Scottish poetry. Ramsay. Fergusson 701

into the. depths of human nature. His own experience of life taught him to despise " mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song," the sham classic pastoralism under which the poets of the early part of the eighteenth century had veiled the frequent wretchedness of the English rural labourer. He used the ethic mode of the heroic couplet employed by Pope, and afterwards developed by Johnson and Goldsmith, as an instrument for describing the actual condition of the poor; and his Parish Register, his Borough, and his Tales, entitle him to the praise bestowed upon him by Byron as " Nature's sternest painter, yet her best."

Meantime the great advance of the democratic spirit in the British nation is clearly illustrated by the vernacular poetry of Scotland. This spirit assumed various external forms. In the first place, a strong centrifugal tendency in the constitution of the body politic made its appearance. Ever since the Union between England and Scotland a large party in the latter kingdom had deliberately emphasised the separate interests of the two countries ; and this disposition of the Scottish people soon reflected itself in poetry. It is particularly manifest in the poems of Allan Ramsay (1685-1758), who encouraged the sentiment of particularism by the use of the Scottish dialect in his poems, and by building a theatre in Edinburgh for the performance of Scotch plays. The latter proceeding tended to produce a revolutionary moral movement in society, bringing, as it did, poetical liberty into conflict with ecclesiastical public opinion, to which the stage, with all belonging to it, was an abomination. The strict and metaphysical form of Scottish theology provoked rebellion in men of strong natural instincts ; and this stimulated the poet to express the feelings of nature in the simplest modes of lyrical diction. " Scots songs " became immensely popular, particularly in the form which they received from the genius of Robert Fergusson (1750-74). An ardent Jacobite, and an enemy to all kinds of religious hypocrisy, Fergusson delighted to express his dislike of England, his love of old Scottish customs and superstitions, and his convivial impulses, in the national dialect, finding for it an admirable metrical vehicle in the rime eouee {caudata), which had taken root in poetry at a very early date in the history of Scotland1. He had received, like all his contemporaries of the same class, a training in Greek and Latin literature, which he turned to excellent account when writing in his native dialect. Most of his Scottish poems are of a light and humorous order; and he never soars to the regions of pathos and sublimity characteristic of his successor and imitator, Robert Burns (1759-96). Burns, carrying on the particularist tradition, which had descended to him, with a sentimental Jacobitism, from Ramsay and Fergusson, gave

1 In this system the stanza concludes with a line of fewer syllables than the lines immediately preceding it rhyming with a previous line of the same number of syllables.

702 Robert Burns

this feeling perhaps its finest form of expression in his Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled. His enthusiasm for liberty led him, though he was in government employ, to sympathise with the beginnings of the French Revolution; but this cosmopolitan tendency was strongly counteracted by his patriotic instincts, and by his apprehension of foreign invasion. On the other hand, the democratic ideas of the time, embodied in the French revolutionary phrase of " fraternity and equality," often find utterance in Burns' verse, the best example being perhaps furnished by the fine song, Is there for honest poverty, with its burden " For a' that and a' that."

Not less characteristic are the poems in which Burns gives utterance to his natural impulses in opposition to the Calvinistic theology of the Scottish Kirk. Fergusson, entertaining the same sentiments, had con fined himself to playing practical jokes on the loose-living professors of the doctrine of "election," without ever venturing to attack them in his verse. Burns, however, whose ardent temperament and irregularities of conduct more than once brought him into open collision with Kirk authority, avenged his own injuries bythe bitterest satire on his ecclesiastical judges, in his Twa Herds, Holy Willie's Prayer, and The Kirk's Alarm, he pours forth the volume of feeling which for three generations had been gathering among his countrymen in violent rebellion against the social tyranny of Presbyterianism.

But it was not so much the matter of Burns' verse as the complete propriety of its poetic form, which won for him the unique place he holds in the affections of his countrymen. He never sought after originality, much less eccentricity, of individual expression. The essential excellence of his poetry lies in its thoroughly representative character. When he aimed at effects in the " classical" style of eighteenth-century diction, he was generally unsuccessful; scarcely one of his compositions in ordinary English is other than commonplace. On the other hand, peasant as he was, he possessed the refinement of genius, and had an incomparable instinct as to the right way of handling the time-honoured songs of the people. In most of his vernacular lyrics the suggestion of the words or the tune may be found in the melodies of often nameless composers that had been for generations literally floating in the air. The genius and originality of Burns shine in giving a new turn to an old sentiment, in finding a current meaning for a traditional phrase, in putting the stamp of universal experience on idioms which, but for him, might have perished in local and particular obscurity. The versatility he shows in adapting the Scottish tongue to various metrical purposes is marvellous, ranging from satires and epistles in rime couee, full of words in common use, and written in the most colloquial idiom, to brilliant humorous narrative like Tarn 6' Shanter, and again from this to songs of exquisite sweetness, such as Mary Morrison, in which the polished language is just tempered to the required Doric simplicity

The Lake School 703

by a slight admixture of dialect. In all of them is manifest the embodied force of democracy, breaking through the half-literary, half-aristocratic conventions of language, which the continuous practice of many generations had established as the standard of English poetry.

Far different was the effect produced by the French Revolution on the taste of the more highly educated classes in England. Throughout the eighteenth century the principle which had given elevation and enthusiasm to the thoughts of these classes was civil liberty. As the natural consequence of party conflict, the affairs of the country had always a tendency to aimless drifting; but in political emergencies representative men — William III, Walpole, and the two Pitts — never failed to appear and to steer the vessel of the State on a constitutional course. Guided by an analogous critical influence, the English poets and prose-writers since the Revolution in their own country had continued to develop the language on the lines that had been followed by their predecessors in the three preceding generations. The stress of the French Revolution threatened to break down all the boundaries of constitutional tradition both in government and art. By it the hereditary doctrines embodied in the Declaration of Right were extended into sympathy with the perfectly abstract principles of liberty proclaimed by the French philosophers as the Rights of Man ; and, by an analogous intellectual movement, the freedom of invention, which had always been claimed as their birthright by English poets, in opposition to the supposed Aristotelian " rules," was now transformed into a metaphysical theory, which demanded for the individual imagination liberty to dispense with rules of every kind.

The poets by whom the new principles of art, as well as of politics, were first philosophically defended were known as the Lake School. Technically, indeed, the term " school" is hardly applicable to them, for the three leading writers who were classed under the name differed among themselves in the most striking manner as regards their thought and style. But they were united by certain fundamental agreements. All of them were in sympathy with the early principles and aspirations of the French Revolution, and in active opposition to the national policy of the English Government; all of them at a later period changed their views and became vehement anti-Jacobins ; and, lastfy, all of them, severing themselves, in theory, from the principle of historic continuity, by which the diction and versification of English poetry had hitherto been determined, proceeded, for the most part, upon the lines suggested by individual impulse. They were thus equally removed in practice from the aristocratic, classical school of Pope and his followers, and from the democratic, romantic school of Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns.

The eldest of the three, and the first pioneer of the new departure in poetry, was William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Bred in the society

704 Wordsworth. Coleridge

of Cumberland "statesmen," he was secluded during his childhood and youth from all contact with city life, and, in the Arcadian isolation of lake and mountain scenery, habituated himself to an impassioned observation of the moods of external Nature and of his own mind. The imaginative tendencies thus formed in him were strengthened by his literary studies at Cambridge ; and, after he had taken his degree, a tour in France inclined him to a strong sympathy with the abstract principles of the French Revolution. On his return to England he engaged in a political controversy with Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, in which he appeared as an advocate for some of the doctrines of Tom Paine. At the same time he published a volume of poems, chiefly characterised by an attempt to express an enthusiastic love of Nature in the conventional diction of the heroic couplet. Soon afterwards, in his Female Vagrant, he employed the Spenser stanza as a vehicle for describing the common objects and experiences in which his imagination was interested. But it is evident that, finding these elaborate and artificial metres unsuited to his purpose, he became more and more disposed to look for his instrument in the simplicity of the ballad metre, and to free himself in longer compositions from the trammels of rhyme. In 1795 he made the acquaintance of Coleridge ; and the two almost immediately formed an alliance which exercised on the genius of each a reciprocal influence, ultimately destined to react on the public taste. The firstfruits of their co-operation were Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798, the character of which is thus described by Coleridge:

" The thought suggested itself — to which of us I do not recollect — that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one the incidents and agents were to be in, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life ; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves." (Biograpliia Literaria, Vol. II, Chap. 1.)

The first class was represented by Coleridge's Ancient Mariner; the larger part of the volume being made up of poems by Wordsworth, written in his new ballad manner, mixed with others in a more elevated style of blank verse. Neither attempt was at first received with much favour by the reading public. Wordsworth was inclined to attribute the ill-success of the volume to the appearance in it of The Ancient Mariner. Coleridge, with more justice, ascribed it to the over-simple style of some of Wordsworth's poems, which offered an obvious mark for critical

Principles of Wordsworth and Coleridge 705

ridicule. In 1800 a second edition of Lyrical Ballads was issued, accompanied by a preface, wherein Wordsworth offered a philosophical defence of his poetical practice, both as regards conception and expression, and seemed to argue that his were the only principles on which true poetry could be composed. The somewhat arrogant motive of his reasoning was indicated with particular emphasis in his theory of poetical diction : " The first volume of these poems," he said, " has been already submitted to general perusal. It was published as an experiment which I hoped might be of some use to ascertain how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted which a poet may rationally endeavour to impart." At the same time he endeavoured to prove that poets of established reputation had imparted pleasure by irrational means, and declared that, if his reasoning were right, men would have to revise their opinion as to the merits of the greatest writers of verse. On the question of poetical diction Coleridge was completely at issue with Wordsworth, and the difference between them led the former to the reasoned system put forward in Biographia Literaria as the philosophical basis of all poetical composition.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) had by far the greatest natural genius of those who composed the Lake School. Distinguished for powers of discursive eloquence in conversation perhaps beyond any man since the time of Socrates, he could bring an array of arguments, images, and emotions to bear with intense conviction upon any subject that for the moment excited his enthusiasm. But he was wanting in the moral force and resolution required to bring his manifold intuitions to a practical result. His mind was full of title-pages ; he saw in a moment of inspiration the contents of a book, which he imagined himself to be writing, but of which not a page ever appeared. He sometimes thought out a whole system of apparently connected metaphysics, only to acknowledge, when it was reduced to form, that it had no basis of reality. Hence he could not compare with Wordsworth — inferior as the latter was to him as a philosophical critic — in the influence he exercised on the course of English poetry.

He agreed with his friend in the principle of cutting loose from all historical continuity in the practice of the art; since for history and fact he cared nothing. He agreed with him also in making the mind of the individual poet the centre of all poetical production. " The Imagination," he says, " I consider either as primary or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and