CHAPTER 3. OTHER POETS OF THE CLASSICAL TRADITION Prior-Parnell-Gay-Goldsmith " Introductory. Amongst the secondary writers of the time of Queen Anne none is more representative of the "spirit of the age" than are Prior, Parnell, and Gay. Prior and Gay were essentially poets of The Town." They were men of the world," for whom the writing of poetry was a mere diversion, a light amusement rather than a high and serious calling.' Their verse is predominantly social verse" in a predominantly social age. Parnell, too, loved the town, and passed most of his life amongst the literary circles of London. Nevertheless, his poetry shows an appreciation of nature greater than that of any of his minor contemporaries. The range of these poets is limited, but within their limits they are master craftsmen. Goldsmith was by temperament a poet of type similar to Prior, Parnell, and Gay, and in some of his light verse the resemblance is clearly revealed. But, antagonistic as he was in theory to Gray and others of his time who felt the first stirrings of romance, he could not escape the changed influences of his own age, so that in his verse there often sounds a deeper note, a more intimate emotion, a touch of sentiment, alien from the Augustan temper. MATTHEW PRIOR (1664-1721) Life and Character.-Matthew Prior was born in Middlesex in 1664. His father, a joiner, moved to London, where Matthew attended Westminster School. Upon his father's death the boy worked in his uncle's wine-shop in London. The Earl of Dorset, finding him studying Horace, sent him back to Westminster. In 1683 Prior entered St. John's College, Cambridge, as a scholar, graduated B.A. in 1686, and was elected fellow of his college in 1688. For some In 1690, by Dorset's aid, Prior began his career as a public servant. years he was secretary to Lord Dursley, English Ambassador at the Hague. Later, he was secretary to the British Embassy in Paris. He returned to England in 1699; in 1700 he entered Parliament as a Whig, but later joined the Tories, by whom he was employed in various political offices. Upon the fall of the Tories he was imprisoned (1715-17). After his release he lived in comfortable retirement by means of the help of friends and the proceeds of his poems. He died of a fever on September 18, 1721. 1" Poetry, which by the bent of my Mind might have become the Business of my life, was by the happyness of my Education only the Amusement of it."-Prior, Essay upon Learning. Prior says elsewhere that his poems are "the Product of his leisure Hours, who had Business enough upon his Hands, and was only a Poet by Accident."-Preface to Poems on Several Occasions. Works.-The poems upon which Prior's fame rests are to be found in the various editions of his Poems on Several Occasions, the chief collection being that dated 1718. His attempts at the fashionable Pindaric Ode (e.g., Carmen Seculare, "For the Year 1700❞—an ode to William III.) are of no value. Many of his poems were published as broadsides; hence some verses attributed to him are not certainly known to be his. His first published work, The Hind and the Panther Transvers'd to the Story of the Country-Mouse and the City-Mouse (1687), is a travesty of Dryden's Hind and the Panther, and was written in collaboration with Charles Montagu. Down Hall appeared in 1723. Prior's prose works, his Essays and Dialogues of the Dead (not published until 1907), deserve high praise. They are in the line of Lyttelton's Dialogues of the Dead and Landor's Imaginary Conversations. Characteristics. The gay, wanton, somewhat artificial muse of Prior, about whose paint and powder there still clings something of Restoration coarseness, has a French vivacity and variability, so that even amidst her most riotous laughter tears are seldom far from her eyes. Prior lives to-day, not by the odes written to William or Anne, or to celebrate British victories-odes inspired by political ambition;' not even by the once famous English Ballad on the Taking of Namur (1695), a clever parody of Boileau's Ode sur la Prise de Namur; but by his light, occasional verse. Prior would undoubtedly have made a clever satirist; but he avoided satire, fearing that it might make enemies, and hinder the accomplishment of worldly success. At times the poet attempted the serious or semi-serious didactic verse typical of the 18th century. He thought the dull poem Solomon his best work, and Wesley and Cowper gave it high praise. In Henry and Emma he turned the fine old ballad of The Nut-Browne Maide into weak verse. In Alma, a humorous and speculative poem on the relations of the soul and body, a work written during the time of his imprisonment, the poet follows in the wake of Hudibras. He had much of Chaucer's sly humour, and it is not strange that he attempted Two Imitations of Chaucer, and also wrote several tales in verse in which the mingled humour and coarseness of much of the Canterbury Tales is to be found. Prior's poetic exemplar is Horace. He is a master of that "familiar style" in poetry which runs through the work of Cowper, Thackeray," "Thomas Ingoldsby," LockerLampson, Praed, and Calverley to Austin Dobson. It is in his occasional social verse that the real, lovable Prior speaks to us. He is indeed an 18th-century Herrick. His Cloes" are but Augustan " Julias," sometimes with an added touch of temper. 1 Published 1719. See Life by Bickley, p. 250. 2 e.g., To the King, 1695; An Ode, humbly inscrib'd to the Queen; On the glorious success of Her Majesty's arms, 1706; etc. 3 See Essay upon Learning.-Works, ed. Waller, II. 185. 4 See Cowper's Letter to William Unwin, January 17, 1782. B " 'Prior's seem to me among the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorous of English lyrical poems."-Thackeray, English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. To be vext at a Trifle or two that I writ, Your Judgment at once, and my Passion You wrong: It is to the strain of such dancing anapæsts as these that the Bohemian Prior lightly pursues his loves and quarrels, in defiance of the fashionable decasyllabic and octosyllabic couplet. He has Herrick's pseudo-paganism, born of Horace and the Greek Anthology,' Herrick's love of women and wine. Venus, take my Votive Glass, Since I am not what I was; His humour is at its best inimitable: delicate, airy, with an occasional undertone of sadness, as in his verses For My Own Monument and To a Child of Quality. This same delicacy of touch is found in the delightful narrative poem Down Hall. Prior's great virtue as a poet is his intense realism. He demands life, with all its noise, colour, change, crudity. He has no sympathy for the "sauntering Jacks and idle Joans" of the world. Nor Good, nor Bad, nor Fools, nor Wise; They led-a kind of—as it were: Nor Wish'd, nor Car'd, nor Laugh'd, nor Cry'd: And so They liv'd; and so They dy'd. The poet's sympathies were rather with that " Jinny the Just " who read and Accounted & payd & abated, Eat and drank, Play'd and Work't, laugh't and Cry'd, lov'd and hated, As answer'd the end of her being Created. In more serious mood Prior penned those verses which found their way long afterwards to the heart of Sir Walter Scott: 2 The Man in graver Tragic known (Tho' his best Part long since was done) Still on the Stage desires to tarry: And He who play'd the Harlequin, Prior indeed expressed the twofold aspect of his character in the thoughtless verses which Johnson records: (2,852) Et je suis triste quand je crie Bannissons la Mélancholie.3 1 See More Literary Recreations, by Sir Edward Cook (1919), pp. 345-6. 2 See Lockhart's Life of Scott, 2nd ed. (1853), pp. 738-9. See Johnson's Lives, ed. Hill, II. 199. II Basking in the light of his laughter, men have overlooked the shadows that reveal it as often but the sunshine of an April day. THOMAS PARNELL (1679-1718) Life and Character.-Thomas Parnell was born and educated in Dublin. He took holy orders in 1700, and in 1706 became Archdeacon of Clogher. Grief for the death. of his young wife in 1706, after five years of married life, caused him to fall into intemperate habits.' He died at Chester while returning to Ireland. Parnell was a friend of Swift and Pope, a member of the Scriblerus Club, and a contributor to the Spectator. He was fond of society, and, detesting life in Ireland, spent most of his time in London. Oliver Goldsmith wrote a Life of the poet. Works. Parnell's fame, such as it is, rests chiefly upon The Hermit, the Hymn to Contentment, an Allegory on Man, and a Night Piece on Death. His poems were published after his death in a volume entitled Poems on Severall Occasions.2 This volume was edited by Pope, who wisely suppressed some pieces. Posthumous Works appeared in 1758, provoking Gray to remark, "Parnell is the dunghill of Irish Grub-street." He also published, in 1717, a translation of Homer's Battle of the Frogs and Mice. Parnell's prose works include an uninteresting Essay on the Different Stiles of Poetry (1713), and an Essay on Homer (1715), prefixed to Pope's translation of the Iliad. Characteristics.—Parnell, Augustan though he was, bears in his poetry the marks of a period of literary transition. In A Night Piece on Death and A Hymn to Contentment we find the moralizing, didactic spirit of the 18th century, expressed with a certain felicity of diction and charm of style. In the first of these poems Parnell to some extent anticipates Gray's Elegy and the "Churchyard School" which followed Young's Night Thoughts. There is real feeling for nature in such lines as these: How deep yon azure dyes the sky, The grounds which on the right aspire, Whose wall the silent water laves. 1 Alternative cause given by Ruffhead, Life of Pope, p. 492, note. 3 Published 1721. See Poems, ed. G. A. Aitken (1894), p. xlix. 3 Gray's Letters, ed. D. C. Tovey (1900-12), Il. 37. That steeple guides thy doubtful sight Among the livid gleams of night. By all the solemn heaps of fate, "Time was, like thee they life possest, And time shall be, that thou shalt rest." A Hymn to Contentment shows a similar blending of description of nature with moralizing thought. There is an exquisite simplicity and directness in the following passage which takes it far from the usual manner of 18th-century verse: Lovely, lasting peace, appear! This world itself, if thou art here, 'Twas thus, as under shade I stood, The Hermit, the best known of Parnell's verses, is a moral, narrative poem. The story was not new, but Parnell tells it with real skill. In Parnell there also lingered something of the lighter music of late Caroline song. When thy beauty appears, In its graces and airs, All bright as an angel new dropt from the sky; At distance I gaze, and am aw'd by my fears, So strangely you dazzle my eye! In A Fairy Tale Parnell brings us amongst the fairies into a world of the supernatural a world soon to be almost lost to English poetry for nearly a century : In Britain's isle and Arthur's days, When midnight fairies daunc'd the maze. He can, when he pleases, be vulgar in the manner of Swift and Prior, but there is a touch of the true poet in the man who in Elysium, a forerunner of Tennyson's Dream of Fair Women, sings of " the beauties slain by tender passion": They range the reeds, and o'er the poppies sweep, That nodding bend beneath their load of sleep. Few readers of Parnell's works to-day would repeat Goldsmith's eulogies of him, but it is possible to argue that amongst the minor poets of the 18th century Parnell has received less than his due share of attention. |