CHAPTER VII DEVELOPMENT OF THE ETHICAL SCHOOL OF POPE THOMAS PARNELL; RICHARD SAVAGE; SAMUEL JOHNSON ; OLIVER GOLDSMITH; WILLIAM FALCONER COWPER, describing the influence of Pope on English Poetry, says of him, in his Table Talk, that He (his musical finesse was such, So nice his ear, so delicate his touch) And every warbler has the tune by heart. How wide of the mark this judgment is may be inferred from the names of the five poets which head the present chapter. All of them were beyond question men of genius; all of them were, in different degrees, disciples of Pope; all of them followed in his footsteps as regards the observance of the heroic couplet; and yet the poetry of each is distinguished from that of the others by the strongest individuality of character, the most emphatic variety of style. Cowper's criticism is, in fact, prejudiced, and wanting in historical perspective. He had little sympathy with Pope, who used a metrical instrument ill qualified to express the feelings by which Cowper himself was moved, and he therefore undervalued the great Georgian satirist as a representative of national thought. It is unphilosophical to believe that a single poet can turn the art of poetry into any channel that he will by his own genius: the greatest artists are those who best understand the conflict of tendencies in their own age, and who, though they rise above it into the region of universal truth, are moved by it to reflect in their work its particular form and character. That there was an inevitable trend of the public taste through the eighteenth century towards satiric or didactic poetry is proved, as I showed in the last chapter, by the whole development of Pope's genius. But this view is still further confirmed by the fact that, before Pope began to develop his latest style, and for a considerable time after his death, there was a continued tendency to use the heroic couplet in his manner, as a vehicle for subjects of living social interest. An ethical school of writers, in fact, modelling their metrical style, with different degrees of closeness, on Pope, grew up spontaneously after the Revolution of 1688, of whom the first was Thomas Parnell. This poet, though of English descent, was born in Dublin in 1679, and was educated first in a school kept there by Dr. Jones. At the age of thirteen he was admitted into Trinity College, Dublin, where he took his degree of M.A. when only twenty-one. In the same year (1700) he was ordained deacon, while still under the canonical age; and in 1705, having taken priest's orders, was appointed Archdeacon of Clogher. Though his father had been an adherent of Cromwell, Parnell was among the Whigs who attached themselves to the party of Harley and Bolingbroke. He seems to have paid his first visit to England about 1706, but he did not come into prominent notice till Swift introduced him to Harley, then Lord Oxford, in 1712. Some time in that year he lost his wife (Anne Minchin), to whom he was married in 1705, and to whom he was devotedly attached. Swift's references to Parnell in his Journal to Stella are frequent; he tried, but without success, to obtain for him preferment in England, where most of the Archdeacon's time was apparently spent in literary society. Parnell was one of the leading members of the Scriblerus Club, and his classical learning was of great use to Pope, who frequently consulted him about his Translation of the Iliad, to which Parnell contributed the Preface. The two became great friends they went as companions to Bath: Parnell was entertained at Binfield by Pope: they were together at Letcombe in the last days of the Tory Administration. When the latter was destroyed by the death of the Queen, and all hopes of preferment were consequently at an end, the Archdeacon returned to his living in Ireland, and wrote thence his Epistle to Pope, which expresses characteristically his appreciation of the social pleasures he had left behind him. He seems to have paid only one more visit to England, bringing with him a number of unpublished poems, which he left for correction in the hands of Pope. On his journey home to his living at Finglass, to which he had been presented in 1716, he was taken ill at Chester, and died there in July 1717. Pope published his Poems in 1721, dedicating them, in famous verses, to the Earl of Oxford. It is probable that they owe something of their polish to his corrections, for he says, in one of his letters, that they were only “a small part of what he [Parnell] left behind him, and that he [Pope] would not make it worse by enlarging it."1 Interesting appreciations of Parnell's work have been left by Goldsmith and Campbell, both of whom belonged to the school of which Parnell was the earliest representative. The former says: He appears to me to be the last of that great school that had modelled itself on the ancients and taught English poetry to resemble what the generality of mankind have allowed to excel. A studious and correct observer of antiquity, he set himself to consider nature with the lights it lent him, and he found the more aid he borrowed from the one, the more delightfully he resembled the other. To copy nature is a task the most bungling workman is able to execute; to select such parts as contribute to delight is reserved only for those whom accident has blessed with uncommon talents, or such as have read the ancients with indefatigable industry. Parnell is ever happy in the selection of his images, and scrupulously careful in the choice of his subjects. His productions bear no resemblance to those tawdry things } Pope to Jervas. Letter of December 12, 1718. which it has for some time been the fashion to admire; in writing which the poet sits down without any plan, and heaps up splendid images without any selection; when the reader grows dizzy with praise and admiration, and yet soon grows weary he can scarcely tell why. Our poet on the contrary gives out his beauties with a more sparing hand. He is still carrying the reader forward, and just gives him refreshment sufficient to support him to his journey's end. At the end of his course, the reader regrets that his way has been so short, he wonders that it gave him so little trouble, and so resolves to go the journey over again. "1 To which Campbell adds, with much felicity: The compass of Parnell's poetry is not extensive, but its tone is peculiarly delightful; not from mere correctness of expression, to which some critics have stinted its praises, but from the graceful and reserved sensibility that accompanied his polished phraseology. The curiosa felicitas, the studied happiness of his diction, does not spoil its simplicity. His poetry is like a flower that has been trained and planted by the skill of the gardener, but which preserves in its cultured state the natural fragrance of its wilder air. 2 It will be gathered from these criticisms-and we have to remember that Goldsmith's exaltation of Parnell's merits is partly inspired by his dislike for the opposite style of Gray-that the characteristics of Parnell's genius are choiceness and purity, rather than force and elevation. He appears to have aimed at a mean between the literary classicalism of Pope and the colloquial idiom of Prior and Swift. His subjects were generally suggested to him by something he had read, and which he sought to reproduce with an exquisiteness resembling that of the Greek Anthologists. His reading lay largely in the bypaths of literature, as may be seen by his translations of such poems as the Pervigilium Veneris, the Batrachomyomachia, and by many paraphrases from the mediaval Latin and the modern French. In decorating these selected themes, the chief qualities he displays are a gay and humorous fancy, joined to a fastidious elegance of Most of his more important poems are pervaded taste. 1 Life of Thomas Parnell (1770). 2 Essay on English Poetry. by an air of moral reflection, which prompted the point of Johnson's graceful epitaph : Hic requiescit Thomas Parnell S.T.P. Ut neque Sacerdoti suavitas Poetae, Nec Poetae Sacerdotis sanctitas, deesset. Goldsmith also asks What heart but feels his sweetly moral lay, That leads to truth through pleasure's flowery way? Two or three passages will serve to illustrate what has been said of the graceful ease, the moral tone, and the familiar elegance of Parnell's style. The first is the opening of his most popular poem, The Hermit : Far in a wild, unknown to public view, A life so sacred, such serene repose, So, when a smooth expanse receives imprest And glimmering fragments of a broken sun, Banks, trees, and skies, in thick disorder run. The following is from An Elegy, To an Old Beauty:1 the last line of the quotation has become proverbial :— 1 The idea of this poem seems to have been suggested by Horace's Ode (iii. 15) beginning "Uxor pauperis Ibyci." |