his political creed was a natural development of Whig principle, an aristocratic Republicanism, veiled under the forms of Monarchy. The emphatic difference in the family character of the two generations was, in fact, to a very great extent, the result of external circumstances. In the time of Sir Robert the Whigs were a select body fighting for the establishment of a constitutional principle : the latter half of the eighteenth century saw the constitutional battle won, the political compromise effected, the Hanoverian dynasty firmly established: the little society which had gained the victory was now chiefly concerned with the division of the spoils; and the son of its great leader became the witty and cynical chronicler of its ideas, its tastes, and its amusements. Horace Walpole's epistolary correspondence illustrates in almost every page the character of the transition :— Oh my dear sir (he writes to John Chute), don't you find that nine parts in ten of the world are of no use but to make you wish yourself with that tenth part? I am so far from growing used to mankind by living amongst them, that my natural ferocity and wildness does but every day grow worse. They tire me, they fatigue me; I don't know what to do with them; I fling open the windows, and fancy I want air; and when I get by myself, I undress myself, and seem to have had people in my pockets, in my plaits, and on my shoulders! I fear 'tis growing old; but I literally seem to have murdered a man whose name was Ennui, for his ghost is ever before me. They say there is no English word for ennui; I think you may translate it most literally by what is called "entertaining people" and "doing the honours": that is, you sit an hour with somebody you don't know and don't care for, talk about the wind and the weather, and ask a thousand foolish questions, which all begin with, “I think you live a good deal in the country," or, "I think you don't love this thing or that." Oh! 'tis dreadful! 1 For this malady the cure appeared to lie in the free indulgence of an Epicurean æstheticism : I'll tell you (Horace goes on) what is delightful-the Domenichin! My dear sir, if ever there was a Domenichin, if there was ever an original picture, this is one. I am quite 1 Letter of August 20, 1743. happy; for my father is as much transported with it as I am. It is hung in the gallery, where are all his most capital pictures, and he himself thinks it beats all but the two Guidos. That of the Doctors and the Octagon-I don't know if you ever saw them? What a chain of thought this leads me into! but why should I not indulge it? I will flatter myself with your some time or other passing a few days here with me. Why must I never expect to see anything but Beefs1 in a gallery which would not yield even to the Colonna ? 2 Alike in his ennui and his æstheticism, the spirit of the aristocratic Whig breathes through Walpole's utterHe wanted more liberty of imagination, and he was a rebel against Classic Form :— ances. The Grecian (says he in a letter to Horace Mann) is only proper for magnificent and public buildings. Columns and all their beautiful ornaments look ridiculous when crowded into a closet or a cheese-cake house. The variety is little, and admits no charming irregularities. I am almost as fond of the Sharawaggi or Chinese want of symmetry in buildings as in grounds or gardens. I am sure whenever you come to England you will be pleased with the liberty of taste into which we are struck and of which you can have no idea.3 Hence he was all for an agreeable licence in Landscape Gardening, and was quite ready to destroy the old formal style of garden to make room for "Kent and Nature." Hence, too, he thought that, in fiction, the right rule was to combine the supernatural "machinery" of the Middle Ages with the modern imitation of Nature, and he exemplified his principles in The Castle of Otranto, with a result that is humorously described in a letter of George James Williams to George Selwyn : It consists of ghosts and enchantments; pictures walk out of their frames and are good company for half an hour together; helmets drop from the moon and cover half a family.* Hence, once more, he pleased himself in his Mysterious Mother with an attempt to revive upon the modern stage, 1 i.e. Squires. 2 Horace Walpole to John Chute. Letter of August 20, 1743. 3 Horace Walpole: A Memoir, by Austin Dobson, p. 117. 4 Ibid. p. 173. in opposition to the formal classicism of plays like Cato, the "melodramatic" style of some of the Elizabethans : Il ne vous plairoit pas assurément (he writes to his friend Mme. de Deffand); il n'y a pas de beaux sentiments. Il n'y a que des passions sans envelope, des crimes, des repentis, et des horreurs.1 : But all this liberty of spirit and imagination was only to be enjoyed by the virtuoso it was illegitimate for the vulgar. When Walpole went to Paris he was shocked to find that polite society aired its religious scepticism before servants waiting at dinner : Free-thinking (said he, commenting on the circumstance,) is for oneself, surely not for society. For literature it is very amusing when one has nothing else to do . . . and besides, in this country one is sure it is only the fashion of the day.2 This is somewhat in the manner of Lord Froth: “To be pleased with what pleases the crowd! Now when I laugh, I always laugh alone.” As the eighteenth century advanced, Romanticism. like Horace Walpole's became more and more prevalent in fashionable society, and there are touches of the petit maître in the criticism even of a scholar so learned as Gray. But such affectations are only the surface symptoms of a movement in society at large, deeper, wider, and more democratic. Certain needs and feelings of the human imagination had been for the time suppressed by the Revolution of 1688, and these forces, again rising into activity, were threatening to dissolve both the constitutional compromise and the classical conventions of taste by which that compromise was attended. I shall attempt in this chapter a brief criticism of the various moods of the Romantic Movement, and of the works that gave expression to it, up to the time when the dykes containing the torrent were broken down by the force of the French Revolution.3 1 Letters of the Marquise du Deffand (1810), vol. i. p. 211. 2 Horace Walpole, by Austin Dobson, p. 174. 3 An excellent account of the progress of the medieval revival in the eighteenth century may be found in Professor Phelps' Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement (Boston, 1893), to which the reader is referred. In the first place it should be noted that the Romantic movement, in most of its forms, was entirely literary: it involved either an adaptation or a revival of some mode of imaginative expression peculiar to a past age. The earliest note of the new style was pastoral, and may be said to have been sounded by a North Briton, Allan Ramsay, born at Leadhill, in Lanarkshire, on the 15th of October 1686. His father was a superintendent of the lead-mills of Cranford Moor for Lord Hopetoun, and he himself had little education, having been apprenticed at an early age to a wig-maker in Edinburgh. In 1712 he married Christina Ross, by whom he had a numerous family, which stimulated him to supplement the labours of the barber with those of the poet. A few years afterwards he edited the old poem Christ's Kirk o' the Green, adding to it a canto of his own as a sequel, an experiment which seems to have given him the first idea of writing in the Scottish dialect. His Muse now became productive. In 1721 he collected his Fugitive Pieces: his Fables and Tales appeared in 1722; his Tale of Three Bonnets in 1723; his Evergreen (a collection of Scotch pieces, supposed to have been written before 1600, but of which many were certainly written after 1700) in 1724. The Gentle Shepherd, his most famous poem, was published in 1725, after which his only important work was a Collection of Thirty Fables, which appeared in 1730. Part of the vogue his poetry enjoyed was due to a feeling, widespread in Scotland after the Union, that the nationality of the northern Kingdom was in danger of being lost. Ramsay shared this sentiment, and to confirm it built, in 1736, a theatre in Edinburgh for the exhibition of Scottish plays. His wife died in 1743. He himself, who had made a small fortune from his two professions, retired from business in 1755, and died on the 7th of January 1756. The Gentle Shepherd is a variation of the pastoral plays developed by Tasso and Guarini out of suggestions furnished to them by the Arcadia of Sanazzaro. From Italy, where these had long been replaced by the operas which naturally grew out of them, the pastoral drama had migrated to England, and had been employed by Fletcher, in The Faithful Shepherdess, and by Ben Jonson, in his fragment of The Sad Shepherd. This form of play was, however, not congenial to English dramatic ideas, and -though Walsh had advised Pope to use it1—had almost dropped out of sight, when it was revived by Allan Ramsay. Ramsay showed the genius of an original inventor in departing from the essential features of his model. He rejected the fiction of the Golden Age, and laid his action in the time of the English Commonwealth ; dispensing, by a logical sequence, with the traditional persons of nymphs, fauns, satyrs, etc.; and retaining, as a last relic of supernatural machinery, only the intervention of an old witch. His shepherds pipe in alternate strains after the usual bucolic manner; but the Doric effect of the literary eclogue is reproduced naturally by means of the Scotch dialect; the scenery described is not mythological, but the actual lake and mountain region amid which Ramsay had passed his boyhood. The plot, which is of the simplest, turns on the hidden relationship of the leading shepherd and shepherdess to an aristocratic personage, who boasts the very unpastoral name of Sir William Worthy: it essentially corresponds, in fact, with the features of "musical comedy" on the modern stage, and, after the success of The Beggars' Opera, Ramsay made a further approach to this type, by introducing into his play a number of songs, set to popular airs. The following passage will give an idea of the Doric character of the dialogue, carried on by the GraecoItalo-Scotch shepherds and shepherdesses in alternate strains :— JENNY. But what if some young giglet on the green, PEG. Wi' dimpled cheeks and twa bewitching een, Nae mair o' that !—Dear Jenny, to be free, 1 Letter of Walsh to Pope of 24th June 1706. |