| “Ye who the merits of the dead revere, Who hold misfortune’s sacred genius dear, Regard this tomb, where Collins, hapless name, Solicits kindness with a double claim. Though nature gave him, and though science taught The fire of fancy, and the reach of thought, Severely doom’d to penury’s extreme, He pass’d in maddening pain life’s feverish dream, While rays of genius only served to show The thickening horror, and exalt his woe. Ye walls that echo’d to his frantic moan, Guard the due records of this grateful stone; Strangers to him, enamour’d of his lays, This fond memorial to his talents raise. For this the ashes of a bard require, Who touch’d the tenderest notes of pity’s lyre; Who join’d pure faith to strong poetic powers; Who, in reviving reason’s lucid hours, Sought on one book his troubled mind to rest, And rightly deem’d the book of God the best.” |
Collins’s character has been portrayed by all xxxiii his biographers in very agreeable colours. He was amiable and virtuous, and was as much courted for his popular manners as for the charms of his conversation. The associate of Johnson, Armstrong, Hill, Garrick, Quin, Foote, the two Wartons, and Thomson, and the friend of several of these eminent men, he must have possessed many of the qualities by which they were distinguished; for though an adviser may be chosen from a very different class of persons, genius will only herd with genius. Johnson has honoured him by saying, that “his morals were pure and his opinions pious;” and though he hints that his habits were sometimes at variance with these characteristics, he assigns the aberration to the temptations of want, and the society into which poverty sometimes drives the best disposed persons, adding, that he “preserved the sources of action unpolluted, that his principles were never shaken, that his distinctions of right and wrong were never confounded, and that his faults had nothing of malignity or design, but proceeded from some unexpected pressure or casual temptation.” A higher eulogium, from so rigid a moralist, could not be pronounced on a man whose life was, for many years, unsettled and perplexed; and those only who have experienced the pressure of pecuniary necessities can be aware of the difficulty of resisting meanness, or avoiding vice, if not in the sense in which these terms are xxxiv usually understood, at least in a sense to which they may as properly be applied––that of refusing to prostitute talents to purposes foreign to the conviction and taste of their possessor.
On this mainly depend the annoyances and dangers of him who seeks a subsistence from his pen. The opinions which he may be desirous to express, or the subject he may be capable of illustrating, may not be popular, and the more important or learned they be, the more likely is such to be the case. Of course his labours would be rejected by publishers, who cannot buy what will not sell; hence no alternative remains but for him to manufacture marketable commodities; and when the popular taste of the present, as well as of former times, is remembered, the degradation to which a man of high intellect must often submit, when he neglects that for which nature and study peculiarly qualified him, for what is in general demand, may be easily conceived. It is not requisite to advert to the taste of the age in which we live, farther than to allude to the class of works which issues from the bazaars of fashionable publishers, and to ask, when such are alone in request, what would have been the fate, had they lived in our own times, of Johnson, Pope, Dryden, Addison, and the other ornaments of the golden age of literature? But if even in that age the Odes of Collins were too abstracted from mundane feelings, too rich in imagery, and xxxv too strongly marked by the fervour of inspiration to be generally appreciated, his chance of being so, by the public generally, is at this moment less; and the only hope of his obtaining that popularity to which he is unquestionably entitled, is by placing his works within the reach of all, and, more especially, by acquainting the multitude with the opinion entertained of him, by those whose judgments they have the sense to venerate, since they are sometimes willing to receive, on the credit of another, that which they have not themselves the discrimination or feeling to perceive.
An anecdote is related of Collins which, if true, proves that he felt the neglect with which his Odes were treated with the indignation natural to an enthusiastic temper. Having purchased the unsold copies of the first edition from the booksellers, he set fire to them with his own hand, as if to revenge himself on the apathy and ignorance of the public.
It is unnecessary to append to the Memoir of Collins many observations on the character of his poetry, because its peculiar beauties, and the qualities by which it is distinguished, are described with considerable force and eloquence by Sir Egerton Brydges, in the Essay prefixed to this edition. Campbell’s remarks on the same subject cannot be forgotten; and other critics of the highest reputation have concurred in ascribing to Collins a conception and genius scarcely exceeded xxxvi by any English poet. To say that Sir Egerton Brydges’s Essay exaggerates the merit of some of his productions may produce the retort which has been made to Johnson’s criticism, that he was too deficient in feeling to be capable of appreciating the excellence of the pieces which he censures. It is not, however, inconsistent with a high respect for Collins, to ascribe every possible praise to that unrivaled production, the Ode to the Passions, to feel deeply the beauty, the pathos, and the sublime conceptions of the Odes to Evening, to Pity, to Simplicity, and a few others, and yet to be sensible of the occasional obscurity and imperfections of his imagery in other pieces, to find it difficult to discover the meaning of some passages, to think the opening of four of his odes which commence with the common-place invocation of “O thou,” and the alliteration by which so many lines are disfigured, blemishes too serious to be forgotten, unless the judgment be drowned in the full tide of generous and enthusiastic admiration of the great and extraordinary beauties by which these faults are more than redeemed.
That these defects are to be ascribed to haste it would be uncandid to deny; but haste is no apology for such faults in productions which scarcely fill a hundred pages, and which their author had ample opportunities to remove.
It may also be thought heterodoxy by the xxxvii band, which, if small in numbers, is distinguished by taste, feeling, and genius, to concur in Collins’s opinion, when he expressed himself dissatisfied with his Eclogues; for, though they are not without merit, it is very doubtful if they would have lived, even till this time, but for the Odes with which they are published, notwithstanding the zeal of Dr. Langhorne, who is in raptures over passages the excellence of which is not very conspicuous. To give a preference to the Verses to Sir Thomas Hanmer, of which all that Langhorne could find to say is, “that the versification is easy and genteel, and the allusions always poetical,” and especially to the Ode addressed to Mr. Home, on the superstition of the Highlands, over the Eclogues, may possibly be deemed to betray a corrupt taste, since it is an admission which is, it is believed, made for the first time. In that Ode, among a hundred other beautiful verses, the following address to Tasso has seldom been surpassed:
| “Prevailing Poet! whose undoubting mind Believed the magic wonders which he sung! Hence, at each sound, imagination glows! Hence, at each picture, vivid life starts here! Hence, his warm lay with softest sweetness flows! Melting it flows, pure, murmuring, strong, and clear, And fills the impassion’d heart, and wins the harmonious ear!” |
The picture of the swain drowned in a fen, and the grief of his widow, possessing every charm xxxviii which simplicity and tenderness can bestow, and give to that Ode claims to admiration which, if admitted, have been hitherto conceded in silence.
From the coincidence between Collins’s love of, and addresses to, Music, his residence at Oxford, and from internal evidence, Some Verses on Our Late Taste in Music, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1740, and there said to be “by a Gentleman of Oxford,” are printed in this edition of Collins’s works, not, however, as positively his, but as being so likely to be written by him, as to justify their being brought to the notice of his readers.
A poet, and not to have felt the tender passion, would be a creature which the world has never yet seen. It is said