THE SWAN OF LICHFIELD

Miss Anna Seward should not be made answerable for the poetry of the late eighteenth century but that no office or responsibility could be conferred upon a more willing recipient; the honour is hardly more than she demanded from the respect of the age to come; and when she bequeathed her works to this great man for editing, her letters to that, and her name to posterity, she would have heard with the satisfaction of her conscious hopes, rather than with elation or surprise, that another century would charge her with all the accumulated opinions of 1799.

It is Mr. Lucas’s witty commentary^[1] that recalls the name of Anna Seward and her claim to speak for those days—the time between two ages. I have no intention whatever to write of her with irony. Neither has Mr. Lucas yielded to the obvious temptation. There is something worthy of no slight respect in the justified security of her representative attitude. To deride her would be to deride that age, almost the latest that had full confidence, that took its historic place absolutely, without reluctance, suffered no misgiving, and did not disturb the order and course of history.

The centuries before our own have resembled a river whereof the direction is known, for it is 50still far from the tidal regions of its journey; so was the course of things in 1799; but in another fifty years the stream of the modern age had, as it were, begun to feel the tides. Waves have set in towards the head of the waters, or they double the current of the ebb. Waters breast waters, and travel against the journey of the stream, making brief excursions foot to foot with Time. Or there is a swing that sends the river turning with the tide, outstripping the pace of the natural pilgrimage.

So was the mind of the nineteenth century lifted and cradled, in suspense like the pause of a vehement heart; so did it tend to the past and set to the future, a tidal flux and influx that flew from the end, flowed from the goal, filled and brimmed upper reaches, revisited pastures of yesterday with eager waves, or ebbed with a run and made haste to leave them twice.

If this, then, was the tidal surge of the stream of letters and the arts, the end of the eighteenth century was almost the last date before the tides began to be perceptible. Almost—for perhaps the days when Walter Savage Landor was seriously discussing the merits of a poem by Miss Chose upon the Queen were really the last of the stream above tides. It may be that the perturbing shock first interrupted the onward flowing just after him. Smooth days, those—there were no doubts as to the way of the wave, and no need to watch the hour in order to know whether backward or 51forward its course was shaped. A stream is a stately stream above the tidal influence. And in Miss Anna Seward’s years the historic river of the mind was unchecked: it glided.

I think there never was a day of more orderly confidence. The ‘taste’, the laws, that had come to pass were the only laws and the only taste that were timely or possible. From the later Milton to Dryden, from Dryden to Addison, Pope, Johnson, Gray, Cowper, Crabbe—the way is a way that has no turning. We mark it with some mingled feelings, but surprise is not one of them. It is much the same in the matter of town architecture. The brick box that came to pass in the building of London streets, in the course of the same age, followed the time of dignity, beauty, and fancy which was Wren’s, and all the degrees thereto were in a kind of order. Doubtless, this is why we have learnt, in the fluttering centre of a renewed architectural town, to look with some degree of esteem upon the black brick box, if only it be truly of that time. And this not because it has a quiet civic majesty of approach to its door à deux battants, and passages and rooms proportionate within, but because that very exterior, which was the negation of architecture, was the last truly punctual style of building. And before its day they might be classical, but they were classical in a manner that was of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with an intense spirit 52of the time. Perhaps the clearest sign of the times before the beating tides is this—their secure self-confidence; for they never doubted that their taste was the best and their criticism the result of accumulated judgement. Nay, in the dregs of times—in 1840—they had faith in their romances, Italian landscape, steel engraving, portraits with large eyes, in a word, in their ‘finish’ (the word is ominous); and because of their good faith we may deride even these with good humour.

Now, Miss Seward has an incontestable right to speak in the name of her contemporaries. There is hardly any one else who had all her good faith and solemnity. But first let me pause upon the title given to her with so much dullness and elegance—the Swan of Lichfield. The Swan of Avon had at least a river; he was never the Swan of Stratford-on-Avon. But with all respect to the poet who devised the name for Shakespeare, we may hold that it was not well inspired to suit a poet who sang in his middle days and was silent some time before he died. Let this, however, pass as the perversity of a phrase not without charm. It is the perversity, perhaps, that has made the name so dear and a household word. But at any rate a Swan of Avon could swim, he was not placed on a high road, or in a street, or within the precincts of a cathedral close. The Swan of Lichfield must have been named with an agreeable intention to confer a sweet dignity, and 53something of that faded dignity remains. The episcopal palace was her home, and she was called a Swan when she was in full career; they did not wait for a swan-song.

So close was she to the first beginnings of the tides that she blundered when she left much of her poetry to Sir Walter Scott, not doubting his willingness to serve her as editor. He did the work, with some considerable excisions, and gave the volumes to the world, but in an ‘aside’ he has called her poems execrable. So that she was all too confident of the immediate future. Dying early in the nineteenth century, she continued a little too long the assurance of the eighteenth; that was her sole fault. In regard to her own day she had none.

It seems even that ‘execrable’ is an unjust word. Miss Seward did not attempt to describe a moonlight night without forgoing her bed to match it with a phrase. Her sincerity is not without its literary value, for it succeeds in a measure; if not fully communicated, it is suggested, and this is no small thing. Moreover, there is a poetic thought—an implicit thought, an inclusion—in her sonnet on ‘December Morning’:

... Then to decree

The grateful thoughts to God, ere they unfold

To friendship or the Muse.

This surely is not without subtlety; nor is the final line, in which the reader and student is said 54to fill his days so full that though he be not old he ‘outlives the old’. A poet capable of this sense of present time (for here is no mere commonplace as to future influence or literary immortality; she means that the outliving is present)—a poet who had this thought might have been a fine poet; she used her intellect, and that action is the vitality of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and song.

This is so high a specimen that I will quote no more. Over Miss Seward’s criticism it would be but too easy to make merry. ‘For the magnificent,’ she says of her century, ‘we have Akenside, Thomson, Collins, Dr. Johnson, Mason, Gray, Chatterton, Darwin, and the sublime Joanna Baillie; in the simpler style, Shenstone, Beattie, Cowper, Crowe, Bowles, Burns, Bloomfield, Walter Scott and his school; Coleridge, Southey, and their school. Poetry can have no nobler models than these supply to her various styles.’ She must have read the ‘Ancient Mariner’; she names Coleridge with Southey!

She had the eighteenth-century love for something that was not purity of style. I think that the critics of our own day have hardly perceived the violence of an age that wrote ‘taught the doubtful battle where to rage’; ‘red Arbela’; ‘gory horrors crowned each dreadful day’; ‘the madding crowd’; ‘maddened o’er the land’; and a thousand other things in tatters. Miss Seward rebuked 55a writer for stealing ‘gulphy’ from Pope. ‘Gulphy’, she thought, was too good to steal. ‘He stole the picturesque epithet “gulphy” from Pope’:

And gulphy Xanthus foams along the field.

‘Than which a more poetic line,’ she decides, ‘was never written.’

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