution at Bristol, in 1461, of Sir Baldwin Fulford, who fought on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. The best quality in Chatterton's verse is its unexpectedness,—sudden epithets or whole lines, of a wild and artless sweetness,—which goes far to explain the fascination that he exercised over Coleridge and Keats. I mean such touches as these:
"Once as I dozing in the witch-hour lay."
"Brown as the filbert dropping from the shell."
"My gorme emblanchèd with the comfreie plant."
"Where thou may'st here the sweetè night-lark chant,
Or with some mocking brooklet sweetly glide."
"Upon his bloody carnage-house he lay,
Whilst his long shield did gleam with the sun's rising ray."
"The red y-painted oars from the black tide,
Carved with devices rare, do shimmering rise."
"As elfin fairies, when the moon shines bright,
In little circles dance upon the green;
All living creatures fly far from their sight,
Nor by the race of destiny be seen;
For what he be that elfin fairies strike,
Their souls will wander to King Offa's dyke."
The charming wildness of Chatterton's imagination—which attracted the notice of that strange, visionary genius William Blake[24]—is perhaps seen at its best in one of the minstrel songs in "Aella." This is obviously an echo of Ophelia's song in "Hamlet," but Chatterton gives it a weird turn of his own:
"Hark! the raven flaps his wing
In the briared dell below;
Hark! the death owl loud doth sing
To the nightmares, as they go.
My love is dead.
Gone to his death-bed
All under the willow tree.
"See the white moon shines on high,[25]
Whiter is my true-love's shroud,
Whiter than the morning sky,
Whiter than the evening cloud.
My love is dead," etc.
It remains to consider briefly the influence of Chatterton's life and writings upon his contemporaries and successors in the field of romantic poetry. The dramatic features of his personal career drew, naturally, quite as much if not more attention than his literary legacy to posterity. It was about nine years after his death that a clerical gentleman, Sir Herbert Croft, went to Bristol to gather materials for a biography. He talked with Barrett and Catcott, and with many of the poet's schoolmates and fellow-townsmen, and visited his mother and sister, who told him anecdotes of the marvelous boy's childhood and gave him some of his letters. Croft also traced Chatterton's footsteps in London, where he interviewed, among others, the coroner who had presided at the inquest over the suicide's body. The result of these inquiries he gave to the world in a book entitled "Love and Madness" (1780).[26] Southey thought that Croft had treated Mrs. Chatterton shabbily, in making her no pecuniary return from the profits of his book; and arraigned him publicly for this in the edition of Chatterton's works which he and Joseph Cottle—both native Bristowans—published in three volumes in 1803. This was at first designed to be a subscription edition for the benefit of Chatterton's mother and sister, but, the subscriptions not being numerous enough, it was issued in the usual way, through "the trade."
It was in 1795, just a quarter of a century after Chatterton's death, that Southey and Coleridge were married in St. Mary Redcliffe's Church to the Misses Edith and Sara Fricker. Coleridge was greatly interested in Chatterton. In his "Lines on Observing a Blossom on the First of February, 1796," he compares the flower to
"Bristowa's bard, the wondrous boy,
An amaranth which earth seemed scarce to own,
Blooming 'mid poverty's drear wintry waste."
And a little earlier than this, when meditating his pantisocracy scheme with Southey and Lovell, he had addressed the dead poet in his indignant "Monody on the Death of Chatterton," associating him in imagination with the abortive community on the Susquehannah:
"O Chatterton, that thou wert yet alive!
Sure thou would'st spread thy canvas to the gale,
And love with us the tinkling team to drive
O'er peaceful freedom's undivided dale;
And we at sober eve would round thee throng,
Hanging enraptured on thy stately song,
And greet with smiles the young-eyed poesy
All deftly masked as hoar antiquity. . .
Yet will I love to follow the sweet dream
Where Susquehannah pours his untamed stream;
And on some hill, whose forest-frowning side
Waves o'er the murmurs of his calmer tide,
Will raise a solemn cenotaph to thee,
Sweet harper of time-shrouded ministrelsy."
It might be hard to prove that the Rowley poems had very much to do with giving shape to Coleridge's own poetic output. Doubtless, without them, "Christabel," and "The Ancient Mariner," and "The Darke Ladye" would still have been; and yet it is possible that they might not have been just what they are. In "The Ancient Mariner" there is the ballad strain of the "Reliques," but plus something of Chatterton's. In such lines as these:
"The bride hath paced into the hall
Red as a rose is she:
Nodding their heads before her, goes
The merry minstrelsy;"
or as these:
"The wedding guest here beat his breast
For he heard the loud bassoon:"
one catches a far-away reverberation from certain stanzas of "The Bristowe Tragedie:" this, e.g.,
"Before him went the council-men
In scarlet robes and gold,
And tassels spangling in the sun,
Much glorious to behold;"
and this:
"In different parts a godly psalm
Most sweetly they did chant:
Behind their backs six minstrels came,
Who tuned the strung bataunt."[27]
Among all the young poets of the generation that succeeded Chatterton, there was a tender feeling of comradeship with the proud and passionate boy, and a longing to admit him of their crew. Byron, indeed, said that he was insane; but Shelley, in "Adonais," classes him with Keats among "the inheritors of unfulfilled renown." Lord Houghton testifies that Keats had a prescient sympathy with Chatterton in his early death. He dedicated "Endymion" to his memory. In his epistle "To George Felton Mathew," he asks him to help him find a place
"Where we may soft humanity put on,
And sit, and rhyme, and think on Chatterton."[28]
Keats said that he always associated the season of autumn with the memory of Chatterton. He asserted, somewhat oddly, that he was the purest writer in the English language and used "no French idiom or particles, like Chaucer." In a letter from Jane Porter to Keats about the reviews of his "Endymion," she wrote: "Had Chatterton possessed sufficient manliness of mind to know the magnanimity of patience, and been aware that great talents have a commission from Heaven, he would not have deserted his post, and his name might have been paged with Milton."
Keats was the poetic child of Spenser, but some traits of manner—hard to define, though not to feel—he inherited from Chatterton. In his unfinished poem, "The Eve of St. Mark," there is a Rowleian accent in the passage imitative of early English, and in the loving description of the old volume of saints' legends whence it is taken, with its
"—pious poesies Written in smallest crow-quill size Beneath the text."
And we cannot but think of the shadow of St. Mary Redcliffe falling across another young life, as we read how
"Bertha was a maiden fair
Dwelling in th' old Minster-square;
From her fireside she could see,
Sidelong, its rich antiquity,
Far as the Bishop's garden-wall";
and of the footfalls that pass the echoing minster-gate, and of the clamorous daws that fall asleep in the ancient belfry to the sound of the drowsy chimes. Rossetti, in so many ways a continuator of Keats' artistry, devoted to Chatterton the first of his sonnet-group, "Five English Poets,"[29] of which the sestet runs thus:
"Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton;
The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace
Up Redcliffe's spire; and in the world's armed space
Thy gallant sword-play:—these to many an one
Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown
And love-dream of thine unrecorded face."
The story of Chatterton's life found its way into fiction and upon the stage. Afred de Vigny, one of the French romanticists, translator of "Othello" and "The Merchant of Venice," introduced it as an episode into his romance, "Stello ou les Diables Bleus," afterward dramatized as "Chatterton," and first played at Paris on February 12, 1835, with great success. De Vigny made a love tragedy out of it, inventing a sweetheart for his hero, in the person of Kitty Bell, a role which became one of Madame Dorval's chief triumphs. On the occasion of the revival of De Vigny's drama in December, 1857, Théophile Gautier gave, in the Moniteur,[30] some reminiscences of its first performance, twenty-two years before.
"The parterre before which Chatterton declaimed was full of pale, long-haired youths, who firmly believed that there was no other worthy occupation on earth but the making of verses or of pictures—art, as they called it; and who looked upon the bourgeois with a disdain to which the disdain of the Heidelberg or Jena 'fox' for the 'philistine' hardly approaches. . . As to money, no one thought of it. More than one, as in that assembly of impossible professions which Theodore de Banville describes with so resigned an irony, could have cried without falsehood 'I am a lyric poet and I live by my profession.' One who has not passed through that mad, ardent, over-excited but generous epoch, cannot imagine to what a forgetfulness of material existence the intoxication, or, if you prefer, infatuation of art pushed the obscure and fragile victims who would rather have died than renounce their dream. One actually heard in the night the crack of solitary pistols. Judge of the effect produced in such an environment by M. Afred Vigney's 'Chatterton'; to which, if you would comprehend it, you must restore the contemporary atmosphere."[31]
[1] Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence."
[2] January 1, 1753.
[3] "The Poetical Works of Thos. Chatterton. With an Essay on the Rowley Poems by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat and a Memoir by Edward Bell"; in two volumes. London, 1871, Vol. I. p. xv.
[4] Willcox's edition of "Chatterton's Poetical Works," Cambridge, 1842, Vol. I. p. xxi.
[5] "Memoir by Edward Bell," p. xxiv.
[6] Cf. ("Battle of Hastings," i. xx)
"The grey-goose pinion, that theron was set,
Eftsoons with smoking crimson blood was wet"
With the lines from "Chevy Chase" (ante, p. 295). To be sure the ballad was widely current before the publication of the "Reliques."
[7] See ante, p. 237.
[8] Walter Scott quotes this passage in his review of Southey and Cottle's edition of Chatterton in the Edinburgh Review for April, 1804, and comments as follows: "While Chatterton wrote plain narrative, he imitated with considerable success the dry, concise style of an antique annalist; but when anything required a more dignified or sentimental style, he mounted the fatal and easily recognized car of the son of Fingal."
[9] Publication begun 1761: 2d edition 1768. Chatterton's letter was dated March 25 [1769].
[10] See ante, p. 346.
[11] "Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others in the fifteenth century. The greatest part now first published from the most authentic copies, with engraved specimens of one of the MSS. To which are added a preface, an introductory account of the several pieces, and a glossary. London: Printed for T. Payne & Son at the Mews Gate. MDCCLXXVII."
[12] "Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley," 2 vols. 1781.
[13] Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol in the fifteenth century by Thomas Rowley, Priest, etc. With a commentary in which the antiquity of them is considered and defended.
[14] "Essay on the Rowley Poems:" Skeat's edition of "Chatterton's Poetical Works," Vol. II. p. xxvii.
[15] For a bibliography of the Rowley controversy, consult the article on Chatterton in the "Dictionary of National Biography."
[16] "Ah, gentle dames! It gars me greet." —Tam o'Shanter
[17] Ante, p. 350.
[18] "Chatterton. A Story of the Year 1770," by David Masson London, 1874.
[19] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 334.
[20] A recent critic, the Hon. Roden Noel ("Essays on Poetry and Poets," London, 1886), thinks that "'Aella' is a drama worthy of the Elizabethans" (p. 44). "As to the Rowley series," as a whole, he does "not hesitate to say that they contain some of the finest poetry in our language" (p. 39). The Choric "Ode to Freedom" in "Goddwyn" appears to Mr. Noel to be the original of a much admired passage in "Childe Harold," in which war is personified, "and at any rate is finer"!
[21] See in Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the Poets," Vol. I. pp. 264-307, the description of a drawing of this building in 1138, done by Chatterton and inserted in Barrett's "History."
[22] For some remarks on Chatterton's metrical originality, see "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III, pp. 400-403.
[23] Look at.
[24] Blake was an early adherent of the "Gothic artists who built the Cathedrals in the so-called Dark Ages . . . of whom the world was not worthy." Mr. Rossetti has pointed out his obligations to Ossian and possibly to "The Castle of Otranto." See Blake's poems "Fair Eleanor" and "Gwin, King of Norway."
[25] Chatterton's sister testifies that he had the romantic habit of sitting up all night and writing by moonlight. Cambridge Ed. p. lxi.
[26] Other standard lives of Chatterton are those by Gregory, 1789, (reprinted and prefixed to the Southey and Cottle edition): Dix, 1837; and Wilson, 1869.
[27] Rowleian: there is no such instrument known unto men. The romantic love of color is observable in this poem, and is strong everywhere in Chatterton.
[28] See also the sonnet: "O Chatterton, how very sad thy fate"—Given in Lord Houghton's memoir. "Life and Letters of John Keats": By R. Monckton Milnes, p. 20 (American Edition, New York, 1848).
[29] Chatterton, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley. "The absolutely miraculous Chatterton," Rossetti elsewhere styles him.
[30] "Historie du Romantisme," pp. 153-54.
[31] "Chatterton," a drama by Jones and Herman, was played at the Princess' Theater, London, May 22, 1884.
CHAPTER XI.
The German Tributary
Up to the last decade of the eighteenth century the romantic movement in Great Britain had been self-developed and independent of foreign influence, except for such stimulus as it had found, once and again, in the writings of continental scholars like Sainte Palaye and Mallet. But now the English literary current began to receive a tributary stream from abroad. A change had taken place in the attitude of the German mind which corresponds quite closely to that whose successive steps we have been following. In Germany, French classicism had got an even firmer hold than in England. It is well-known that Frederick the Great (1740-86) regarded his mother-tongue as a barbarous dialect, hardly fit for literary use. In his own writings, prose and verse, he invariably employed French; and he boasted to Gottsched that from his youth up he had not read a German book.[1]
But already before the middle of the century, and just about the time of the publication of Thomason's "Seasons," the so-called Swiss school, under the leadership of the Züricher, Johann Jacob Bodmer, had begun a national movement and an attack upon Gallic influences. Bodmer fought under Milton's banner, and in the preface to his prose translation of "Paradise Lost" (1732), he praised Shakspere as the English Sophocles. In his "Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren" ("Treatise on the Marvelous," 1740) he asserted the claims of freedom, nature, and the inspired imagination against the rules of French critics, very much as the Wartons and Bishop Hurd did a few years later in England. Deutscheit, Volkspoesie, the German past, the old Teutonic hero-age, with the Kaiserzeit and the Middle Ages in general, soon came into fashion. "As early as 1748 Bodmer had published specimens from the Minnesingers, in 1757 he had brought out a part of the Nibelungenlied, in 1758 and 1759 a more complete collection of the Minnesingers, and till 1781, till just before his death, he continued to produce editions of the Middle High-German poems. Another Swiss writer, Christian Heinrich Myller, a pupil of Bodmer's . . . published in 1784 and 1785 the whole of the Nibelungenlied and the most important of the chivalrous epics. Lessing, in his preface to Gleim's 'War-songs,' called attention to the Middle High German poets, of whom he continued to be throughout his life an ardent admirer. Justus Möser took great interest in the Minnesingers. About the time when 'Götz' appeared, this enthusiasm for early German poetry was at its strongest, and Bürger, Voss, Miller, and Höltz wrote Minnesongs, in which they imitated the old German lyric poets. In 1773 Gleim published 'Poems after the Minnesingers,' and in 1779 'Poems after Walther von der Vogelweide.' Some enthusiasts had already hailed the Nibelungenlied as the German Iliad, and Bürger, who vied hard with the rest, but without much success, in turning Homer into German, insisted on dressing up the Greek heroes a little in the Nibelungen style. He and a few other poets loved to give their ballads a chivalrous character. Fritz Stolberg wrote the beautiful song of a German boy, beginning, 'Mein Arm wird stark und gross mein Muth, gib, Vater, mir ein Schwert'; and the song of the old Swabian knight—'Sohn, da hast du meinen Speer; meinem Arm wird er zu schwer.' Lessing's 'Nathan,' too, appealed to this enthusiasm for the times of chivalry, and must have strengthened the feeling. An historian like the Swiss, Johannes Müller, began to show the Middle Ages in a fairer light, and even to ascribe great merits to the Papacy. But in doing so, Johannes Müller was only following in Herder's steps. Herder . . . had written against the self-conceit of his age, its pride in its enlightenment and achievements. He found in the Middle Ages the realization of his aesthetic ideas, namely, strong emotion, stirring life and action, everything guided by feeling and instinct, not by morbid thought: religious ardor and chivalrous honor, boldness in love and strong patriotic feeling."[2]
When the founders of a truly national literature in Germany cut loose from French moorings, they had an English pilot aboard; and in the translations from German romances, dramas, and ballads that were made by Scott, Coleridge, Taylor, Lewis, and others, English literature was merely taking back with usury what it had lent its younger sister. Mention has already been made of Bürger's and Herder's renderings from Percy's "Reliques,"[3] an edition of which was published at Göttingen in 1767; as well as of the strong excitement aroused in Germany by MacPherson's "Ossian."[4] This last found—besides the Viennese Denis—another translator in Fritz Stolberg, who carried his medievalism so far as to join the Roman Catholic Church in 1800. Klopstock's "Kriegslied," written as early as 1749, was in the meter of "Chevy Chase," which Klopstock knew through Addison's Spectator papers. Through Mallet, the Eddaic literature made an impression in Germany as in England; and Gerstenberg's "Gedicht eines Skalden" (1766), one of the first-fruits of the German translation of the "Historire de Dannemarc," preceded by two years the publication—though not the composition—of Gray's poems from the Norse.
But the spirit which wrought most mightily upon the new German literature was Shakspere's. During the period of French culture there had been practically no knowledge of Shakspere in Germany. In 1741 Christian von Borck, Prussian ambassador to London, had translated "Julius Caesar." This was followed, a few years later, by a version of "Romeo and Juliet." In 1762-66 Wieland translated, in whole or in part, twenty-two Shakspere's plays. His translation was in prose and has been long superseded by the Tieck-Schlegel translation (1797-1801-1810). Goethe first made acquaintance with Shakspere, when a student at Leipsic, through the detached passages given in "Dodd's Beauties of Shakspere."[5] He afterward got hold of Wieland's translation, and when he went to Strassburg he fell under the influence of Herder, who inspired him with his own enthusiasm for "Ossian," and the Volkslieder, and led him to study Shakspere in the original.
Young Germany fastened upon and appropriated the great English dramatist with passionate conviction. He became an object of worship, an article of faith. The Shakspere cultus dominated the whole Sturm- und Drangperoide. The stage domesticated him: the poets imitated him: the critics exalted him into the type and representative (Urbild) of Germanic art, as opposed to and distinguished from the art of the Latin races, founded upon a false reproduction of the antique.[6] It was a recognition of the essential kinships between the two separated branches of the great Teutonic stock. The enthusiastic young patriots of the Göttinger Hain,—who hated everything French and called each other by the names of ancient bards,—accustomed themselves to the use of Shaksperian phrases in conversation; and on one occasion celebrated the dramatist's birthday so uproariously that they were pounced upon by the police and spent the night in the lockup. In Goethe's circle at Strassburg, which numbered, among others, Lenz, Klinger, and H. L. Wagner, this Shakspere mania was de rigueur. Lenz, particularly, who translated "Love's Labour's Lost," excelled in whimsical imitations of "such conceits as clownage keeps in pay."[7] Upon his return to Frankfort, Goethe gave a feast in Shakspere's honor at his father's house (October 14, 1771), in which healths were drunk to the "Will of all Wills," and the youthful host delivered an extravagant eulogy. "The first page of Shakspere's that I read," runs a sentence of this oration, "made me his own for life, and when I was through with the first play, I stood like a man born blind, to whom sight has been given by an instant's miracle. I had a most living perception of the fact that my being had been expanded a whole infinitude. Everything was new and strange; my eyes ached with the unwonted light."[8]
Lessing, in his onslaught upon the French theater in his "Hamburgische Dramaturgie" (1767-69), maintained that there was a much closer agreement between Sophocles and Shakspere in the essentials of dramatic art than between Sophocles and Racine or Voltaire in their mechanical copies of the antique. In their own plays, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller all took Shakspere as their model. But while beginning with imitation, they came in time to work freely in the spirit of Shakspere rather than in his manner. Thus the first draught of Goethe's "Götz von Berlichingen" conforms in all externals to the pattern of a Shaksperian "history." The unity of action went overboard along with those of time and place; the scene was shifted for a monologue of three lines or a dialogue of six; tragic and comic were interwoven; the stage was thronged with a motley variety of figures, humors, and conditions—knights, citizens, soldiers, horse-boys, peasants; there was a court-jester; songs and lyric passages were interspersed; there were puns, broad jokes, rant, Elizabethan metaphors, and swollen trunk-hose hyperboles, with innumerable Shakesperian reminiscences in detail. But the advice of Herder, to whom he sent his manuscript, and the example of Lessing, whose "Emilia Galotti" had just appeared, persuaded Goethe to recast the piece and give it a more independent form.
Scherer[9] says that the pronunciamento of the new national movement in German letters was the "small, badly printed anonymous book" entitled "Von Deutscher Art und Kunst, einige fliegende Blätter" ("Some Loose Leaves about German Style and Art"), which appeared in 1773 and contained essays by Justus Möser, who "upheld the liberty of the ancient Germans as a vanished ideal"; by Johann Gottfried Herder, who "celebrated the merits of popular song, advocated a collection of the German Volkslieder, extolled the greatness of Shakspere, and prophesied the advent of a German Shakspere"; and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who praised the Strassburg Minster and Gothic architecture[10] in general, and "asserted that art, to be true, must be characteristic. The reform, or revolution, which this little volume announced was connected with hostility to France, and with a friendly attitude toward England. . . This great movement was, in fact, a revulsion from the spirit of Voltaire to that of Rousseau, from the artificiality of society to the simplicity of nature, from doubt and rationalism to feeling and faith, from a priori notions[11] to history, from hard and fast aesthetic rules to the freedom of genius. Goethe's 'Götz' was the first revolutionary symptom which really attracted much attention, but the 'Fly-sheets on German Style and Art' preceded the publication of 'Götz,' as a kind of programme or manifesto." Even Wieland, the mocking and French-minded, the man of consummate talent but shallow genius, the representative of the Aufklärung (Éclaircissement, Illumination) was carried away by this new stream of tendency, and saddled his hoppogriff for a ride ins alte romantische Land. He availed himself of the new "Library of Romance" which Count Tressan began publishing in France in 1775, studied Hans Sachs and Hartmann von Aue, experiments with Old German meters, and enriched his vocabulary from Old German sources. He poetized popular fairy tales, chivalry stories, and motives from the Arthurian epos, such as "Gandalin" and "Geron der Adeliche" ("Gyron le Courteois"). But his best and best-known work in this temper was "Oberon" (1780) a rich composite of materials from Chaucer, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the French romance of "Huon of Bordeaux."[12]
From this outline—necessarily very imperfect and largely at second hand—of the course of the German romantic movement in the eighteenth century, it will nevertheless appear that it ran parallel to the English most of the way. In both countries the reaction was against the Aufklärung, i.e., against the rationalistic, prosaic, skeptical, common-sense spirit of the age, represented in England by deistical writers like Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Tindal in the department of religious and moral philosophy; and by writers like Addison, Swift, Prior, and Pope in polite letters; and represented most brilliantly in the literatures of Europe by Voltaire. In opposition to this spirit, an effort was now made to hark back to the ages of faith; to recover the point of view which created mythology, fairy lore, and popular superstitions; to believe, at all hazards, not only in God and the immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries of these beliefs, in ghosts, elves, demons, and witches.
In both countries, too, the revolution, as it concerned form, was a break with French classicism and with that part of the native literature which had followed academic traditions. Here the insurrection was far more violent in Germany than in England,[13] partly because Gallic influence had tyrannized there more completely and almost to the supplanting of the vernacular by the foreign idiom, for literary uses; and partly because Germany had nothing to compare with the shining and solid achievements of the Queen Anne classics in England. It was easy for the new school of German poets and critics to brush aside perruques like Opitz, Gottsched, and Gellert—authors of the fourth and fifth class. But Swift and Congreve, and Pope and Fielding, were not thus to be disposed of. We have noted the cautious, respectful manner in which such innovators as Warton and Percy ventured to question Pope's supremacy and to recommend older English poets to the attention of a polite age; and we have seen that Horace Walpole's Gothic enthusiasms were not inconsistent with literary prejudices more conservation than radical, upon the whole. In England, again, the movement began with imitations of Spenser and Milton, and, gradually only, arrived at the resuscitation of Chaucer and medieval poetry and the translation of Bardic and Scaldic remains. But in Germany there was no Elizabethan literature to mediate between the modern mind and the Middle Age, and so the Germans resorted to England and Shakspere for this.
In Germany, as in England, though for different reasons, the romantic revival did not culminate until the nineteenth century, until the appearance of the Romantische Schule in the stricter sense—of Tieck, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Wackenroder, Fouqué, Von Arnim, Brentano, and Uhland. In England this was owing less to arrested development than to the absence of genius. There the forerunners of Scott, Coleridge, and Keats were writers of a distinctly inferior order: Akenside, Shenstone, Dyer, the Wartons, Percy, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, the boy Chatterton. If a few rise above this level, like Thomason, Collins, and Gray, the slenderness of their performance, and the somewhat casual nature of their participation in the movement, diminish their relative importance. Gray's purely romantic work belongs to the last years of his life. Collins' derangement and early death stopped the unfolding of many buds of promise in this rarely endowed lyrist. Thomson, perhaps, came too early to reach any more advanced stage of evolution than Spenserism. In Germany, on the contrary, the pioneers were men of the highest intellectual stature, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller. But there the movement was checked for a time by counter-currents, or lost in broader tides of literary life. English romanticism was but one among many contemporary tendencies: sentimentalism, naturalism, realism. German romanticism was simply an incident of the sturm- und Drangperiode, which was itself but a temporary phase of the swift and many-sided unfolding of the German mind in the latter half of the last century; one element in the great intellectual ferment which threw off, among other products, the Kantian philosophy, the "Laocoön," "Faust," and "Wilhelm Meister"; Winckelmann's "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums" and Schiller's "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell." Men like Goethe and Schiller were too broad in their culture, too versatile in their talents, too multifarious in their mental activities and sympathies to be classified with a school. The temper which engendered "Götz" and "Die Räuber" was only a moment in the history of their Entwickelung; they passed on presently into other regions of thought and art.
In Goethe especially there ensued, after the time of his Italienische Reise, a reversion to the classic; not the exploded pseudo-classic of the eighteenth-century brand, but the true Hellenic spirit which expressed itself in such work as "Iphigenie auf Tauris," "Hermann und Dorothea," and the "Schöne Helena" and "Classische Walpurgis-Nacht" episodes in the second part of "Faust." "In his youth," says Scherer, "a love for the historical past of Germany had seized on the minds of many. Imaginative writers filled the old Teutonic forests with Bards and Druids and cherished an enthusiastic admiration for Gothic cathedrals and for the knights of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century. . . In Goethe's mature years, on the contrary, the interest in classical antiquity dwarfed all other aesthetic interests, and Germany and Europe were flooded by the classical fashion for which Winckelmann had given the first strong impulse. The churches became ancient temples, the mechanical arts strove after classical forms, and ladies affected the dress and manners of Greek women. The leaders of German poetry, Goethe and Schiller, both attained the summit of their art in the imitation of classical models."[14] Still the ground recovered from the Middle Age was never again entirely lost; and in spite of this classical prepossession, Goethe and Schiller, even in the last years of the century, vied with one another in the composition of romantic ballads, like the former's "Der Erlkonig," "Der Fischer," "Der Todtentanz," and "Der Zauberlehrling," and the latter's "Ritter Toggenburg," "Der Kampf mit dem Drachen," and "Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer."
On comparing the works of a romantic temper produced in England and in Germany during the last century, one soon becomes aware that, though the original impulse was communicated from England, the continental movement had greater momentum. The Gründlichkeit, the depth and thoroughness of the German mind, impels it to base itself in the fine arts, as in politics and religion, on foundation principles; to construct for its practice a theoria, an aesthetik. In the later history of German romanticism, the medieval revival in letters and art was carried out with a philosophic consistency into other domains of thought and made accessory to reactionary statecraft and theology, to Junkerism and Catholicism. Meanwhile, though the literary movement in Germany in the eighteenth century did not quite come to a head, it was more critical, learned, and conscious of its own purposes and methods than the kindred movement in England. The English mind, in the act of creation, works practically and instinctively. It seldom seeks to bring questions of taste or art under the domain of scientific laws. During the classical period it had accepted its standards of taste from France, and when it broke away from these, it did so upon impulse and gave either no reasons, or very superficial ones, for its new departure. The elegant dissertations of Hurd and Percy, and the Wartons, seem very dilettantish when set beside the imposing systems of aesthetics propounded by Kant, Fichte, and Schelling; or beside thorough-going Abhandlungen like the "Laocoön," the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie," Schiller's treatise "Ueber naïve and sentimentalische Dichtung," or the analysis of Hamlet's character in "Wilhelm Meister." There was no criticism of this kind in England before Coleridge; no Shakspere criticism, in particular, to compare with the papers on that subject by Lessing, Herder, Gerstenberg, Lenz, Goethe, and many other Germans. The only eighteenth-century Englishman who would have been capable of such was Gray. He had the requisite taste and scholarship, but even he wanted the philosophic breadth and depth for a fundamental and eingehend treatment of underlying principles.
Yet even in this critical department, German literary historians credit England with the initiative. Hettner[15] mentions three English critics, in particular, as predecessors of Herder in awakening interest in popular poetry. These were Edward Young, the author of "Night Thoughts," whose "Conjectures on Original Composition" was published in 1759: Robert Wood, whose "Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer" (1768) was translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian; and Robert Lowth, Bishop of Oxford, who was Professor of Poetry at Oxford delivered there in 1753 his "Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum," translated into English and German in 1793. The significance of Young's brilliant little essay, which was in form a letter addressed to the author of "Sir Charles Grandison," lay in its assertion of the superiority of genius to learning and of the right of genius to be free from rules and authorities. It was a sort of literary declaration of independence; and it asked, in substance, the question asked in Emerson's "Nature": "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Pope had said, in his "Essay on Criticism,"[16] "follow Nature," and in order to follow Nature, learn the rules and study the ancients, particularly Homer. "Nature and Homer were the same." Contrariwise, Young says: "The less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more. . . Learning . . . is a great lover of rules and boaster of famed examples . . . and sets rigid bounds to that liberty to which genius often owes its supreme glory. . . Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies?. . . Let not great examples or authorities browbeat thy reason into too great a diffidence of thyself. . . While the true genius is crossing all public roads into fresh untrodden ground; he [the imitative writer], up to the knees in antiquity, is treading the sacred footsteps of great examples with the blind veneration of a bigot saluting the sacred toe." Young asserts that Shakspere is equal in greatness to the ancients: regrets that Pope did not employ blank verse in his translation of Homer, and calls Addison's "Cato" "a piece of statuary."
Robert Wood, who visited and described the ruins of Balbec and Palmrya, took his Iliad to the Troad and read it on the spot. He sailed in the track of Menelaus and the wandering Ulysses; and his acquaintance with Eastern scenery and life helped to substitute a fresher apprehension of Homer for the somewhat conventional conception that had prevailed through the classical period. What most forcibly struck Herder and Goethe in Wood's essay was the emphasis laid upon the simple, unlettered, and even barbaric state of society in the heroic age: and upon the primitive and popular character (Ursprünglichkeit, Volksthümlichkeit) of the Homeric poems.[17] This view of Homer, as essentially a minstrel or ballad-maker, has been carried so far in Professor Newman's translations as to provoke remonstrance from Matthew Arnold, who insists upon Homer's "nobility" and "grand style."[18] But with whatever exaggeration it may have latterly been held, it was wholesomely corrective and stimulating when propounded in 1768.
Though the final arrival of German romanticism, in its fullness, was postponed too late to modify the English movement, before the latter had spent its first strength, yet the prelude was heard in England and found an echo there. In 1792 Walter Scott was a young lawyer at Edinburgh and had just attained his majority.
"Romance who loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and folded wing,
To him a painted paroquet
Had been—a most familiar bird—
Taught him his alphabet to say,
To lisp his very earliest word."[19]
He had lain from infancy "in the lap of legends old," and was already learned in the antiquities of the Border. For years he had been making his collection of memorabilia; claymores, suits of mail, Jedburgh axes, border horns, etc. He had begun his annual raids into Liddesdale, in search of ballads and folk lore, and was filling notebooks with passages from the Edda, records of old Scotch law-cases, copies of early English poems, notes on the "Morte Darthur," on the second sight, on fairies and witches; extracts from Scottish chronicles, from the Books of Adjournal, from Aubrey, and old Glanvil of superstitious memory; tables of the Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Runic alphabets and transcripts relating to the history of the Stuarts. In the autumn or early winter of that year, a class of six or seven young men was formed at Edinburgh for the study of German, and Scott joined it. In his own account of the matter he says that interest in German literature was first aroused in Scotland by a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in April, 1788, by Henry Mackenzie, the "Addison of the North," and author of that most sentimental fictions, "The Man of Feeling." "The literary persons of Edinburgh were then first made aware of the existence of works of genius in a language cognate with the English, and possessed of the same manly force of expressions; they learned at the same time that the taste which dictated the German compositions was of a kind as nearly allied to the English as their language; those who were from their youth accustomed to admire Shakspere and Milton became acquainted for the first time with a race of poets who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming boundaries of the universe and investigate the realms of Chaos and old Night; and of dramatists who, disclaiming the pedantry of the unities, sought, at the expense of occasional improbabilities and extravagance, to present life on the stage in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all its boundless variety of character. . . Their fictitious narratives, their ballad poetry, and other branches of their literature which are particularly apt to bear the stamp of the extravagant and the supernatural, began also to occupy the attention of the British literati." Scott's German studies were much assisted by Alexander Frazer Tytler, whose version of Schiller's "Robbers" was one of the earliest English translations from the German theater.[20]
In the autumn of 1794 Miss Aikin, afterward Mrs. Barbauld, entertained a party at Dugald Stewart's by reading a translation of Bürger's ghastly ballad "Lenore." The translation was by William Taylor of Norwich; it had not yet been published, and Miss Aikin read it from a manuscript copy. Scott was not present, but his friend Mr. Cranstoun described the performance to him; and he was so much impressed by his description that he borrowed a volume of Burger's poems from his young kinswoman by marriage, Mrs. Scott of Harden, a daughter of Count Brühl of Martkirchen, formerly Saxon ambassador at London, who had a Scotchwoman for his second wife, the dowager Countess of Egremont. Scott set to work in 1795 to make a translation of the ballad for himself, and succeeded so well in pleasing his friends that he had a few copies struck off for private circulation in the spring of 1796. In the autumn of the same year he published his version under the title "William and Helen," together with "The Chase," a translation of Bürger's "Der Wilde Jäger." The two poems made a thin quarto volume. It was printed at Edinburgh, was anonymous, and was Walter Scott's first published book. Meanwhile Taylor had given his rendering to the public in the March number of the Monthly Magazine, introducing it with a notice of Burger's poems; and the very same year witnessed the appearance of three other translations, one by J. T. Stanley (with copperplate engravings), one by Henry James Pye, the poet laureate, and one by the Hon. William Robert Spencer,—author of "Beth Gelert." "Too Late I Stayed," etc.,—with designs by Lady Diana Beauclerc. (A copy of this last, says Allibone, in folio, on vellum, sold at Christie's in 1804 for L25 4s.) A sixth translation, by the Rev. James Beresford, who had lived some time in Berlin, came out about 1800; and Schlegel and Brandl unite in pronouncing this the most faithful, if not the best, English version of the ballad.[21]
The poem of which England had taken such manifold possession, under the varied titles "Lenore," "Leonore," "Leonora," "Lenora," "Ellenore," "Helen," etc., was indeed a noteworthy one. In the original, it remains Bürger's masterpiece, and in its various English dresses it gained perhaps as many graces as it lost. It was first printed at Göttingen in Boie's "Musen Almanach" in 1773. It was an uncanny tale of a soldier of Frederick the Great, who had perished in the Seven Years' War, and who came at midnight on a spectral steed to claim his ladylove and carry her off a thousand miles to the bridal bed. She mounts behind him and they ride through the phantasms of the night till, at cock-crow, they come to a churchyard. The charger vanishes in smoke, the lover's armor drops from him, green with the damps of the grave, revealing a skeleton within, and the maiden finds that her nuptial chamber is the charnel vault, and her bridegroom is Death. "This poem," says Scherer, "leaves on us, to some degree, the impression of an unsolved mystery; all the details are clear, but at the end we have to ask ourselves what has really happened; was it a dream of the girl, a dream in which she died, or did the ghost really appear and carry her away?"[22] The story is managed, indeed, with much of that subtle art which Coleridge used in "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel"; so that the boundary between the earthly and the unearthly becomes indefinite, and the doubt continually occurs whether we are listening to a veritable ghost-story, or to some finer form of allegory. "Lenore" drew for its materials upon ballad motives common to many literatures. It will be sufficient to mention "Sweet William's Ghost," as an English example of the class.
Scott's friends assured him that his translation was superior to Taylor's, and Taylor himself wrote to him: "The ghost nowhere makes his appearance so well as with you, or his exit so well as with Mr. Spencer." But Lewis was right in preferring Taylor's version, which has a wildness and quaintness not found in Scott's more literal and more polished rendering, and is wonderfully successful in catching the Grobheit, the rude, rough manner of popular poetry. A few stanzas from each will illustrate the difference:
[From Scott's "William and Helen."]
"Dost fear? dost fear? The moon shines clear:—
Dost fear to ride with me?
Hurrah! Hurrah! the dead can ride"—
"O William, let them be!"
"See there! see there! What yonder swings
And creaks 'mid whistling rain?"
"Gibbet and steel, the accursed wheel;
A murd'rer in his chain.
"Halloa! Thou felon, follow here:
To bridal bed we ride;
And thou shalt prance a fetter dance
Before me and my bride."
And hurry! hurry! clash, clash, clash!
The wasted form descends,[23]
And fleet as wind through hazel bush
The wild career attends.[23]
Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash, splash! along the sea:
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee.
[From Taylor's "Lenora."]
Look up, look up, an airy crewe
In roundel dances reele.
The moone is bryghte and blue the night,
May'st dimly see them wheel.[24]
"Come to, come to, ye ghostlie crewe,
Come to and follow me.
And daunce for us the wedding daunce
When we in bed shall be."
And brush, brush, brush, the ghostlie crew
Come wheeling o'er their heads,
All rustling like the withered leaves
That wyde the whirlwind spreads.
Halloo! halloo! Away they goe
Unheeding wet or drye,
And horse and rider snort and blowe,
And sparkling pebbles flye.
And all that in the moonshine lay
Behynde them fled afar;
And backward scudded overhead
The skye and every star.
Tramp, tramp across the land they speede,
Splash, splash across the sea:
"Hurrah! the dead can ride apace,
Dost fear to ride with me?"
It was this stanza which fascinated Scott, as repeated from memory by Mr. Cranstoun; and he retained it without much change in his version. There is no mention of the sea in Bürger, whose hero is killed in the battle of Prague and travels only by land. But Taylor nationalized and individualized the theme by making his William a knight of Richard the Lion Heart's, who had fallen in Holy Land. Scott followed him and made his a crusader in the army of Frederic Barbarossa. Bürger's poem was written in an eight-lined stanza, but Taylor and Scott both chose the common English ballad verse, with its folkloreish associations, as the best vehicle for reproducing the grewsome substance of the story; and Taylor gave an archaic cast to his diction, still further to heighten the effect. Lewis considered his version a masterpiece of translation, and, indeed, "far superior, both in spirit and in harmony, to the German." Taylor showed almost equal skill in his rendering of Bürger's next most popular ballad, "Des Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain," first printed in the Monthly Magazine for April, 1796, under the somewhat odd title of "The Lass of Fair Wone."
Taylor of Norwich did more than any man of his generation, by his translations and critical papers in the Monthly Magazine and Monthly Review, to spread a knowledge of the new German literature in England. When a lad of sixteen he had been sent to study at Detmold, Westphalia, and had spent more than a year (1781-82) in Germany, calling upon Goethe at Weimar, with a letter of introduction, on his way home to England. "When his acquaintance with this literature began," wrote Lucy Aikin, "there was probably no English translation of any German author but through the medium of the French, and he is very likely to have been the first Englishman of letters to read Goethe, Wieland, Lessing, and Bürger in the originals."[25] Some years before the publication of his "Lenora" he had printed for private distribution translations of Lessing's "Nathan der Weise" (1791) and Goethe's "Iphigenie auf Tauris" (1793). In 1829-30 he gathered up his numerous contributions to periodicals and put them together in a three-volume "Historic Survey of German Poetry," which was rather roughly, though not disrespectfully, handled by Carlyle in the Edinburgh Review. Taylor's tastes were one-sided, not to say eccentric; he had not kept up with the later movement of German thought; his critical opinions were out of date, and his book was sadly wanting in unity and a proper perspective. Carlyle was especially scandalized by the slight space accorded to Goethe.[26] But Taylor's really brilliant talent in translation, and his important service as an introducer and interpreter of German poetry to his own countrymen, deserve always to be gratefully remembered. "You have made me hunger and thirst after German poetry," wrote Southey to him, February 24, 1799.[27]