or sciences, but it is the natural result of their activity, and shows them to be closely connected with the religious feeling. The nations have hitherto based alliances upon material interests, bargains and ambitions. We are about to advocate a different method, the method of the Humanists, and we are fortunate in having to support us at the outset the experience and the enthusiasm of an Englishman who is familiar, to a degree perhaps unique, both with the cities and the souls of nations.

COLLINS, AND THE ENGLISH LYRIC IN

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

BY DR. J. W. MACKAIL, M.A., F.R.S.L.

[Read January 21st, 1920.]

By common consent it is in the sphere of the lyric that English poetry has throughout its history found its fullest, highest, and, one might say, most authentic expression. We possess a body of lyrical poetry to which, alike in range and in beauty, that of Greece alone is comparable. It extends in an all but continuous chain, gathering itself at intervals into a blazing mass of jewels, over the last six centuries. The lyrical voice is our native and natural speech. The lyrical note pervades nearly all our greatest poetry, even when that embodies itself in other forms. At the periods when the lyrical impulse has flagged, when its expression has become for a time forced or languid, the life-blood of our poetry in general has been slower; and our great lyric periods have been followed by a fresh impulse communicated from them into narrative or dramatic, descriptive or reflective poetry.

The eighteenth century-taking that convenient term in its broadly descriptive meaning and not as a strict chronological limit-is traditionally regarded as a period in which the lyric voice of poetry was

VOL. I, N.S.

1

feeble or almost dumb. This view requires much qualification. But it is substantially true for nearly the first half of the century. In the course of the seventeenth century enormous over-production had resulted in something like exhaustion. Our lyrical poetry became an unweeded garden, possessed more and more by things rank and gross in nature. It went astray in various directions; it became tortuous or mystical or artificial. The lyric lost touch with Nature and life, and in doing so put off its own nature and lost its own enduring vitality. The immense popularity of Cowley lasted for a generation after his death; but only a few years later, Pope's question, "Who now reads Cowley ?" could be asked. Cowley was, as Johnson says of him, "the last of the race"; "the last," he repeats, and adds more doubtfully, "and perhaps the best.” He only outlived by three years Herrick, who may share with Fanshawe the claim to be the last of the Elizabethans, and Milton, that lonely figure who spans the gulf that lies, with its swarming and confused poetic movement, between the Elizabethan and the Augustan age. Meanwhile, the civilisation of our poetry was being taken in hand. Its entry into the general European Commonwealth of letters was effected, but at a great cost. Between its own decay of over-ripeness and the desperate remedies which were applied, it lost much of its distinctive national quality. The English lyric soon, say by the death of Dryden on May Day in the last year of the century, became faint, mannered and almost voiceless. For forty years there is no English lyrical poet of the first or even of the second rank. What

little vitality remained evident in the native instinct toward lyric expression was confined to a trickle of inspiration in the hymn-writers. Addison was one of these. Watts, Doddridge, Tate (who was Poet Laureate throughout the reign of Anne as well as being one of Pope's dunces), are followed a little later by John and Charles Wesley, the first collection of whose hymns was published in 1737. These are the more prominent figures in the chain of stepping-stones across a level and almost featureless marsh. The lighter and livelier verse of Prior and those of his contemporaries who wrote in the same manner, if it would be going too far to say that it can only be called poetry by courtesy, is hardly lyrical poetry except in a purely formal sense of the term.

But the lyrical instinct was not dead; though it had been driven for a time below the surface, its springs were flowing underground; it was waiting its time. The attempt to find any organic connection between political and poetical history, though enticing, is probably futile; but it is a curious fact that the resurgence of the lyric first shows itself just after the collapse in 1742 of the long rule of Walpole. It was in that year that Gray wrote his Eton Ode and his Hymn to Adversity, and began to compose his Elegy. It was in that year that Collins came before the world with the Persian (afterwards re-named the Oriental) Eclogues. It is in that year that the re-emergence of the lyric in England may be definitely fixed, in so far as definite dates can be usefully assigned to the stages of what is a continuous vital process.