Although most of these juvenile efforts were never completed, or if finished were never published, so many of them did get into print that the Monthly Review declared in 1802, "Epic poems are become 'as plenty as blackberries "";1 and the young Byron exclaimed, 1 Another Epic! Who inflicts again More books of blank upon the sons of men? 2 If these ambitious attempts had been warranted by considerable success in verse, or by evidences of unusual powers of poetical narration on the part of their authors, there would be less cause to wonder at their number; but as a rule they appear to have sprung only from the wish to join the ranks of the "bright celestial choir Of bards" by writing such potent lays As may the wide world fill with dumb amaze.3 Not that any of them succeeded in amazing the world; for we are told that they seldom lived longer "than the constitution of a republic, or the celebrity of a German drama," and it is certain that few eighteenth-century Iliads reached a second edition, and that only one, Glover's Leonidas, was really popular.5 Epic-writing was not, however, an isolated phenomenon; it was an expression of that love of the heroic of mouth-filling words, long speeches, and noble sentiments, of self-conscious but incredibly brave princes-which struts through the tragedy of the time. If even in that day such things did not attract readers, no wonder they now appear as absurd as drum-majors and showy uniforms in real war, no wonder they have been relegated to the melodrama, to the speeches of demagogues, and to Fourth-of-July orations. The epic seems to us, as indeed it did to Horace Walpole, to belong, with the Leonidas at the age of twenty-five; Sir William Jones was twenty-three when he formed the "design" and composed at least part of Britain Discovered, "an heroic poem in twelve books"; Richard Cumberland wrote part of an epic on India soon after he left college, and Landor composed the Phocaeans while at college; Henry Milman began Samor at Eton and nearly finished it before leaving Oxford; Macaulay wrote three cantos of Olaus the Great when he was only eight years old, and parts of at least three more epic poems before he was fourteen; and John Fitchett cannot have been much over twenty when he began his lifelong struggle with King Alfred. 1 Enlarged ed., xxxvii. 359. * Cary, Sonnets, etc. (1788), 33. 2 English Bards, 385-6. • Mo. Rev., enl. ed., xxxvii. 359 (1802). The year previous the Critical Review, after a long discussion of Ogilvie's epic, concluded somewhat wearily (new arr., xxxii. 403), "It is saying little to add, that the Britannia is not inferior to any one of the numerous works of the same class which have lately made their appearance." * The indifference of the public may also be deduced from the number of epic poems that were published in part but never completed. popular ballad and the chronicle play, to the past. Keats and Arnold are the only notable English poets of the last century who attempted it, and Hyperion remained but a fragment and Sohrab and Rustum but an episode. The chief heroic story of the British, in which Milton saw another Aeneid, became in Victorian hands the Idylls of the King, and one that suggests the Odyssey emerged from even the sagaloving mind of William Morris as the Earthly Paradise. On one point we should probably agree with the writers of eighteenth-century epics, that if there is to be heroic poetry the proper vehicle for it is blank verse.1 There were several reasons for the prevalence of such an opinion in the days of Thomson and Cowper,— the difficulty of writing a long work in heroic couplets, the monotony of it when written, the examples of Homer and Virgil, which carried great weight, and that of Milton, which in this instance probably carried even greater. For, as we have seen, by 1730 it was commonly agreed that Paradise Lost was the greatest epic in any modern language and for loftiness and grandeur the supreme English work. The matter of grandeur was of no small importance, inasmuch as poets accepted the epic conventions and, worrying very little about naturalness of expression, sought for the sublime. In order to do this they frankly copied Milton's style, diction, and at times even his "machinery," with the result that in no other field was his influence so marked and in no other was it of so little value. Since these epics did not appeal to the reading public but remained exotics fostered only by the ambitions of poets, and since they had slight influence on one another, they show little development. To be sure, those composed after 1800 are usually free from many of the vices which disfigure those written a hundred years 1 The following rimed epics (of which only the Epigoniad is of any importance) are all I have noticed: Edward Howard's Caroloiades, or the Rebellion of Forty One (1689); Richard Blackmore's Prince Arthur (1695), King Arthur (1697), Eliza (1705), and Alfred (1723); Thomas Ken's Edmund and Hymnotheo (written before 1711); John Henley's Esther (1714); Aaron Hill's Gideon (c. 1716-49) and Fanciad (1743); an anonymous Britannia, a Poem of the Epic Kind (Canterbury, 1723; not seen, may be in blank verse); John Harvey's Life of Robert Bruce (Edin., 1729, reprinted as The Bruciad, 1769); William Wilkie's Epigoniad (Edin., 1757); George Cockings's War (1760), Paoliad (1769), and American War (1781); James Ogden's British Lion Rous'd (1762), Revolution (1790), and Emanuel, or Paradise Regained (Manchester, 1797; not seen, may be in blank verse); Hannah Cowley's Siege of Acre (1799); Sir James Bland Burges's Richard the First (1801); H. J. Pye's Alfred (1801); W. H. Drummond's Battle of Trafalgar (Belfast, 1806), and Thomas Adams's poem with the same title (Poetical Works, Alnwick, 1811, pp. 14-114); Joseph Cottle's Messiah (1815). The American epics, Timothy Dwight's Conquest of Canaan (Hartford, 1785) and Joel Barlow's Columbiad (Hartford, 1787), are worth noting. Washington, or Liberty Restored (1809), by Thomas Northmore, also an American, follows Milton in verse, style, phrasing, and "machinery." earlier, they exhibit better taste and a better understanding of blank verse; but anything approaching epic power is still as much to seek as in Blackmore's days. The later pieces are more readable, but, except for those of Southey, Landor, and Keats, there is no more reason for their being read. The earlier efforts, it has been said. constitute "the most desolate region of English poetry, a dreary 'No man's land,' forbidding desert, without sign of human occupation or interest... through which few, if any, living travellers have ever forced their way." And it must be owned that eighteenth-century epics do not possess the interest many duller works have by virtue of dealing with the times in which their authors lived, and that they rarely entice the reader to continue to the end or leave any definite impression on his mind. The truth is that, with the possible exception of Southey's Madoc and Roderick, even the best want that quality indispensable in an epic but usually lacking in all English poetry, narrative power. They are largely given over to speeches, soliloquies, descriptions, and comments; they are without action, their story never hurries one along, and their men and women are lifeless types. As Walpole said, "Epic poetry is the art of being as long as possible in telling an uninteresting story.' "2 What makes the poems tiresome is in part the lack of suppleness and swiftness in the blank verse of the period, which had not yet been made a good narrative medium, and in part the desire to be impressive, which led writers to stiffen their style with inversions and other Miltonisms until rapid movement was impossible; but to a considerable extent it is because men who possessed any power of sustained narration were then turning to the newest, most popular, and most remunerative of literary forms, the novel. Indeed, it may be urged with considerable justice that Tom Jones is a truer epic than any of its ponderous verse-contemporaries that claimed the title. Only after a course of penitential reading in the narrative poems of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can the Lay of the Last Minstrel and Marmion, The Giaour and Mazeppa, be appreciated and their immediate and remarkable vogue be understood. They are, of course, romances not epics, and they have many obvious faults; but they are unquestionably good stories, swift, vivid, well told, and full of movement, which is more than can be said of their predecessors for a century preceding. Gebir and Hyperion atone as poems for what they lack as stories; but the eighteenth-century epic-writers were neither story-tellers nor poets, and for such there 1 W. M. Dixon, English Epic and Heroic Poetry (1912), 241. 2 Letter to Mason, June 25, 1782. is no hope. There was but one thing for them to do, - laboriously to copy Homer, Virgil, and Milton, employing the plan and many of the details of the Greek or the Roman writer and the language and style of the English one, together with a goodly number of the long similes and classical allusions with which all three abound. In the matter of "machinery" they found Pope's advice useful, "If you have need of devils, draw them out of Milton's Paradise." 1 Milton's influence on heroic poetry was first seen in the works that have already been noticed, — the rimed productions of Blackmore, such quasi-religious epics as the anonymous Prae-existence (1714) and Last Day (c. 1720) or Thomas Newcomb's Last Judgment of Men and Angels (1723), and the poems on the battles of Blenheim and Ramillies. A little later James Ralph, who had sailed from America in the company of Benjamin Franklin, published his Zeuma, or the Love of Liberty (1729), the story of a king of Chili who dies resisting the Spanish invaders. For this romantic and grandiose picture of a noble savage passionately devoted to freedom and to his sweetheart, Ralph used a more Miltonic style, diction, and kind of versification than he had employed in his earlier blank verse. These lines are typical: At first the Hero gave unbounded loose Strait, prompted by despair, he rav'd anew. Zeuma is too romantic and too brief to be termed an epic. The first unrimed poem after Paradise Lost which can lay any claim to that title is the only one that ever enjoyed any real popularity, Richard Glover's Leonidas (1737). This work reached a fourth edition within two years, and even after 1800 was three times reprinted, once in America; it was immediately translated into French, while in Germany it had considerable vogue and no little influence. Lyttelton devoted an issue of Common Sense to its 1 Art of Sinking in Poetry, ch. xv (Works, Elwin-Courthope ed., x. 403). 2 See pp. 90-95, 97, 101 n. 2, 109-11, above. Page 47. For Ralph's other Miltonic blank verse, see p. 239 above. No editions were published in London between 1739 and 1798, except the enlarged one that Glover brought out in 1770, which, though reprinted at Dublin two years later, seems to have attracted little attention. It is hard to understand how it came to be reissued in 1804, 1810, and 1814, since the references to the poem show that the first enthusiasm had soon waned (see, e. g., Europ. Mag., 1786, ix. 2, 4; Mo. Rev., 1788, lxxix. 515, and enl. ed., 1797, xxiv. 455; Chalmers, English Poets, 1810, xvii. 9-10; Boaden's Memoirs of Kemble, 1825, i. 303). Within ten years of its publication, indeed, Horace Walpole wrote (to H. S. Conway, Oct. 24, 1746) that Leonidas was already forgotten. 1 praise, as "one of those few [poems] of distinguish'd Worth and Excellence, which will be handed down with Respect to all Posterity, and which, in the long Revolution of past Centuries, but two or three Countries have been able to produce"; 1 Matthew Green, in his witty poem The Spleen (1737), gave more than twenty lines to Glover, But there's a youth, that you can name, Who needs no leading-strings to fame, Whose quick maturity of brain and William Thompson declared in a poem To the Author of Leonidas, Promiscuous Beauties dignify thy Breast, By Nature happy, as by Study blest, New Worlds descry'd, and made Them all our own. 3 Yet the thirty books of the "stupendous and terrible" Athenaid (1787), in which Glover sought to repeat his success by continuing the story of the Persian invasion to its end, seem to have been an utter failure. To be sure, no one in recent years has become sufficiently interested in either work to determine whether Leonidas is really superior to its sequel; but at least it is shorter (there were only nine books until 1770, when three more were added), it had the advantage of coming fifty years earlier, and it is apparently richer in lofty sentiments and paeans on liberty. These last are said to have been largely responsible for its immediate popularity, since 1 April 9, 1737. Robert Phillimore (Memoirs of Lyttelton, 1845, i. 100) says that "Fielding and Pitt were scarcely behind Lyttelton in extolling" the merits of Leonidas. 2 Lines 556-77. › Poems on Several Occasions (Oxford, 1757), 33. Striking testimony to Glover's immediate vogue is afforded by the publication, within a year, of Henry Pemberton's Observations on Poetry, especially the Epic, occasioned by Leonidas (1738). "Pray who is that Mr. Glover," asked Swift, writing from Ireland to Pope, May 31, 1737, "who writ the epic poem called Leonidas, which is reprinting here, and has great vogue?" "Nothing else," according to Joseph Warton (in his edition of Pope's Works, 1797, ix. 297 n.), "was read or talked of at Leicester-house." Some of this popularity is undoubtedly due to the subject-matter; for Southey wrote to Bedford, Nov. 13, 1793, "Leonidas... has ever been a favourite poem with me; I have read it, perhaps more frequently than any other composition, and always with renewed pleasure... perhaps, chiefly owing to the subject." • They "fell plumb into the water of oblivion," declares Dowden (Life of Southey, 1879, p. 51). Cowper, who had to read the first book twice before he could understand it, concluded finally, "It does not deserve to be cast aside as lumber, the treatment which I am told it has generally met with" (letters to Samuel Rose and Lady Hesketh,. Jan. 19 and Feb. 4. 1789). Southey thought that if published nearer to Leonidas it might have "partaken the gale, for its merits are not inferior" (Life and Works of Cowper, 1836, ii. 319). |
