literary fashions of the day linger here and there in diction and phrasing, in an occasional frigid personification, and in the literary or political didacticism which underlies several of the odes; but over these matters we need not linger. The classic and the romantic elements require more detailed examination. We will begin with the latter. In these odes Collins reveals his poetical creed by his literary allusions. Spenser and his school, Shakspere, Milton, Otway that belated Elizabethan, — these are the gods of his idolatry among English poets; while he speaks slightingly of the then popular Waller, and implies that pathos is a lost note in the British lyre. His practice conforms to his theory. The Odes, in their main effect, are not intellectual and didactic, but imaginative, pictorial, and lyrical. They are not chiefly to be thought out, but to be looked at, felt, and sung. The versification is an index to the spirit of the whole. The end-stopped pentameter couplet of the Eclogues and the Epistle, a form so admirable for narration, exposition, or satire, so ill-adapted for lyric flow, has given place to a variety of measures that fitly embody the subject-matter. But it is the subject-matter itself which most clearly shows the poet's trend toward Romanticism. Collins was, literally, a visionary. He saw visions. He lived in a world of imaginary beings, some beautiful, some terrible, some the creation of folklore and legend, and some the product of his own imagination. If the Odes be read rapidly, with this single point in view, it is surprising how constantly the poet's thought escapes from reality to an imaginary world. Even The Manners, in praise of the observation of the real world, is all compact of fancies about "wizard Passions," "giant Follies," and "magic shores." The Passions is didactic in intent, praising the simplicity of Greek music above the complex music of modern times. But the lesson is a picture. And in place of the historical Alexander in Dryden's similar ode, Collins painted a new Pandemonium and Elysium in one, where bedlam Passions mingle with the Loves and Graces. The political and military events of the day, passing through this poet's mind, are transformed into a dream-land peculiarly his own, where ideal figures stand out in colossal bas-relief, as in the Ode to Mercy, or, as in the Ode to a Lady and How Sleep the Brave, shadowy forms at once delicate and majestic mourn over the graves of the heroic dead. But the Ode to Fear, the Ode to Liberty, and the Ode on the Poetical Character are richest in elements of the supernatural or semi-supernatural. In the beginning of the last-named, Collins's imagination manifestly revels in the marvellous legend of the magic girdle; he is wandering amid the mazes of The Faerie Queene. The description of creation, an echo from the idealism of Plato and Spenser, beats with an inward heat, an intense pleasure in the fantastic richness of the picture. And the ideal landscape with which the ode ends had its inspiration in a reverence, amounting almost to worship, for Milton as the poet of the supernatural sublime. The antistrophe of the Ode to Liberty shows how well Collins knew the poetic value of old legends and traditions; the fabled disruption of Britain from the mainland is thoroughly romantic in its rugged wildness and a certain element of the monstrous; while the second epode is rich with imaginative beauty deriving from old Celtic sources. The Ode to Fear marks the climax of the supernatural element in these Odes of 1747. A true imaginative shudder runs through the whole. It is conceived and expressed throughout with a vigor which shows that the poet had himself lifted “the veil between" and was looking out with pleasurable awe into the dim, vast realm of imaginative Terror and the dark Sublime. From the classic drama he selects those aspects which are most closely allied to the murkiness of the "Gothic" mind; and the conception, in the strophe, of fiends who "over Nature's wrecks and wounds preside" is essentially Teutonic, the counterpart of the Greek belief in fair spirits, the guardian divinities of mountains, trees, and running brooks. The treatment of nature in the Odes is not remarkable except in the Ode to Evening. A French critic has recently observed that in this poem Collins anticipated the work of the modern "impressionist" school; and he points out that "the phenomena of evening, which dissolve progressively all natural form and destroy the solidity of every object," are peculiarly adapted for treatment in accordance with the doctrine of the impressionists that "things are more poetic by their aspects than by their forms, and by their colors than by their substance." But curious as this anticipation is, it concerns us more just now to ask what relation the poem bore to Collins's own environment and to the rest of his work. It must have had a close relation, although it seems so unique. It cannot have been a literary freak, a poem-child of the nineteenth century born out of due time. What view of the matter did Collins himself probably It is not likely that he supposed he was doing anyAnd in a way he was not. It is singular take? 1 "L'Ode au Soir est en effet de la poésie impressioniste au premier chef; d'instinct, Collins a découvert et appliqué inconsciemment la théorie que l'on sait, et il lui a suffi pour cela du désir d'imiter son objet aussi étroitement que possible, car s'il est vrai que les choses sont plus poétiques par leurs aspects que par leurs formes et par leurs couleurs que par leur substance, on comprendra aisément comment le phénomène du soir, qui dissout progressivement toute forme naturelle et détruit la solidité de toute objet, s'accommode mieux que tout autre d'être traité selon cette doctrine, qui, si elle est douteuse dans d'autres cas, est absolument vraie dans celui-là.” — Heures de Lecture d'un Critique, by Émile Montégut, Paris, 1891, pp. 213, 214. that this poem, in the last stanza, is marred by worse conventionalism than can be found elsewhere in the Odes. Furthermore, the mood of the poem is common enough. Eventide, when all things are idealized by dimness and calm, is Nature's popular poetry, felt by the most callous, and disposing every one to pensiveness and repose. Nor does the ode show minute or subtle observation, such as distinguishes much of the nature poetry of the present century. The objects and aspects described are obvious and common. The exquisite fineness in the poem is fineness of feeling and expression, not of perception. We should not expect Collins, the dreamer and visionary, to have a particularly keen eye for the facts of the external world. And in this poem, as elsewhere, he was more dreaming than seeing; or, more accurately, he was seeing, but only because in this case seeing and dreaming were nearly one, nature at twilight creating a fairy world much like his own land of dreams. In other words, Collins did know and greatly love the common phenomena of evening, for the reason that they were peculiarly congenial to his mood and closely akin to that imaginary world in which his fancy loved to dwell. As confirming this view, note how Collins mingles in the poem the facts of nature with his own and others' fancies. The sun and the hours are persons, as in old mythology. Elves, and nymphs who shed the dew, and Pensive Pleasures sweet, prepare Evening's shadowy car. Even the conventional personifications with which the poem ends show only the same tendency carried farther; fancy banishes fact altogether, and nothing is left but the group of wooden abstractions, stiffly sitting in the "sylvan shed." This sorry ending is simply a striking proof of the fact that Collins, in this poem, had no thought of making an objective study of nature, still less of founding a new school of nature poetry. He was not trying, in Wordsworth's phrase, to keep his eye ee steadily on the object." Rather he was attracted instinctively to the dreamy aspects of twilight, partly for their own sake, and partly because they made so poetic a habitation for the creatures of his imagination; and so he wrote a poem in which the two series of facts, the real and the imaginary, freely intermingled, although they never became identified. In all this there was nothing new in kind. He was simply at his old trick of dreaming again, only in this instance it was evening, instead of the wars on the continent or the literature of terror, that supplied the inspiration and part of the material. If this be true, we should expect to find it true at the core of the poem, in the conception of evening itself. And it is true there. Throughout the ode, Evening and evening are distinct, and Collins's attention is divided between the two. Whole stanzas are given up to natural description, without the slightest immediate reference to Evening the person. At other times Evening is directly addressed, but rather frigidly and in terms which only in the most general way suggest a connection with the objective facts; as "chaste Eve," " nymph reserved," "maid composed," "calm votaress," and "meekest Eve." In a few places the relation is more intimate, and the personification more imaginative, notably in Prepare thy shadowy car, and in marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil. But the person and the phenomena are never completely fused, as might have happened had Collins been wholly absorbed in picturing the scenes of the real world at evening time. Keats, in his ode to Autumn, was thus absorbed in catching up into words the subtle spirit of the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," and he has identified Autumn ee |