Introduction to Browning | Page 9

claimed to be translations from the poems of Ossian, the son of Fingal.?Whether genuine or not, these poems indicated the tendency of the time. In Scotland, the old ballad spirit, which had continued to exist with a vigor but little abated by the influence of the artificial, mechanical school of poetry, was gathered up and intensified in the songs of him "who walked in glory and in joy,?following his plow, along the mountain-side", and who is entitled to a high rank among the poetical reformers of the age.
It is not surprising that the great literary dictator in Percy's day, Dr. Samuel Johnson, should treat the old ballads with ridicule. The good man had been trained in a different school of poetry, and could not in his old age yield to the reactionary movement. Bishop Warburton, who ranked next to Johnson in literary authority, had nothing but sneering contempt to bestow upon upon the old ballads, and this feeling was shared by many others in the foremost ranks of literature and criticism. But in the face of all opposition, and aided by the yearning for literary liberty that was abroad, the old ballads grew more and more into favor. The influence of this folklore was not confined to England. It extended across the sea, and swayed the genius of such poets as Buerger and Goethe?and Schiller.
Along with the poetical revival in the eighteenth century,?came the great religious revival inaugurated by the Wesleys and Whitefield; and of this revival, the poetry of William Cowper was a direct product. But the two revivals were co-radical, -- one was not derived from the other. The long-suppressed?spiritual elements of the nation began to reassert themselves in religion and in poetry. The Church had been as sound asleep as the Muses.
Cowper belongs to the Whitefield side of the religious revival, the Evangelicals, as they were called (those that remained within the Establishment). In his poem entitled `Hope', he vindicates the memory of Whitefield under the name Leuconomus, a translation into Greek, of White field. It was his conversion to Evangelicism which gave him his inspiration and his themes. `The Task' has been as justly called the poem of Methodism as the `Paradise Lost' has been called the epic of Puritanism. In it we are presented with a number of pictures of the utterly fossilized condition of the clergy of the day in the Established Church (see especially book II., vv. 326-832, in which he satirizes the clergy and the universities).
Cowper has been truly characterized by Professor Goldwin Smith, as "the apostle of feeling to a hard age, to an artificial age, the apostle of nature. He opened beneath the arid surface?of a polished but soulless society, a fountain of sentiment which had long ceased to flow."
The greatest things in this world are often done by those?who do not know they are doing them. This is especially true of William Cowper. He was wholly unaware of the great mission he was fulfilling; his contemporaries were wholly unaware of it. And so temporal are the world's standards, in the best of times, that spiritual regenerators are not generally recognized until long after they have passed away, when the results of what they did are fully ripe, and philosophers begin to trace the original impulses.
"Only reapers, reaping early?In among the bearded barley,?Hear a song that echoes cheerly?From the river winding clearly
Down to towered Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary,?Piling sheaves in uplands airy,?Listening, whispers, 'Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott."
John Burroughs, in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman?entitled `The Flight of the Eagle', quotes the following sentence from a lecture on Burns, delivered by "a lecturer from over seas", whom he does not name: "When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be done; and to give life to that dying literature, a man must be found not educated under its influence."
Such a man I would say was William Cowper, who, in his weakness, was
"Strong to sanctify the poet's high vocation",
and who
"Testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy desolated, -- Nor man nor angel satisfies whom only God created."
John Keats, in his poem entitled `Sleep and Poetry',?has well characterized the soulless poetry of the period between the Restoration and the poetical revival in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but more especially of the Popian period. After speaking of the greatness of his favorite poets?of the Elizabethan period, he continues: --
"Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism?Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,?Made great Apollo blush for this his land.?Men were thought wise who could not understand?His glories: with a puling infant's force?They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse,?And thought it Pegasus."
(Alluding to the rocking-horse movement of the Popian verse.)
"Ah dismal soul'd!?The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd?It's