London, April to September 1822
AT THE same time that the novel was becoming “romantic,” poetry was undergoing a similar transformation. Cowper abandoned the French school and revived the national school; Burns started a similar revolution in Scotland. After them came the restorers of the ballads. Several of these poets of 1792 to 1800 belonged to what was called the “Lake School” (the name has survived) because these romantics dwelled on the lakeshores of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and they sang of them sometimes.
Thomas Moore, Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Southey, Hunt, Knowles, Lord Holland, Canning, and Croker are still alive, to the honor of English letters; but a man must be born English to appreciate the merit of such an intimate style of composition, which comes home particularly to natives of the soil.
No one, in a living literature, can be a competent judge except of works written in his own language. It is vain to believe you possess a foreign idiom in all its depths. You did not swallow it with your nurse’s milk; you did not hear the first words of it at her breast, and taste them on your tongue. Certain accents belong only to the home-land. About our men of letters, the English and the Germans have the most baroque notions: they adore what we scorn and scorn what we adore. They do not understand Racine, or La Fontaine, or even most of Molière. It makes one laugh to learn the names of our great writers in London, Vienna, Berlin, Petersburg, Munich, Leipzig, Göttingen, and Cologne—to learn whom they read with fervor and whom they do not read at all.
When an author’s chief merit is his diction, a foreigner will never fully comprehend this merit. The more intimate, individual, and national a talent, the more its mysteries escape the mind which is not, so to speak, a “compatriot” of this talent. We admire the Greeks and Romans by hearsay. Our admiration comes to us from tradition, and the Greeks and Romans are not here to mock our Barbarian judgments. Who among us can form any idea of the harmonies of Demosthenes or Cicero, the cadences of Alcaeus or Horace, as they must have sounded to a Greek or Latin ear? It has been claimed that true beauty is for all time and all countries: yes, if we are speaking of the beauties of feeling and thought, but no, not the beauties of style. Style is not, like thought, cosmopolitan: it has a native soil, sky, and sun of its own.
Burns, Mason, and Cowper died during my London exile, either before or in the year 1800. They ended one century, and I began another. Erasmus, Darwin, and Beattie died two years after my return from exile.
Beattie had heralded the new era of lyric poetry. The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius is a description of the Muse’s earliest effects on a young bard who is still ignorant of the breath that torments him. Sometimes, the future poet goes to sit by the seashore during a tempest; sometimes, he leaves the games of the village behind him to listen, lonesomely, to the music of the bagpipes in the distance.
Beattie has gone through the whole series of reveries and melancholy ideas of which a hundred other poets have believed themselves “discoverers.” He was planning to continue with his poem and in fact wrote a second canto. One evening Edwin hears a solemn voice issuing from the depths of a valley. It is the voice of a hermit who, having comprehended the illusions of the world, has buried himself in this retreat in order to collect his thoughts and sing the wonders of the Creator. The hermit instructs the young minstrel and reveals the secret of his genius to him. The idea was a happy one, but the execution wasn’t quite equal to the idea. Beattie was destined to shed tears; his son’s death broke his heart. Like Ossian after the loss of Oscar, Beattie hung up his harp in the branches of an oak. Perhaps Beattie’s son was that young minstrel of whom the father had sung and whose footsteps he no longer saw on the mountain.