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Page 16
I don't propose to linger over the perruque. The Restoration was a
time of carnival when, if the men were overdressed, the ladies were
underdressed; and the perruque was a part of the masquerade. In such a
figurehead you could be as licentious as you chose--and you were; you
could only be serious in satire. The perruque accounts for Dryden and
his learned pomp, for Rochester and Sedley, and for Congreve, who told
Voltaire that he desired to be considered as a gentleman rather than
poet, and was with a shrug accepted on that valuation: it accounts for
Timotheus crying Revenge, and not meaning it, or anything else except
display; it accounts for Pepys thinking _King Lear_ ridiculous. Let me
go on rather to the day of the tie-wig, of Pope's Achilles and Diomede
in powder; of Gray awaking the purple year; of Kitty beautiful and
young, of Sir Plume and his clouded cane; of Mason and Horace Walpole.
When ladies were painted, and their lovers in powder, poetry would be
painted too. It would be either for the boudoir or the alcove. I don't
call to mind a single genuine love-song in all that century among
those who dressed _� la mode_. There were, however, some who did not
so dress.
Gray was not one. Whether in the country churchyard, or by the grave
of Horace Walpole's favourite cat, he never lost hold of himself,
never let heart take whip and reins, never drowned the scholar in the
poet, never, in fact, showed himself in his shirtsleeves. But before
he was dead the hearts of men began to cry again. Forty years before
Gray died Cowper was born; fourteen years before he died, Blake was
born; twelve years before he died, Burns. It is strange to contrast
the _Elegy_ with _The Poplar Field:_
My fugitive years are all wasting away,
And I must ere long be as lowly as they,
With a turf on my breast and a stone at my head,
Ere another such grove shall arise in its stead.
Put beside that melodious jingle the ordered diction and ordered
sentiment of one of the best-known and most elegant poems in our
tongue. They were written within fifteen years of each other. Within
the same space of time, or near about it, there came this spontaneous
utterance of simplicity, tragedy and hopeless sorrow:
Young Jamie lo'ed me weel, and sought me for his bride;
But saving a croun he had naething else beside:
To make the croun a pund young Jamie gaed to sea;
And the croun and the pund they were baith for me.
The authoress of that was born twenty-one years before Gray died. I
speak, perhaps, only for myself when I say that reading that, or the
like of that in Burns or in Blake, my heart becomes as water, and
I feel that I would lose, if necessary, all of Milton, all of
Shakespeare but a song or two, much of Dante and some of Homer, to
be secured in them for ever. My friend (of the Ramillies) and I
were disputing about a phrase I had applied to lyric poetry as the
infallible test of its merit. I asked for "the lyric cry," and he
scorned me. I could find a better phrase with time; but the quatrain
just quoted makes it unmistakable, as I think. Anyhow, it will be
conceded that there was some putting off of the tie-wig, the hoop and
the red-heeled shoe about 1770.
In the time of Reform, say from 1795 to 1830, you could do much as
you pleased, and dress according to your fancy. You could smother your
neck in a stock, wear a high-waisted swallow-tail coat, kerseymere
continuations and silk stockings. So sat Southey for his portrait, and
so did Rogers continually. Or you could wear a curly _toup�_ with Tom
Moore and the Prince Regent, be as rough as a dalesman with Wordsworth
or as sleek as a dissenting minister with Coleridge, an open-throated
pirate with Byron, or a seraph with Shelley. If the rules lingered,
they were relaxed. I think there were none. Individuality was in the
air; schools were closing down. For the first time since the spacious
days men sang as they pleased, and some sang as they felt and were,
but with this difference added that you would no longer identify the
age with the utterance. There were many survivals: most of Coleridge,
all of Rogers, much of Byron, some of Wordsworth (_Laodamia_) is
eighteenth century; and then, for the first time, you could archaicize
or walk in Wardour Street--Macpherson had taught us that, and Bishop
Percy. But all of Shelley and Keats, the best of Coleridge and
Wordsworth belong to no age.
The pale stars are gone!
For the sun, their swift shepherd,
To their folds them compelling,
In the depths of the dawn,
Hastes in meteor-eclipsing array and they flee
Beyond his blue dwelling,
As fawns flee the leopard.
But where are ye?
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