HUMANITARIANISM IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH 
 
 LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 SYLVAN DIX HARWOOD 
 
 A. B. University of Illinois, 1916 
 
 THESIS 
 
 SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS 
 FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH 
 IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, 
 
 1922 
 
 URBANA, ILLINOIS 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2015 
 
 https://archive.org/details/humanitarianismiOOharw 
 
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 
 THE GRADUATE SCHOOL 
 
 3 / 
 
 -192 
 
 I HEREBY RECOMMEND THAT THE THESIS PREPARED UNDER MY 
 
 S U PER V I SION BY., 7 ) / A. 
 
 ENTITLED^ //uma ** / /a sua . n / -r /?? J/7 Jr y/i /* tv //j ly. L 
 
 / / hA&L ?L 
 
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 BE ACCEPTED AS FULFILLING THIS PART OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR 
 
 THE DEGREE OF /lia.yh* H fit /) //7 
 
 'A.,.//? V? 
 
 
 
 
 In Charge of Thesis 
 
 Head of Department 
 
 Recommendation concurred in'* 
 
 Committee 
 
 on 
 
 Final Examination* 
 
 Required for doctor’s degree but not for master's 
 
CONTE N T S 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Page 
 
 THE ENGLISH HUMANI TAR IAN TEMPER BEFORE 1726 1 
 
 The normal English attitude toward animal life in 
 the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance. The 
 
 scientific spirit of the seventeenth century 
 the Royal Society dilletantism and vi- 
 visection. Apologists and satirists of the new 
 age. Seventeenth and early eighteenth century 
 conceptions of man. Transition in the early 
 eighteenth century. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 HUMAN I TAR IAN ISM AND THE SLAVE TRADE 24 
 
 The Christian campaign for converts in the New 
 World. The Restoration conception of the 
 noble savage. Eighteenth century sentimental- 
 ists and their belief in the sleeve's inherent 
 nobility. The brotherhood of man and natural 
 rights . 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 HUMAN! TARIAHI SM AND THE LOWER ANIMALS 53 
 
 The changing attitude toward the country and the 
 consequent clmnge in attitude toward animals. 
 
 The philosophic justification of humanitarian- 
 ism. The status of animals in a man- ruled world 
 as stated by the humanitarians. The applica- 
 tion of the new sensibility to British in- 
 stitutions. widening sympathies with lower 
 as well as higher animals. Increased obser- 
 vation of animals — ■ the skylark in eighteenth 
 century poetry. Conclusion. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CULMINATION OP HUMANITARIAN PEELING IN THE CENTURY 
 
 Cowper and the spiritual kinship. Blake and the 
 ideal kinshio. Darwin and the scientific kin- 
 ship. 
 
 95 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
C_0JIJP_E_1IJDJS 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 V 
 
 Page 
 
 128 
 
 I 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 ENGLISH HUMANITARIAN TEMPER 3EE0RE 1726. 
 
 1* The normal English attitude toward animal li-i.e in oIb 
 M iddle Ages and in the Renaissance. 2. The scientific spirit Oi 
 
 the seventeenth century the Royal Society ailletanoism 
 
 vivisection. 5. Apologists and satirists of the new age. 
 
 4. Seventeenth and early eighteenth century conceptions of man. 
 
 5. Transition in the early eighteenth century. 
 
 1 . 
 
 There is an old tale of Baldwin, king of Jerusalem, which 
 tells how, when he lay at the point of death from wounds, his leech 
 asked for a captured Saracen to experiment upon, in that way, per- 
 haps, to find a cure for the king. Put Baldwin refused to peimit 
 even an infidel to he sacrificed that he might live, and ohe leech 
 was forced to satisfy himself with the vivisection of a oear in- 
 stead. ’’Then said the king, ’We will not strain at the oeast if 
 need he; do therefore as thou wilt.’ . . . Let this suffice con- 
 cerning the king’s pitifulness.” (1) 
 
 In this legend from Guihert de Logent, written in biie 
 
 twelfth century, we find an interesting example of respect for 
 
 (1) Coulton, Media eval Garner , no. 18 
 

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 human life in a time when the brotherhood of Christendom was none 
 too clearly recognized and when pagans" lives were deemed worthy 
 of no consideration whatever. By his "pitifulness" the king re- 
 cognized the sacredness of the human body. Even when it came to 
 the animal he apparently was dubious, but he was willing to permit 
 
 the experiment "if need be". The legend, or historical fact 
 
 the authenticity of the story aside from point of time does not 
 
 matter shows that this respect for life is not characteristic 
 
 of these last two centuries only, which have shown increased sen- 
 sitiveness to the deliberate infliction of pain for dubious ends. 
 
 Hartland has an interesting theory that the savage con- 
 siders animal motives and mental reactions to be exactly like our 
 own. (2) In the stories of primitive peoples both man and beast 
 act in precisely the same way and for the same reasons. This 
 theory, however, applies only to the folk literature of races; 
 and in this essay I shall concern myself only vi th more sophisti- 
 cated writers in my attempt to show the normal attitude of man 
 toward other species, disregarding those earlier times in which 
 he was unconscious of any gulf between them. We shall meet a 
 conception of equality Of the species again among the eighteenth 
 century sentimentalists. In that highly sophisticated age, we 
 shall find a realization of the gulf, of course, and man acting the 
 role of benevolent dictator. 
 
 In our earliest extant literature, particularly in 
 
 (1) E. S. Hartland, Popular Studies in Mythology , Romanc e and 
 Folklore , no . 7 . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Beowulf and Cynewulf (l), mention is made of man*s companionship 
 with animals, but this friendliness was generally confined to dogs 
 and the hawk on his perch in the hall. Horses we re highly valued, 
 principally because they were of practical importance. Of all 
 those animals dwelling in the mysterious forests near the sea- 
 coasts there was fear born of the unknown fear like our mod- 
 
 ern attitude toward insects, disgust and suspicion intermingled. 
 
 In the Middle Ages the hawk was held in still greater 
 esteem thai in Anglo-Saxon days. In the mediaeval stronghold 
 the lap-dog was popular, even though he might be useless for the 
 chase; and every lady, mewed in her dingy apartments, had her 
 caged magpie to amuse her. Women were clever at hunting with 
 birds, John of Salisbury tells us, (2) and adds that the inferior 
 sex is superior at the sport because women are more rapacious. 
 
 We are left in doubt as to what his motives were for this criti- 
 cism, whether he was indignant about idle killing or whether he 
 
 (1) In the Riddles there are many charming pictures to illustrate 
 the friendship between the species, like this one of the nightin- 
 gale : 
 
 Many varied voices voice I through my bill; 
 
 Holding to my tunes, hiding not their sweetness 
 
 I, the ancient evening- singer , bring unto the Earls, 
 
 Blithe within the burgs, when I break along 
 With a cadenced song. Silent in their dwelling 
 They are sitting, leaning- forwards. 
 
 (2) Quoted by Wright, Womankind in Western Europe , 230. "Quod 
 vel ex eo mecum conjicies quod deterior sexus in avium venatione 
 potior est. In quo poteras naturam arguere , nisi nosses quia de- 
 teriora semper promiora sunt ad rapinam." 
 
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 wanted to rebuke women for frivolity. I’ he latter supposition is 
 the more plausible. 
 
 In the thirteenth century we are given a glimpse of the 
 monastic attitude toward animals when the author of Ancr en Riv/le 
 addresses his three pious ladies, "Ye shall not possess any 
 beast, my dear sisters, except only a cat." (l) Anchoresses 
 were to emulate Mary, not Martha, who busied herself about many 
 things. That nuns in general were fond of pets is obvious from 
 the numerous reports of episcopal and diaconal visitations. One 
 rule at Chatteris, Cambridgshire , is quite specific on this point. 
 
 "Runs shall not keep fowls, dogs or small birds within 
 the convent precincts, nor bring them into church during divine 
 service, and they shall not, from a wish to reform them, take in- 
 to their employ servants who are known for their bad ways." (2) 
 
 This custom of taking one's pets with him when he went to mass was 
 
 not uncommon; particularly was this true of hawks, which required 
 
 a good deal of pampering. 
 
 Another example of mediaeval fondness for animals is found 
 in Chaucer’s description of the prioress, who must have been just 
 such another amiable lady as those of the Ancren Riwle . She was 
 so "pitous” that she would weep for an entrapped mouse "if it were 
 deed or bledde" , and her "smale houides" dined royally on roasted 
 meat and fair bread. 
 
 "But sore weep she if oon of hem were deed. 
 
 Or if men smote it with a yerde smerfce." 
 
 (1) Ancren Riv/le . p 417 
 
 (2) Eckenstein, Women tinder Monasticsm . p 401 (quoted). See 
 Dugdale’s Monasticon . Chatteris. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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 In telling of this characteristic of the lady prioress, Chaucer 
 uses the word, conscience . which in connotation is identical 
 with the eighteenth century word, sensibility * In this respect, 
 she was thoroughly representative of her class. 
 
 In the fifteenth century there is evidence of this kind- 
 ly spirit not in the monastery or the feudal castle but at the 
 courts of kings. Sir Thomas More’s character, Raphael Hythlodaye, 
 reports the views of the Utopians regarding animals and their 
 slaughter, Shelley might not have been perfectly happy among 
 these idealized peoples, for certainly they v/ere not vegetarians; 
 but they permitted only slaves to slaughter animals, ’’because 
 they think it blunts the tenderness and affections of human 
 nature, and little by little those qualities would deteriorate 
 in the nation at large.” (1) Then Raphael adds, apropos of 
 hunting: 
 
 ’’But if the hope of slaughter and tearing the animal 
 in pieces is the object (of hunting), should you not rather be 
 moved to pity to see a poor innocent hare done to death by a 
 
 dog the weaker by the stronger, the timid by the fierce, the 
 
 innocent by the cruel and unmerciful? All such hunting is un- 
 worthy of free and responsible men, and the Utopians have relegat- 
 ed it to their butchers, to which trade they appoint slaves only." 
 ( 2 ) 
 
 The Utopians we re unable to conceive of a merciful dod who de- 
 lighted in animal sacrifices, for surely IP could not be pleased 
 
 with their deaths when He gave these animals life. (3) 
 
 (1) More 1 s Millenium , p 127. (2) Ibid, p 162. (3) Ibid, p 245. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Shakespeare, too, occasionally puts humanitarian i’eas 
 
 into the mouths of his characters. He felt particularly compassion- 
 ate for the hare and deer. 
 
 Duke, senior . Come, shall we go and kill us venison? 
 
 And yet it irks me the poor dappled* fools , 
 
 Being native burghers of this desert city, 
 
 Should in their own confines with forked heads 
 Have their round haunches gored, (1) 
 
 Here is an idea which might as well have been voiced by an 
 eighteenth century poet as well as by Shakespeare, were it de- 
 veloped more fully and not merely a passing fancy of the duke. 
 
 It implies quite in the eighteenth century manner, that here on 
 earth we all have certain rights and that any who would inter- 
 fere with us are tyrants. Among those who have such rights are 
 "the poor dappled fools" that Shakespeare loves so well. "Poor 
 Wat", the hare, is also described with compassion when he "stands 
 on his hinder legs v/ith listening ear" to see if the hunter still 
 pursues. (2) 
 
 The foregoing examples are given to show that the humane 
 spirit has been present throughout the centuries of mglish 
 literature, though without having become a creed for a school 
 of writers, The English poet has normally had no quarrel with 
 the life about him, nor has the average Englishman, for that 
 matter, though hunting has ever been a favorite sport and prob- 
 ably always will be. Generally he has not gome out of his way to 
 
 (1) As You Like It, Act II, I, 1 21 ff 
 
 (2) Venus and AcLonis , 1 697 ff 
 

 
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 fight with animals. This spirit of mutual toleration is a part 
 of human nature , present not only among the Anglo-Saxons but in 
 Greece, Rome, and the Orient. At times in English literature it 
 has been absent but never entirely degenerate. 
 
 The purpose of this essay, having determined what man* s 
 general attitude has been, is to examine the literature of the 
 periods from 1660 to 1726, the Restoration to the publication of 
 Thomson* s Winter , and from 1726 to the Lyrical Ballads . to dis- 
 cover in both periods what the deviation from the normal has been. 
 
 From 1726 on, the sentimentalists did not confine them- 
 selves to pitying the tearful and faithful spouses of Colley 
 Cibber and Richard Steele. Their compassion became more catholic. 
 It is within the scope of this essay to trace English humanitar- 
 ianism both as it was concerned with lower animals and with the 
 savages of Africa and America, to consider the causes of the move- 
 ment, to examine its relationship to the anti- slave trade ag- 
 itation to the end of the century. The publication of the Lyrical 
 Ballads is selected as a stopping point, because at that time the 
 work of the humanitarian poets and novelists was at its height. 
 
 In the nineteenth century many of their dearest wishes were real- 
 ized and the reforms they sought consummated. The slave trade 
 was abolished; then slavery was stamped out. The right of 
 democratic self-expression gradually became universal in Anglo- 
 Saxon countries, and new problems presented themselves for sol- 
 ution. 
 

 
 
 
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 In the late seventeenth century there was a deviation from 
 
 the normal attitude just described a deviation attributable 
 
 to the peculiar interests of that age which valued sanity rather 
 than sentiment. It is necessary to describe this period in order 
 to contrast it with the era of sensibility which came in the 
 eighteenth century. 
 
 The scientific spirit was abroad in Europe after tin 
 Renaissance, and men, &s if awakening from a long sleep, were more 
 observant than ever before of physical and biological phenomena 
 about them. Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood. 
 Bacon had apotheosized the inductive method as a means for the 
 discovery of natural truths. As the explorations of the previous 
 hundred years had stimulated men*s imaginations in regard to new 
 worlds, so Harvey and Bacon paved the way for discoveries in the 
 natural sciences. Curiosity was more lively than it had ever 
 been before. Men tried many things, and their appetites for 
 marvels knew no satiety. When the Stuarts returned in 1660, they 
 encouraged scientific inquiry. Their courtiers brought with them 
 news of a similar movement in France to urge the English scient- 
 ists to still greater endeavor. The Royal Society flourished. 
 Experimentation became fashionable. 
 
 In Erance during this century there arose the famous mech- 
 anistic theory of Descartes, who, in order to endow man with a 
 soul, was forced, by discretion, to declare all other animals 
 
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 automata, like clocks. In England the mechanistic doctrine gained 
 some adherents, hut there is scant evidence of their having gone 
 to the extremes of Malebranche, Antoine Arnauld, and the other 
 Port Royalists, Said Malebranche, "They (animals) eat without 
 pleasure; they cry without pain; they increase without con- 
 sciousness of it; they desire nothing; and if they act with 
 dexterity and in a manner indicative of intelligence, it is 
 
 God who motivates them to preserve them, (l) Sainte Beuve 
 illustrates Malebranche 1 s practical application of the theory by 
 an interesting anecdote. As he came out of his house one day, 
 his dog, about to have puppies, fawned upon him in expectation of 
 a caress. Malebranche kicked her. As she went yelping away, he 
 said tranquilly, "Eh, quoi I ne savez - vous pas bi en cue cela ne 
 sent pas ?" (2) Her cries were but the rumble of wheels, like 
 the creak of the spit. 
 
 In England the struggles between the automatists and their 
 opponents were never very exciting, which is strange, for never 
 before had the cultivated men of the tw r o ceuntries been in closer 
 cultural accord. But after 1660 the learned societies of England 
 and France were absorbed in experiments with blood transfusion. 
 Vivisection of every variety became a matter of common occurrence, 
 but it was not confined to the surgical laboratory. The dilettantdk 
 
 (1) Quoted by Huxley, Methods and Results, ch. V from Meditations 
 
 Metaphysiques et_ Correspondence de IT. Malebranche . I have 
 been unable to find this selection. 
 
 (2) Sainte Beuve, Port-Royal t v II p 316-17 
 

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 practically without scientific knowledge, carried the new activ- 
 ity into the drawing-rooms and enlivened smart functions by dis- 
 embowelling living dogs for the ediiication Oj. ohe cuali 0 , 7 . (l) 
 They were magicians conjuring gold fish out of silk hats. 
 
 Said a writer in Philosophical Transactions , "We have 
 been ready for this Experiment these six Months, and wait for 
 nothing but good opportunities, and the removal of some consid- 
 erations of a Moral nature .' 1 2 3 (2) (That is, ~or the experiment 
 of blood transfusion into the body of a man. ) In the dispute 
 as to who had first performed the operation, the English were 
 forced to concede the honor to the French, but they maintained 
 that a laudable scrupulosity and a respect for the "Penalties of 
 the Law", more strict in England than in Prance, had detained them 
 Within six months after, however. Dr. King had found his man, a 
 feeble-minded cleric, and had operated successfully, November, 
 1667. (3) 
 
 It would be grossly unfair to the scientific pioneers of 
 England to deny them credit for brilliant research and discovery. 
 It was chiefly among the dilettantes that the custom became de- 
 plorable. Animals not only were opened without purpose, out 
 they were given no care after the experiments were per rormed. 
 
 ( 1 ) Philosophical Transactions , v I and II. Pepys and Boyle tell 
 
 similar stories. 
 
 (2) Ibid, v II. p 522. 
 
 (3) Pepys, v VII, p 197; Phil . Trans . v II, p 557 
 
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 The Hon* Robert Boyle, in spite of his distinguished services to 
 the cause of learning, habitually seems to have examined the in- 
 terior workings of his specimens, sewed them up, and released 
 them with no apparent attempt to see that the incisions were 
 properly healed* Long after the result of such an experiment 
 was well known, animals were stifled in air pumps, to satisfy, 
 one suspects, only a fruitless and aimless curiosity* After the 
 spleen of an animal had been removed or after his blood had been 
 let, he was released to go his way, no effort being made to do 
 more than to sew up the wound. ( #)But to Boyle this was a man*s 
 world, so created by Bod, who has upon occasion made the sun to 
 stand still and has suspended other natural laws for the benefit 
 of the human race. (1) 
 
 Pepys tells how Charles II obtained the body of a natural 
 child, apparently the offspring of some court lady, which was dis- 
 sected by the Merry Monarch with many a sprightly jest. (2) John 
 Evelyn escorted many great ladies and peers to the disseccing 
 rooms at Gresham College , where experiments were performed es- 
 pecially for them, among his guests being her grace of Newcastle , 
 "a mighty pretender to learning". (3) There was much oi tnis 
 idle drawing-room dilettantism among the noble virtuosi, for 
 whom Charles Stuart set the fashion. 
 
 (#) Phil . Trans . v I, p 352, 
 
 (1) Boyle, v II, p 12, Usefulness of Natural Philosophy . 
 
 (2) Pepys, v III, p 41. 
 
 (3) Evelyn, v I, p 26. 
 

 
 
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 There were, of course, many who attacked the legitimate 
 activities of investigators, but without much distinction between 
 the serious and the frivolous. Among the apologists were Thomas 
 Sprat and John Dryden, both of whom have paid high tribute to the 
 scientific spirit. 
 
 "Among th 1 assertions of free reason 1 s claim, 
 
 Th 1 English are not the least in worth or fame." (1) 
 
 Then follows high praise of Harvey, £>acon, and Dryden’s colleagues 
 in the Royal Society. Sprat replies to those who cast aspersions 
 on the new method. The scientists are not godless or visionary 
 or ridiculous. Hut nothing is said in defense of useless vivi- 
 section or of disavowal of amateur experimentation. Since there 
 are many pages devoted to the Society’s defense without any such 
 mention, eertainly there could have been few attacks on those two 
 scores. (2) There were, indeed, some rumors that vivisection of 
 men had been forbidden, for Jean Penis wrote from Paris in 1667- 
 68, to find if this were true * but the rumor was emphatically 
 denied in Philosophical Transacti ons , which declared that there 
 was no protest and certainly no legal attempt to forbid it. (#) 
 
 Shadwell, in The Virtuoso, satirizes this whole class of 
 energetic seekers after seemingly esoteric information in the 
 person of Sir Nicholas Grime rack, who was to dissect, after the 
 mode, at his town house. The evening festivities were to con- 
 clude with "a dish of tea, meat, and discourse of the noble Oper- 
 ation, and to sport an author over a Glass of Wine." (3) Samuel 
 
 (1) Dryden, To My Honor’d Friend, Dr. Charleton. (2) Hist . of R._S. 
 (#) Phil . Trans . V II, p 710 
 (3) Virtuoso , Act I, p 7 
 

 
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 Butler attacks the virtuosi in The Elephant and the Moon and in 
 A Satire on the Royal Society , but like S hadwell he holds no 
 brief for those who went beneath the knife, either rnan or beast. 
 
 Now membership in the learned associations of England was 
 not confined to eager scholars and bored aristocrats. There was a 
 community of interests among scientists and literati in the late 
 seventeenth century, such as never since obtained, at lee.st not 
 to the same extent. In the list of fellows of the Royal Society 
 before 1700 appear the names of John Dryden, Edmund Waller, 
 
 Thomas Bp rat, Edward Stillingfleet , and lord Chesterfield, all 
 of them remembered in the annals of literature and philosophy 
 rather than in experimental science. This is undoubtedly one 
 reason for the absence of emotion in the poetry of the period, 
 though certainly it is not the only one. The writers gained 
 clarity and a wider horizon at the sacrifice of feeling. An exam- 
 ination of the Philosophical Transactions after 1750 will show the 
 scientific interest inclining to physical investigation rather 
 than biological. Certainly we should have had the humanitarians 
 "hymning in full choir" if the conditions of the first decade 
 after the Restoration still obtained. 
 
 It is Addison who first among the di stinguished literary 
 men of the early eighteenth century stated his disapproval of tin 
 careless treatment of animal life by the pseudo-scientists. 
 
 Addison was a believer in the mechanistic theory, but he did not 
 follow Descartes 1 automatism to extremes. Animals are governed 
 by instincts, and Deus est anirna brutorum. He has small patience 
 

 
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 wit h pretenders to scientific erudition. 
 
 "There are, besides the above-mentioned innumerable re- 
 tainers to physic, who, for want of other patients, amuse them- 
 selves with the stifling of cats in an air-pump, cutting up dogs 
 alive or impaling insects upon the point of a needle for micro- 
 scopical observations; besides those that are employed in the 
 gathering of weeds, and the chase of butterflies . • . . (1) 
 
 There is a report in the Spectator of an experiment in vhich the 
 
 investigators, to demonstrate mother love, showed her puppies to 
 
 a dog then being dissected alive. The details are much like those 
 
 mentioned before; but Addison begs pardon for mentioning this 
 
 "very barbarous experiment" and this "instance of cruelty." (£) 
 
 3. 
 
 In the first decades of the eighteenth century we find the 
 two goddesses, classicism and experimental science, still enthron- 
 ed; physicians like Garth were writing poetry, and at such gath- 
 erings as Dr. Arbuthnot held at St. James* s there was no divorce 
 between letters and laboratory. The presence of the research mett 
 od in literature accounts for the small regard paid to the lower 
 species in the poetry of the period, but the time had come for 
 the pendulum to swing back to the E nglish norm and finally to 
 the other end of the arc. 
 
 Though writers of the period may have countenanced the 
 lachrymose fidelity of the Colley Cibber heroine, their influence 
 in the development of later romantic emotionalism was slight. It 
 is necessary, however, to examine them in order to complete the 
 
 (1) Spectator . no 21, 121 
 
 (2) Ibid, no 120. 
 

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 survey of tendencies prior to the humanitarian movement, to rec- 
 ognize more clearly the signs of transition from an age of head 
 to an age of heart, and to understand completely the wide gesture 
 of huinanitarianism to come. 
 
 The men we think of as most representative of the spirit 
 
 of their age were interested primarily in man man in society, 
 
 man and his mind, man and his relations with a rationalistic 
 
 diety. The primary concerns of Chesterfield, Pope, and Swift were 
 
 critical, like those of their predecessors; they had inherited 
 
 their manner and method from the previous generation, Man is a 
 
 wonderful machine, even as Descartes has said, oub horn to err, 
 
 and, as Pope insists, reason must restrain. (1) Chesterfield 
 
 sometime later, in advising his son, instructs him to study man, 
 
 ( 2 ) . The genus homo whom he was to study was an urbane creature 
 
 whose interests carried him no farther from Charing Cross than 
 
 the rolled lav/ns of Twickenham or Richmond, This is a man's world, 
 
 and the proper study of mankind is man. 
 
 In Windsor Forest Pope's recognition of the high place 
 
 occupied by the human species and the negligible position of the 
 
 lower is obvious. His conception is typically neo-classic. 
 
 The shady empire shall retain no trace 
 Of war, or blood, but in the sylvan chase; 
 
 The trumpet sleep while cheerful horns are olown, 
 ffim d arms employed on bird, and beast alone, [& 
 
 ( 1 ) Essay on Man, II Is 1,2 
 
 (2) Chesterfield , Letter CHXIV 
 
 (3) Windsor Forest , 1 371 ff 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Such is Pope’s conception of the Golden Age to come beloved 
 
 fancy of poets. Certainly in this delectable time, which shall 
 rival the prime of days in felicity, animals shall have no share 
 in the good things of life; . the world will continue to be the 
 province of the poet’s own hind. In the Big say on Man , however , 
 Pope speaks of the state of nature as having been the time when 
 God reigned here below, when man was neither clothed nor red by 
 murder; (1) yet later he insists that the present state of things 
 is best and that, though man is tyrant of the whole, he is help- 
 ing nature and treats animals humanely while he prepares them far 
 his feasts. But in the age of Dryden the position of the lower 
 species had interested the poets not at all, and therefore, this 
 short discussion in Pope is an announcement of a new poetical 
 subject. In addition to their having aided man to make this a 
 better world to live in beasts have been his teachers. Prom the 
 bee man has learned the art of building; from the ant the 
 science of government. 
 
 Like Pope, Gay also considers this a man’s sphere. Gentle 
 and kindly as he generally was, he describes with infinite zest 
 the hunt and kill, his enthusiasm mounting as the dog closes in 
 on his victim. 
 
 (1) Essay on Man . Ill, I 154 
 
 (2) Gay, Rural Sports , canto II 
 

 
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 Eager he presses on. but overshoots the ground: 
 
 She turns fthe hare), he winds and soon regains the way. 
 Then tears with gory mouth the screaming prey 
 What various sports does rural life afford! (1) 
 
 When he writes of domestic animals, however, his tone is distinct- 
 ly humane. The London coachman is subject for a diatribe in Trivia 
 because he beats his horse, the friend of man which labors for his 
 comfort. John Gay is generally recognized to have been an early 
 humanitarian; but certainly he was only a mild one who was never 
 willing to sacrifice his own comfort, even philosophically,: for 
 the beasts of the field or wood. There are isolated passages like 
 the one in Trivia when he appears as champion for beasts, but 
 there is a preponderance of evidence on the other side. But there 
 is evidence in his poetry of the transition. 
 
 Another reason for the lukewarm attitude toward animal 
 life in early eighteenth century literature is that the poets 
 we re not familiar with any except the most common domestic 
 animals. The love of the Augustans for the Town is well known, 
 "the dear, damn'd, distracting town." of Pope's Farewell to London . 
 When he describes the rural scene, even such a domesticated land- 
 scape as that of Windsor and Eton is generalized, and the animals 
 of the river and forest become "the wanton fawn", "the bounding 
 steed", "the pamper'd goose". When he describes a lark or thrush, 
 there is an obvious lack of first-hand observation. 
 
 tl) Gay, Rural Sports . canto II 
 

 
 
 
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-18- 
 
 So when the nightingale to rest removes. 
 
 The thrush may chant to the forsaken groves. 
 
 But, charmed to silence, listens while she sings. 
 
 And all the aerial audience clap their wings, (1) 
 
 Surely he was thinking of a West End assembly! Again, he describe 
 the death of the larks, beautifully, it is true, but as if he had 
 received his knowledge vicariously and certainly with no humane 
 purpose • 
 
 Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare. 
 
 They fall, and leave their little notes in air. (2) 
 
 The song of the poets* bird certainly made little impression on 
 the Twickenham bard. It polished its work as Mr. Pope did his 
 couplets • 
 
 And yet there are lovely pictures in his ordered land- 
 scapes pictures of animals which mark him as a transition 
 
 poet. In his description he portrays beautifully and faithfully 
 the death of the purple-crested pheasant which mounts on 
 "triumphant wings" only to fall wounded in a crumpled heap when 
 the fowler comes by. (3) 
 
 A third reason for the poets* indifference to animals was 
 that, through the influence of Latin models, satiric and didactic 
 poetry was immensely popular among the Augustans. When they 
 used the lower species as subjects, it was generally to point a 
 moral or to belittle man. Lean Swift *s Beasts* Confession 
 
 (1) Spring , 1 13 ff . (2) Windsor Forest 1 133 
 
 (3) Windsor Forest .1 115 ff. 
 

 
 
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-19- 
 
 illustrates well the tendency. He specified four aaimals, he 
 
 says in the advertisement, to symbolize the evil characteristics 
 
 of mankind, the ass, the wolf, the swine and the ape, "all equally 
 
 mischievous, except the last, who outdoes them in the article of 
 
 cunning; so great is the pride of man." And again, 
 
 For here he owns that now and then 
 Beasts may degenerate into men* 
 
 Gay often writes in much the same vein. In his vivid praise 
 of rural life (l), he describes the custom of daring larks with 
 mirrors, a method of hunting which has served many a poet with 
 similes. It is pride which "lures the little warbler from the 
 skies," a conception scarcely to be comprehended in any other 
 period except that of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth 
 centuries. In the midst of rhymed epistles on every kind of 
 subject is Bounce to Fop , from a dog at Twickenham to a dog at 
 court. Bounce is a spaniel with a "manfer roar". He loathes the 
 anemic and ill-tempered city dog and scorns his tricks of fetch- 
 ing and carrying at the hest of a capricious mistress. The poem 
 has a double meaning, and underneath there is the inevitable 
 satire on the human race; for to Gay the two dogs represent the 
 town-bred man and the honest country gentleman so often satirized 
 in the comedy of manners. (2) 
 
 ( 1 ) 
 
 (2) In Elegy on a Lap-Dog . Gay concludes with the customary thrust 
 at man. 
 
 Here Shock, the pride of all his kind, is laid; 
 
 Who fawn T d like man, but ne'er like man betraydd 
 See also Fable no. 9, in which the bull remarks that the 
 dog has learned evil, because he has been trained beneath the 
 butcher, man. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 20 - 
 
 Pope, too, adopts the same method of bitter moralizing in 
 Windsor Fores t and delivers with his humanity a sound lecture 
 to predatory man. 
 
 (Beasts, urg*d by us, their fellow beasts pursue. 
 
 And learn of man each other to undo). (1) 
 
 The conspicuous exception to the prevailing literary fashion 
 just described appears in the verse of Anne, Countess of Winchil- 
 sea, lady in waitin g to Mary of Modena before the revolution of 
 1688, who after the Etuart debacle retired to her country seat 
 in Kent and devoted herself to writing. She was, in marked con- 
 trast to Prior, Pope, and Swift, a close observer of the rural 
 scene. She was not interested in "wild" nature, though she was 
 a sympathetic friend to the animals of her manor park. Occasion- 
 ally she suggests as none of the classicists does a genuine love 
 of the quiet and orderly beauty of rural England. The Bird in 
 the Arras contains a note well worth contrasting with those of 
 her contemporaries. The bird flies into a room, tries to light 
 on the tapestried foliage, beats in desperation against wall 
 and ceiling, "till some kind hand directs the way" for his es- 
 cape. In her fables she also shows how thoroughly out of sympathy 
 she is with her age. Even though she uses the form as often as 
 the rest of the Augustans and moralizes energetical ly , there is 
 a gentleness and a touch of quiet humor like Cowper’s. And this 
 
 quite humor is the only quality v/hich can save a poet of humanity 
 from descending to inanity and bathos. 
 
 £l) Windsor Forest, 1 125 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 21 - 
 
 4 . 
 
 In this discussion of various centuries which preceded the 
 era of humanitarianisra, I have tried to shov; that the English 
 have normally loved external nature and have recognized that a 
 bond exists between man and the other creatures which share the 
 world with him. Sensibly enough, the love of one*s own always 
 
 comes first consciousness of kind, the sociologists call 
 
 it, as, for example, in Utopia . where More T s ideal citizens 
 object to slaughter because it tends to react unfavorably on the 
 human race by making it callous. There are many examples, too, 
 not only from England but from the continent which show that in 
 monastic ism there is a humanitarian tendency. 
 
 In the seventeenth , century there was a deviation from the 
 norm, because man*s curiosity was stimulated by exploration and 
 the greater value placed on material comfort and aspirations. 
 Mysticism had vanished. Man consulted the book of nature and in- 
 exorably sought to dispel the universal gloom of ignorance with 
 the white light of reason. He hated mystery, preferring sanity 
 to ecstasy and microscopes to stained glass windows. As he in- 
 dulged his curiosity, he rejected emotional experience because 
 it hampered him in his search for truth. Consequently, he view- 
 ed the living things about him not as creatures of feeling but 
 as so many fascinating problems on which he might exercise his 
 intellectual ingenuity and which have been placed here by Cod 
 for the well-being of the human race. Poets and scientists as- 
 _£um£4... thatthe ir field of endeavor was the same, and they com- 
 
- 22 - 
 
 bined forces in their desire to extend the frontiers of knowledge. 
 Such a social temper is not conducive to humanitarianism, which, 
 to flourish, needs responding emotions. What sympathy there was 
 was devoted almost exclusively to man. 
 
 But in the first two decades of the eighteenth ceitury, 
 though science and rationalism we re still supreme, there are signs 
 of change. True, from the previous generation, the cultivated had 
 inherited an absorbing interest in the affairs of mankind. But 
 since society was urban, its members had little opportunity to ob- 
 serve any except the most common domestic animals. Satire and 
 didacticism were the correctives for human frailties, and the low- 
 er animals were used in fables merely for disciplining the human 
 rac e . 
 
 And yet there are signs of a transition. Pope occasionally 
 shows sympathy for the creatures about him, though it is well-con- 
 trolled compassion. In Say the tendency is more apparent. Pro- 
 tect the streams from otters, he says, because they kill the fish, 
 and also spoil the fishing. Do not torture a worm by putting him 
 on a hook; besides, a fly makes better bait. (1) Thus speaks the 
 seventeenth century voice. But the coachman has no right to abuse 
 his horse, (2) and man* s method of teaching his dog to murder is 
 reprehensible. (5) Though the signs are faint ones in Pope, Gay 
 and Swift, they are unequivocal in Lady Winchilsea; and in Thomson 
 we shall find without mistake that the pendulum lias begun to swing 
 
 (U Rural Sports , I 1 253. (2) Trivia, II 1 227 ff 
 
 (3) Fable no. 9 
 
- 25 - 
 
 away from neo-classic frigidity. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 HUMANITARIANISM AND THE SLAVE TRADE . 
 
 1. The Christian campaign for converts in the Hew World. 
 2. The Restoration conception of the noble savage. 3. Eighteenth 
 century sentimentalists and their belief in the slave 1 s inherent 
 nobility. 4. The brotherhood of man and natural rights. 
 
 In tracing the development of humanitarian tendencies in 
 the eighteenth century, we should naturally expect to find that 
 the greater emphasis of writers should be placed upon the ne cessity 
 of the brotherhood of man, and that before the champions of univer- 
 sal benevolence opened wide their arms to include in their earthly 
 society everything that feels, they should have first devoted 
 their attention to those rights which belong to the human species, 
 including the negroes and Indians of America and Africa. I shall 
 try to show that the first right recognized as common to all men 
 was that of salvation, to which is added, in the latter half of the 
 eighteenth century, the more wordly right of life, liberty, and the 
 pursuit of happiness. 
 
 Among the champions of man T s claims to salvation, both 
 Protestant and Catholic organisations would take the initiative, but 
 there was another group showing faint stirrings of the fraternal 
 spirit in the early eighteenth century which had no concern at first 
 with the Christian movement for the democracy of the hereafter. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Just as the clergy supported their cause by quoting the law of 
 God, this second group quoted the law of nature* The one was 
 interested in man’s equality in heaven; the other was interested 
 in man’s equality on earth. It was through the contributions of 
 both these groups, who championed man's spiritual and natural 
 rights, that the later humanitarians were able to make some 
 practical gesture towards the realisation of their ideals* To 
 prove this contention is the purpose of this section of my dis- 
 cussion. 
 
 By 1557 the zeal of various religious orders in &pain had 
 brought pressure to bear on Paul III, who aided them in their work 
 among the American Indians with a papal bull; and first of all, 
 for the more efficient missionary activity of the Roman church, 
 it was necessary for the Holy father to decree that the Indians 
 of the New World were "truly men and that they are capable not 
 only of understanding but, according to our information, they ex- 
 ceedingly desire to receive it. (Christianity) .... the said 
 Indian and all other people who may later be discovered by 
 Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty, or 
 the possession of their property, even if they be outside the 
 faith of Jesus Christ." (1) furthermore, the bull rejects the 
 argument of Spanish colonists that Indians were brutes and states 
 
 (1) Sublimi s Deus Pauli III, MacNutt, Bartholomew de las ^asas. 
 
 appendix. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 that such a contention arose from the avarice of those who would 
 enslave them. These early profiteers were "enemies of the human 
 race", the pope continues, because they tried to exclude fellow 
 men from eternal bliss. 
 
 Within forty- five years after the discovery of America, 
 then, the Church had recognized its problem, thanks to Las Casas, 
 himself a Spanish colonist in the hew World, who took holy orders, 
 freed his bondmen, and devoted his life to engaging the aid of 
 king Ferdinand and the mighty prelates of Spain in the cause of 
 Indian betterment, for such early friars as he, seeing in America 
 a vast field for missionary zeal, devoted themselves indefatigably 
 to lightening the natives’ lot. Seeing that the cruelty of the 
 settlers was playing havoc with these pro specti - ^ Christians , 
 
 Las Casas wrote to the king in 1510, recommending that Indian 
 slaves be replaced by African negroes. His motives were essential- 
 ly religious. First, it v/as necessary to recognize the Indians 
 as men, not as mere brutes, so that they might be baptized; 
 secondly, since they were of a higher order of intelligence than 
 the negroes, the missionaries could accomplish two laudable acts 
 at one stroke. They could convert the Indians at once and import 
 negroes to occupy the position of bondmen until such time as they, 
 too, might progress to the peerless blessings of Christianity. 
 
 For two centuries f olio wing, both Catholics and Protestants were 
 denying the brutality of the inferior races, though their prin- 
 cipal concern was not with terrestrial fetters but with celestial 
 
-27- 
 
 felicity. And certainly we find Las Casas, like many a later cham- 
 pion of spiritual equality, actong on the Jesuitical assumption that 
 all means are justifiable if only the end be laudable. His whole 
 purpose, like that of the Protestant coadjutors I shall name, was to 
 save man’s soul. The body was almost, though certainly not quite, 
 absolutely negligible. 
 
 In England the first sentiment against the slave trade 
 sprang from the same religious sources. "The True and Sincere 
 Declaration" of the Virginians in 1609 cleverly anticipated ob- 
 jections by stating that the true purpose of slavery in the colonies 
 was to convert the African. (1) The other method of meeting op- 
 posin public opinion was the same that Las Casas and his brethren 
 
 had used in the bull of Paul III negroes and Indians were 
 
 brutes created like the ox to toil for man. 
 
 But it was really nearly a century after John Havfcins 
 first carried negroes in an English bottom to a Spanish colony 
 before any agitation against the trade on the practice of holding 
 slaves was strongly voiced by an Englishman. The majority, in the 
 sixteenth century, looked on the growing traffic indifferently 
 and without abhorrence. Queen Eli-abeth had said, when the news 
 of Hawkins’s first venture was brought to her, that if the trade 
 
 (1) Spear, The American Slave Trade , p 10. 
 

 
-28- 
 
 continued, ,T it would be detestable and -would call down the ven- 
 geance of heaven upon the undertakers. n (1) But later Hawkins 
 was granted permission to add to his arms n a demi-Moor proper 
 bound with a cord", (2) and Elizabeth was the first English sov- 
 erreign to share in the profits of the trade, a custom which did 
 not succumb to adverse public opinion till the days of Anne. 
 
 Not until George Pox went out to Barbadoes to hold meet- 
 ings there emong the Quakers did the horror of the situation, come 
 home to a few Englishmen through the agitation of Pox himself and of 
 his friend, William Edmondson. Here were men like the English, but 
 for the color of their skins, growing up in ignorance of Christian- 
 ity, and he urged their masters in 1671 "to train them up in the 
 fear of God". After he had thus admonished the owners, he urged 
 them to deal humanely with their slaves and eventually to free them. 
 Nothing at all is said of the trade. Above all, the relationship 
 of master and man is like that of Joshua and his household, an 
 excellent opportunity for the patron to enforce service to the 
 Eord. Here indeed were virgin fields for the missionary. (5). 
 
 This seirnon created a tremendous furore against the 
 Quakers among the planters of Barbadoes. Their meetings were brok- 
 en up, and members of the society were assaulted until Pox , in 
 behalf of his brethren, restated his position and denied that he 
 
 (1) Ibid, p 15 (2) Traill, Social Engla nd, v III, Sec. Ill P 740-1 
 
 (3) Jo urn , of George Pox , v II, P 502. 
 
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 was stirring up discontent and insurrection among the slaves. The 
 Quakers, he said, merely held meetings with the Blacks, urging them 
 to he righteous before God and faithful to their masters. Fox 
 was willing to compromise, if need be, so far as the slaves* 
 earthly existence was concerned, if the soul might be saved; 
 yet, after he went back to England, he continued the fight. He 
 wrote in 1690 to the "Friends and brethren, ministers, exhorters, 
 aid admonishers" to keep up their work among the Whites, Blacks, 
 and Indian kings. (1). 
 
 Since the Quakers were a gentle and tolerant people, 
 they did not urge their views vigorously against those outside 
 their society, particularly after the mobs of 1671 in Barbadoes 
 had made it necessary for Fox and Edmonson to state their position 
 unequivocally; but the work inaugurated by these two was carried 
 on, and in 1758 at the yearly meeting in England members were for- 
 bidden to concern themselves "in reaping the unrighteous profits 
 arising from that iniquitous practice of dealing in negroes and 
 other slaves." Eegroes are men; they should be treated as men. 
 
 The law of God is invoked in their behalf. And the body becomes 
 of importance as well as the soul. (2) 
 
 The Puritans, too, were rallying to the cause, basing 
 their attitude toward the traffic on divine law. Men are brothers 
 
 (l) Ibid. (2) Epistles of the Yearly Meetings , v 1 p 507 
 

 
 
 
 
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 iii God. This is the constant argument, just as a century later was 
 to come in the same cause the contention that they are brothers in 
 nature. Two years after Fox’s attack on slave owners in Barbadoes, 
 Richard Baxter stated the Puritan position, going further than 
 Pox, hew ever, since he was speaking from the security of England, 
 in voicing humane sentiments. Slavery is undoubtedly wrong, and 
 the trade is wrong. Man has no right, said Baxter, to treat his 
 fellow man as a beast. He has no right to treat him unkindly, 
 for we are all equal in Ohrist. ..'.ven assuming that slavery is 
 justifiable, there is this Christian brotherhood in which the 
 master is the trustee of God, the guardian. of the slave 1 s soul.(l) 
 
 A planter’s chief duty is to care for the salvation of those who 
 serve him; he should think of their spiritual welfare rather 
 than of accruing profits. To keep them fron the Word is to en- 
 danger their existence in the next world and is "rebellion against 
 God". Thus far, the Puritan point of view is similar to that 
 of Catholic and Quaker. 
 
 There are times, however, when slavery is permissible, 
 he thinks, for a man may be enslaved for crime; and even a 
 Christian may sell himself or forfeit his liberty. "But on no con- 
 dition shall the owner do anything to prevent the salvation of his 
 soul or require him to sin", and those who neglect the bondmen T s 
 souls are" fitter to be called incarnate devils than Christians, 
 though they may be no Christians whom they so abuse." (2) 
 
 (1) Baxter, Christian Pi rectory , V/orks , v I, 461 ff 
 (£) Baxter, v 1. p 462. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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-31- 
 
 j Little comment seems necessary on this Puritan point of 
 
 view. All men are part of the Christian community, thinks Baxter, 
 but there is an undercurrent in the Christian Directory , strongly 
 reminiscent of Las Casas. Since we have the institution of slavery, 
 here is an excellent opportunity to do missionary work. He re- 
 cognizes a right to spiritual freedom, but a man may forfeit his 
 earthly liberty. His position is precisely this: first, care for 
 
 the soul. Then the question of e art lily bondage may be taken up. 
 
 After 1 he Christian Directory , the Church of England 
 also advanced to champion the oppressed when Morgan Godwyn, w ho 
 had spent some years in the West Indian colonies, returned, fired 
 with indignation at the treatment accorded slaves and the care- 
 lessness shorn by their masters in preparing them for the life to 
 come. Hot the least of Godwyn T s concerns was the fact that his; 
 church had so long remained silent on this questi on, particularly 
 since the Hew Englanders and the Quakers were working the mission- 
 ary field while the Anglicans remained tranquilly aloof. He had 
 waited, he said, for someone to speak, but the clergy had remained 
 silent. In 1680, The negroes 1 and Indians 1 Advocate appeared, and 
 in 1685 he denounced the institution of slavery in Westminster 
 abbey, the very heart of the nation; but, irony of ironies, he 
 dedicated his published sermon to James II, himself a large stock- 
 holder in the Royal Adventurers Trading company l 
 
 Like the other clergymen, Godwyn was primarily interested 
 
 

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- 52 - 
 
 in the souls of inferior races. He had been stirred to activity 
 by Fox's address to the ministers of Barbadoes which had been put 
 into his hands, "a malitious end crafty invective", in which the 
 Quaker had asked "Who made you Ministers o f the Gospel to the 'white 
 People only . and not to the Tawneys and Blacks also ? (with many the 
 like inso lent Queries , following in a tedious Harangue . " (l) How 
 
 this, he declared in virtuous wrath, is manifestly untrue, for does 
 not the Anglican liturgy contain a prayer for all sorts and con- 
 ditions of men? It was, nevertheless, the scorn of Fox which 
 caused Godwyn to act. 
 
 His problem was a little more difficult than the ones 
 faced by the Puritans and Quakers. He had to see that the negroes 
 were insured of eternal bliss without disturbing the earthly status 
 quo . He hated slavery as much as did the dissenters, but he had 
 to go slowly. First, then, he had to answer the ivy- grown argument 
 that slaves are brutes. Then he quotes Virginia lav/ and Lord Chan- 
 cellor Finch (2) to prove that baptism does not free a negro; but 
 in spite of this appeal to man-made law, he declares again and again 
 the equality of all men before God and their rights to the exercise 
 and privilege of Christianity, and no difficulties or inconveniences 
 whatever can justify the English in denying them salvation. The 
 negroes are human. They laugh and talk. They are entrusted with 
 
 (1) Hegroes 1 2 and Indians Advocate . p 4 ff 
 
 ( 2 ) Trade Preferr T d before Religion . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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the positions of overseers, an anomalous situation if they are 
 brutes. They reason like men, and their servitude does not imply 
 a loss of humanity. 
 
 " Another time it was told me," he writes, speaking of 
 his colonial experiences, "with no small Passion and v'ehemency, 
 and that by a Religious Person (for so in all things else she ap- 
 peared), that T might as well baptise a Puppy, as a certain young 
 Negro , the Mother whereof was a C hristian , and for ought I know 
 { no twit list and i ng her Complexion) as dear to God as her self ." ( 1 j 
 
 But Godwyn believes in humane treatment, though he holds no brief 
 
 for emancipation of the slave T s body. The system is indeed wrong, 
 
 and with fine scorn he pictures the good Christian at his work of 
 
 oppression. The part of the problem, however, he is forced to 
 
 treat lightly, because too many influential people were financially 
 
 involved by the system. 
 
 There never was a more vigorous seventeenth century 
 crusader against an evil than Godwyn, even if his activity was 
 prompted not by pity but by a desire to see his own church get 
 its share of heathen instead of continuing to pray in its in- 
 imitably complacent manner for all sorts and conditions of men. 
 
 2 . 
 
 To examine the other tributary to the main stream of 
 humanitarianism in its relation to slavery, it is necessary to 
 pay some attention to early conceptions of the Noble Savage , vhom 
 
 ( 1 ) 
 
 Negroes 1 and Indians 1 Advocate , p 58 
 

- 34 ' 
 
 we first encounter in the heroic tragedies of Dryden ! s time and 
 who continues as fictional stock in trade well into the third de- 
 cade of the eighteenth century. There was naturally much interest 
 in the new lands of Orient and Occident in the seventeenth century, 
 and London shops were constantly stimulating the imagination hy 
 displaying as they never had before wares from far off countries. 
 The Noble Savage was the creation of the heroic tragedians and 
 the travel stories of explorers and visiting colonists. He is a 
 child of the imagination. The princes of the new continents were 
 noble chiefly because they were princes, since it was a fundamental 
 precept of these writers that royalty is noble, whether it be the 
 ruling house of Ilium or Timbuctoo. Consequently, we have bronze 
 heroes, ebony kings, and cinnamon- colored potentates roaring out 
 heroic couplets as they lie on the rack or confounding their en- 
 emies in critical moments by hurling their vital organs at them. 
 
 Dryden’s noble savages are typical. In The Indian 
 Emperor ( 1665 ) Hontezuma is about to suffer death at Spanish hands, 
 but Cortez is willing to show clemency to his victim, because he is 
 a noble prince and because, like the rival lovers in Polyeucte . 
 he would compete with this noble savage only in civilite . Like a 
 true neo-classic chieftain, the Aztec speaks: 
 
 Name life no more; 
 
 *Tis n ow a torture worse than all I bore: 
 
 I f ll not be bribed to suffer life, but die. 
 
 In spite of your mistaken clemency. 
 
 I was your slave, and I was used like one; 
 
 The shame continues when the pain is gone: 
 
 But I 1 !?! a king while this (his sword) is in my hand. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 (1) Again, when Cortez, after having employed an Indian as spy dur- 
 ing his Mexican campaign, finds that his creature has betrayed 
 Montezuma, he bursts into disillusioned soliloquy. 
 
 Where, banish 1 ! virtue, wilt thou show they face. 
 
 If treachery infects they Indian race? (2) 
 
 This is the histrionic Cortez speaking, we must remember, and not 
 the sprightly gentleman of history. 
 
 Dryden*s ideas of a state of nature, were they not in- 
 troduced so casually, would make us think pretty seriously of 
 Jean- Jacques and his pictures of the past in The Discourse on Arts 
 and Science . In the lands beyond the western sea, there are fruit- 
 ful vales of supernal beauty where guiltless men while away their 
 lives in primitive felicity. (5) And Almanzor, in The Conquest oi_ 
 Granada, cries: 
 
 I am as free as nature first made man, 
 
 Ere the base laws of servitude began, 
 
 When wild in woods the noble savage ran. (4) 
 
 The Dr;. den conception of man as a noble savage, wandering happily 
 
 about in a world, unharassed by care or oppression, is beautiful 
 
 tl) Indian Emperor, V 2 (2) Ibid, I 2 
 
 (3) To Dr. Char le ton: The fruitful vales set round with shady trees, 
 
 And guiltless men who danc’d away their time, 
 Eresh as their groves, and happy as their clim< 
 
 (4) Conquest of Granada , pt I, Act I. 3c. 1 
 

 
 ! 
 
 
-56- 
 
 while it lasts, but it is only a poetic convention after all. The 
 poet was too much of a Tory at heart. Though savages may he free, 
 he would not have traded his lot for a less sophisticated one. He 
 was opposed to change of all hinds, as Ah s ol om and Achitophel 
 indubitably shows. (l) It is a beautiful idea for the fancy 
 to play with, and is not to be taken seriously. 
 
 In fiction, the Noble Savage was as fanciful a creature 
 as his kindred in heroic tragedy. T he classic example is Mrs. 
 Behn*s Orinooko (1668), said by some critics to be the first 
 humanitarian novel. But this seems to me an erroneous classifica- 
 tion. Mrs. B e hn knew nothing of Surinam, the locale of her tale, 
 (2) and a brief outline of Orinooko will be sufficient to show that 
 Mrs 3ehn*s noble savage is but a novelist* s conception of prince- 
 ly perfection. Her novel presents the conventional problem 
 of heroic tragedy, the dilemma of love and honor. 
 
 Orinooko, an African chieftain of peerless masculine 
 beauty, is in love with Imoinda, an African princess of peerless 
 feminine beauty. He is lured aboard a slaver and taken to America 
 to become a slave. In the meantime, Imoinda, too, because of the 
 jealousy of her lover* s grandfather, has been sold and sent to 
 Surinam, where "the noble slave", this "large soul", this "great 
 man", "our black hero" meets her and is permitted to marry her. 
 
 (1) We inherit our positions as subjects through the forfeiture 
 of Adam. There is no doubt which idea is a part of Dryden*s real 
 Philosophy, lines 770 ff. 
 
 (2) Prof. Hrnest Bernbaum has a conclusive article on Mrs. Behn*s 
 career as a romancer masquerading’ as a realist in the Modern Lang- 
 
 Aonnoaati oja^pufrli cations , ■ v X3HTIIT. - ~~ " 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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 After being treated with cruelty, Orinooko leads a revolt against 
 his Christian tormentors, who promise his followers immunity if they 
 capitulate. Deserted, he and Imoinda resolve to die together. He 
 slays her and faces his persecutors. To show his contempt of them, 
 he cuts a piece out of his neck and flings it in their faces. Then 
 with the same heroic indifference he disembowells himself. In 
 spite of this display of "nobility”, they take him prisoner, heal 
 his wounds, and prepare him for the torture. He dies nonchal- 
 antly smoking a pipe while they hack off his nose, ears, arms, and 
 legs with a dull knife. 
 
 On board the slave trader f s ship QrinoohD’s followers 
 have gone on hunger strike, and the worried captain assures their 
 chief that all vail be freed when they reach the new land. He would 
 put the hero on parole, were he not suspicious of what would then 
 happen; but Orinooko shames him with a lofty exposition of African 
 ethics. 
 
 "Let him (that is, the captain) know, I swear by my 
 Honour; which to violate would not only render me contemptible and 
 despised by all brave and honest Men, and so give myself perpetual 
 pain, but it would be eternally offending and displeasing to all 
 Mankind; harming, betraying, circumventing, and outraging all Lien. 
 Bu Punishments hereafter are suffer 1 ! by one’s self; and the World 
 takes no cognizance whether this Cod has reveng T d ’em or not, *tis 
 done so secretly, and def err’d so long; while the Man of no Honour 
 suffers every Moment the Scorn and Contempt of the hon ester World, 
 and dies every Day ignominiously in his Dame, which is more valuable 
 than Life." (l) 
 
 (1) U or ks of Aphra Behn, OrinookQ , p 164 
 
-58- 
 
 I.Irs. Behn’ s hero is speaking the language of his "breth- 
 ren in Dryden, Otway, Southern, and Lee. Again he addresses the 
 slaves whom he has been exhorting to revolt. "Gome, my Fellow- 
 Slaves, let us descend, and see if we can meet with more Honesty 
 and Honour in the IText World we shall touch upon." (1) When he 
 makes love, it is in the same grandiloquent manner, for young 
 
 Indians Mrs. Behn does not seem to distinguish between 
 
 Indians and Africans fold their arms, follow the desired 
 
 one with soulful glances, and sighs are their only language. (2) 
 
 His action is unmistakably in the heroic manner. Mrs. Behn re- 
 marks that in a state of innocence men did not know how to sin, 
 and that "simple nature is the most harmless, inoffensive, and 
 virtuous mistress." (3) But it must be remembered that the 
 slaves desert Orinooko in his time of need; so it is obvious that 
 all are not noble and true in the primitive state, and Orinooko 
 may not be considered as the lofty and primitive soul of Jean- 
 Jacques but a creation after the manner of the author’s times. 
 
 Besides, it has been proved beyond doubt that Mrs. B e hn’s knowledge 
 of the savage was vicariously obtained. 
 
 The Hoble Bavage and his beautiful innocence remained 
 popular on the English stage and in nnglish fiction for several 
 
 (1) Ibid, p 166-7 
 (3) Ibid, p 131 
 
 (2) Ibid, p 131 
 
-29- 
 
 generations. He became almost as indispensable as the square- 
 jawed capitalist in the modern problem novel or the uncut diamond 
 in the fiction of the Indiana school, and he is presented to us in 
 a variety of thin disguises. in Penelope Aubin 1 s The Noble Slaves 
 we are again presented with a more or less noble savage whose love 
 for his mistress he confesses as he dies. He tells her he was born 
 as free as she is, but religion and his present servitude make the 
 difficulties of courtship insuperable. (1) The author implies 
 that the slave is just as admirable a character as a white’ man in 
 his natural state. 
 
 There is not much in these dithyrambic utterances on the 
 Noble Savage to make him live for us. Mrs. H e hn did not know the 
 new world, and neither did southern, who dramatized the story of 
 Orinooko. Mrs. Aubin 1 s geography is constantly an incomparable joy 
 to the twentieth century reader. Persia and Japan are apparently 
 but a few leagues apart. The hero travels from Quebec to Panama, 
 
 Mexico, or some such other place Ilfs Aubin does not seem to 
 
 know exactly which --- by stage coach, and her Japanese Indians 
 speak Chinese. Now a humanitarian is seldom or never created by 
 the vicarious contemplation of another’s woe. Among the religious 
 antagonists to slavery, we do encounter a mild indignation at the 
 
 (1) Aubin, Noble Slaves , p 7 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-40- 
 
 lot of the savage, though the soul is of principal concern; but 
 among the writers of fiction and drama the conventional idea of 
 African or Indian nobility was wholly without sympathy, because the 
 author did not know his characters and because he was following a 
 convention. Either there i s no emotional attitude on the part of 
 the author or the story lacks verisimilitude, and very often in the 
 heroic tragedy the idea of primitive excellence is introduced too 
 casually to make the reader suspect the author of sincerity. 
 
 3 . 
 
 I have shorn how the various Protestant churches and the 
 Catholic Contributed their part to the developing sentiment against 
 slavery in the Hew World by invoking the law of Cod against it; 
 and how the idea of the Hoble Savage arose as a stock figure in the 
 tragedies of the Restoration theatre. My purpose now is to ii ow 
 how this artificial conception of the seventeenth century ceased to 
 be a convention of the far side of the proscenium arch and how it 
 became of use in the practical application of humanitarian philosophy 
 But first it is necessary to sketch briefly the background of events 
 which prompted the attacks on slavery by the humanitarians and the 
 apologetics of their opponents. 
 
 Before 1729 colonists returning to England on business 
 
 or for a holiday often brought a few slaves with them. Since it 
 was a generally recognized maxim of English la w that a slave when 
 baptized became free, many negroes obtained baptism and successfully 
 

 
 
-41- 
 
 reiisted their masters 1 attempts to force them to return to American 
 bondage. The actual conditions were brought more vividly before 
 the English people when in that year the attorney and solicitor- 
 general handed down the opinion that baptism of a slave in England 
 did not automatically free him. To test the validity of this de- 
 cision, Granville Sharp took up the cause in 1765. In that year, 
 Jonathan Strong, a slave from Barbadoes, who had been baptized, 
 was seized by his master when about to return to his plantation; 
 but Sharp succeeded in frightening his owner into withdrawing 
 pressure by threatening to prosecute him for assault if he 
 tried to remove the negro. (1) 
 
 In 1769 the case of James Somerset came up. The question 
 involved was a larger one than that of emancipation by baptism. 
 
 The courts were asked to decide whether or not a slave brought on 
 English soil automatically became free. Somerset, an African slave, 
 had been brought to England by his master, from whom he subsequent- 
 ly escaped. The master had the man seized and conveyed aboard a 
 vessel bound for Jamaica. The decision handed down in 1772 was in 
 favor of the enemies of slavery. The result of the trial had far 
 reaching effects. The case was discussed throughout England. 
 
 Whereas it was libellous in those days to tell the truth in a 
 nev/spaper about the maltreatment of a negro, such information, if 
 given in open court, might be published with impunity. (2) 
 
 (1) Clarkson, History of the African Sla ve Trade . Chap. I sec II 
 
 ( 2) Spear . The American Sla ve Trade , p 104 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 - 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-42- 
 
 From that time on memoirs and travel stories written by those who 
 knew conditions on the African and American coasts were published 
 almost without number. 
 
 Sharp continued his investigations. He found that 
 negro slaves brought to England were cast upon public charity when 
 they no longer were fit for service, and that conditions aboard the 
 slavers touching at home ports were unbelievably bad. So closely 
 were the Africans packed together in the filthy holds of vessels 
 that the mortality among’ both victims and masters was terrific. 
 
 Even William Beckford, father of the author of Vathek, himself 
 an owner of slaves in Jamaica, admitted this. (1) In 1787, 
 
 Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp organized the Committee for 
 the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which obtained the passage of 
 the first bill for the regulation of the traffic and started the 
 movement vh ich resulted in its final abolition in 1807. The pub- 
 licity of the investigations made by the committee in English port 
 towns, where they found the space allotted to each captive to be fiv< 
 feet six inches long by sixteen inches broad, extended to the 
 far corners of England. (2) The committee T s bill called for a 
 limitation of the number of slaves carried and for their greater 
 
 (1) Beckford, He marks upon the Situation of ilegroes in Jamaica 
 (2) Clarkson, History of the African Slave Trade, Chap. 2, sec 1 
 Bandinel, Slave Trade, p 81 
 
-43- 
 
 c.omfort. On the third attempt in Parliament the Dolhens bill pass- 
 ed both houses and became a law in 1788. 
 
 In the eighteenth century, however, long' before Granville 
 Sharp gained fame as the first abolitionist, there were many 
 humanitarians, among the first and most interesting being Joseph 
 Addison. I have quoted before his satire on the ruthless virtuosi 
 of his times, and certainly if one wants evidence of his kindly 
 feelings toward all living things, one does not have to look far 
 among the Spectator papers or in the work of his friends on The 
 Guardi an . In one essay he elaborates the idea that education is 
 the sculptor of the human spirit. To illustrate his point he tells 
 how two slaves with wondrous "greatness of soul" killed their love 
 because neither might possess her alone. What might not this in- 
 herent nobility produce if the oppressed races were given an op- 
 portunity for cultivation? There certainly can be no excuse at all 
 for the contempt in which we hold the lives of savages, merely in- 
 flicting a fine, as we do, on the man who takes their lives and com- 
 pletely depriving them sometimes of their chances for immortality. 
 ( 1 ) 
 
 Addison* s point of vi ew is significant. The master is to 
 be condemned, and so is society, £§r carelessness of human life, 
 which should be valued more highly. The master is to be condemned 
 for keeping a soul from salvation. In these assertions Addison is 
 voicing sentiments we have heard before in Godwyn; but the younger 
 
 (1) Spectator . no. 215 
 
-44- 
 
 man, unlike his predecessor, stresses, the importance of the "body 
 of man and subordinates salvation, at least so far as his rhetorical 
 emphasis goes. We find, too, that there really is such a thing as 
 "savage greatness of soul"* Addison accepts the story as fact, 
 and from the number of times it is quoted by later humanitarians it 
 must generally have been considered authentic. The author certain- 
 ly believed it. In this essay there seems to be the first evidence 
 of a combination of the religious and literary attitudes toward 
 the savage. He was not a reformer, of course; so he holds no 
 brief for emancipation or abolition. His sympathy is purely in- 
 tellectual . 
 
 This idea of the inherent nobility of even the prim- 
 itive man appears as a serious thesis in Colonel Jacque (IVES). 
 
 On the Virginia plantation where Jacque found himself a bondman 
 is a master who objects to the brutal treatment of his slaves. 
 
 He insists that in them, as in every other man, there is good stuff 
 which responds to the right sort of treatment. The negroes were 
 not only to be handled kindly by their overseers but they were to 
 be reasoned with if they did wrong-, for their master believed them 
 to be rational.. In the discussion the owner , of course, vans 
 his point. "It appeared," said Jacque, "that negroes were to be 
 reasoned into things as well as other people, and it was by this 
 managing their reason that most of the work was done." (l) 
 
 To use them unkindly, "is a violence upon nature in every way, 
 
 (l) Colonel Jacoue . p 174 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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-45- 
 
 an l is the most disagreeable thing in the world to a generous mind." 
 (1) Like Addison, Defoe holds no brief for emancipation or the 
 curtailment of the trade. He urges only that the Blacks be treat- 
 ed like free men, for they are noble. They are to be treated 
 humanely, for it is contrary to the law of nature that they oe per- 
 secuted. Unlike the early clerical writers on the subject, he 
 argues from the law of nature instead of xrom Hie lav/ ol G-oci, c.nd 
 the emphasis on humanity and the insistence on humane treatment 
 to the body supersedes the early distress over the negroes' welfare 
 in the life to come. 
 
 Shortly before and immediately after the middle of the 
 century the presses were issuing sermons and poetry on Hie ins c i mi 
 tion of slavery at a tremendous rate. Dyer attacked it in The 
 Fleece, though not vigorously, and prophesies revolt and bloodshcf 
 if the negroes were not more kindly treated. Grainger made a plea 
 for the humane treatment of Africans, though at the same time in 
 Sugar Cane he seems to want to justify the system. George white- 
 field wrote in no uncertain terms to the He th odists of America in 
 L Letter to the Inhabitants of Maryland , Virginia , ll orth and sou oh 
 C arolina , in which he assured them they were no better by nature 
 
 (1) Colonel Jacque , p 167 
 
-46- 
 
 than were the negroes. If revolt were to come as a result of the 
 colonists* inhumanity, they would merely he getting what such cruel- 
 ty merited. Even Shenstone , wandering about the bench-cluttered 
 "landslip" of the Leasowes, speaks pityingly of the negroes 1 wretch- 
 ed lot, a significant fact, since his life and thoughts were far 
 away from the world as it existed in reality. 
 
 Bishop Warburton delivered a sermon before the Society 
 for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1766, which shows how far the 
 Church of England position had changed since the days of Morgan 
 Godwyn. The purpose of the society was just that which its name 
 implies, to further the Gospel, and consequently he discusses pretty 
 thoroughly the sti ortcomings of the Anglicans as missionaries, The 
 welfare of the natives, he says, is as nothing to the desire of 
 the colonists to exploit them. Gain is their God. They traffic 
 endlessly in Africans, just as if the negroes were brutes. White 
 men and negroes are brothers, and the slaves have all the faculties 
 of the superior race. 
 
 All this is far from new. But he voices the sentiments 
 of the later humanitarians when he invokes both divine law and 
 nature against the traffickers in human lives. White men and black 
 men are "brethren both by nature and grace." (l) In refuting the 
 slave- owners* argument that the negro is happier bond than free, he 
 
 (1) Warburton, Works , v 10 p 55 
 
-47- 
 
 reasserts his thesis that ’’nature created man free, and Grace in- 
 vites him to assert his freedom.” (X) Godwin and his contempor- 
 aries invoked the law of God; Defoe invoked the law of nature. 
 Warburton invoked both. Humanity and common sense as well as re- 
 vealed religion are shocked at the godless commercialism of the 
 t ime s . 
 
 As one examines the works of those who attack the slave 
 trade during the fifties and sixties of the eighteenth century, he 
 is more and more impressed with the manner in which the movement 
 gained its strength from widely different groups and what strange 
 companions some of these humanitarian champions would have made. 
 Rousseau's famous works were well known in ^urope by 1770. America 
 stood on the brink of rebellion. It is as if in the stock rooms 
 of controversy there were innumerable properties available for any 
 crusade in behalf of the oppressed. Among the borrowers appeared 
 John Wesley in 1774, a passionate opponent of slavery, for he had 
 seen it as it was during his American visit; and like his friend, 
 Whitefield, he viewed its effects with horror. Wesley was certain- 
 ly no follower of Rousseau, even when he maintained that negroes 
 had an inalienable right to their liberty, for he had no sympathy 
 with those English radicals who gathered about Dr. Price. He ex- 
 pended a, great deal of his passionate eloquence in apologetics 
 for George III and his government in Observations on Lioerty and 
 
 (1) War burton, works , v 10 p 55 
 
. 
 
-48- 
 
 A Calm Address , Political liberty interested him but little. He 
 was willing in the former pamphlet to dawdle with the reducti o ad 
 absur&um . like an expert in sophistry. 
 
 When it came to concrete rights that is, the physical 
 
 freedom of man to go and come as he would -- Wesley used his voice 
 in the interests of the slave, attacking the whole system with 
 the true fire of the later eighteenth century humanitarians. 
 
 Thoughts on Slavery appeared in 1774 when the beauties of liberty 
 were interesting to Europe and were particularly interesting to 
 the western world. He opens his essay with a description of the 
 land of Guinea and a characterization of the gentle savages who 
 cultivate the soil, manufacture a few articles, and live most 
 peaceably among themselves. They are sober, industrious, and 
 noble, except in those sections where they have been corrupted by 
 the white men. "Where shall we find, at this day," he cries, 
 
 "among the fair-faced natives of Europe, a nation generally pro- 
 claiming the justice, mercy, and truth, which are found among 
 these poor JLfricans." (l) In other words, the English may leave 
 their native land to find genuine virtue among the people they en- 
 slave. In reply to the current story that negroes sell their child- 
 ren, he vehemently retorts, "Whites, not Blacks, are without natural 
 affection!" (2) If the negro is stupid, it is because of his 
 master, for he is in no respect inferior to the European (3) and 
 
 (1) Wesley, Works, y. 16, (2) Ibid, p 450. (3) Ibid, p 460 
 
 p. 448. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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-49- 
 
 in some respects he is superior (1) when he has a European’s oppor- 
 tunities. 
 
 Like many of those who preceded him, Wesley invokes the 
 natural law, a convenient enough term until it is defined. He 
 uses it, however, in the conventional eighteenth century sense as 
 "the nature of things", the law of things as they are, which man 
 discovers without the aid of revelation, and more to he heeded than 
 the man-made laws which violate the principles of justice. The 
 Angolan has the same natural rights as the Englishmen (2) to per- 
 sonal liberty. In his argument from natural, law he passionately ar- 
 raigns those who would debase their own kind, who have no proper 
 regard for the true majesty of man and his inherent goodness. 
 
 In John Wesley, then, we can most easily see how the 
 two earlier conceptions of the negro have been synthesized. 
 
 Slavery is an odious practice, because it is contrary to the lav/ of 
 God. It is still more odious, because it violates the law of nature 
 which grants every man his physical liberty. The noble savage of 
 Dryden and Behn becomes a genuinely noble savage, not the creature 
 of the imagination. He is as good as the white man when he has the 
 opportunity. Even without them he is more honest and is in no way 
 inferior. Addison would not have gone so far if he had been con- 
 fronted with the consequences of the point of view taken in the 
 Spectator paper quoted. 
 
 (1) Wesley, Works , p 459. (2) Ibid, p 455 
 

-50- 
 
 The last humanitarian to be discussed here is Thomas bay, 
 a man whose views represent the philosophic ideas before described, 
 with the contribution that Rousseauism would naturally make as 
 soon as the humanitarians realized how aptly the theory of the 
 rights of man could be applied to the situation of the oppressed 
 Africans. Unlike John Wesley, Day was a vigorous supporter of 
 colonial rights. The year the Declaration of Independence was 
 signed he wrote his tract on slavery for an American who had asked 
 him for an opinion on the question; but he witheld the letter from 
 public at ion until 1784, because he did not wish to make his criticism 
 public before "the happy termination of that disastrous war." 
 
 Among man T s indisputable rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit 
 of happiness . (^In kindly fashion but none the less forcibly, Day 
 turns upon the colonists their own Rousseauistic arguments of the 
 Declaration of Independence, 'while they were fighting for their 
 political integrity, they were holding in bondage men of another 
 color whose rights to the good things of earth were equal with that 
 of the whites# To attack the system as it exists is but to obey 
 the necessitous promptings of morality; for if men are enslaved, 
 the enslavers will degenerate. Natural religion refuses to sanction 
 slavery. Revealed religion deplores it. A man has no more right 
 to be cruel to another than he has the right to kill at pleasure, 
 and to abuse a fellow is a "flagitious insult upon justice, human- 
 ity, and common sense.” (l) "If there be an object truly ridiculous 
 
 Day, fragment of an Original Letter, p 13 
 (1) Ibid, p 28-9 
 
-51- 
 
 in nature," he continues, "it is an American patriot, signing resolu- 
 tions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brand- 
 ishing a whip over his affrighted slaves •" (l) The only justifica- 
 
 tion for slavery as well as the only justification for government 
 is the consent of all parties concerned. 
 
 During the first forty years after the Restoration the 
 humanitarian element in writers on the subject is subordinate. 
 
 The churches wanted to enlarge their field of missionary endeavor, 
 and therefore their primary interest was to make easier their wo rk 
 in preaching tM G-ospel. The spirit of competition among the 
 various creeds w. s strong. Their purpose in converting and civil- 
 izing the savage was to add new bulwarks to Christianity and to 
 acquire more stars for their celestial crowns than their com- 
 petitors of other creeds. Hence, they fought an institution 
 which obstructed their designs. The only literary purpose of such 
 writers as Mrs. Behn was to utilize the new material made avail- 
 able by exploration. The savage appealed to the imagination and 
 was treated in the same terms as the other heroes of the age. 
 
 He wa s honorable , because all heroes of the period were ready to 
 sacrifice anything for the sake of fictional rectitude. Later we 
 find Addison and Defoe actually believing in the inherent nobility 
 of the savage, who was therefore not to be mistreated, because his 
 
 (1) Day, Fragment of an Original Letter , p 55 
 

 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 < 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 52 - 
 
 ill treatment was a violation of nature's law. He is as good inher- 
 ently as is the white man. With the introduction of Rousseauism, 
 the theory that all authority is to he based upon the consent of 
 the governed is accepted by those who support their humanitarianism 
 by divine precept and natural law. With the constant reiteration 
 of the idea of the brotherhood of man, it is easily to be seen why 
 Granville Sharp and his friends were able to accomplish a r forma- 
 tion of a system when others had tried vainly. As the groups before 
 described joined forces with those who would extend toleration and 
 brotherly love to the lower species, so the eighteenth century pre- 
 pared itself in a variety of ways for the idea of a society in 
 which no creature or thing that feels is ineligible if he lives at 
 peace with those about him. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 53 - 
 
 Q HAP TER III . 
 
 HUIAUITARIARISH ARE TIE LOWER ARIHALS. 
 
 1# The changing attitude toward country and the consequent 
 change in attitude toward animals. 2. The philosophic justifica- 
 tion of human i tarianism. 5. The status of animals in a man- 
 ruled world as stated by the humanitarians. 4. The application 
 of the new sensibility to British institutions. 5. Widenin' 
 sympathies with lower as well as higher animals. 6. Increased 
 
 observation of animals the skylark in eighteenth century 
 
 poetry. 7. Conclusion. 
 
 1 . 
 
 The people of the great English hinterland in the early 
 eighteenth century, bourgeoisie or quality, lived their ordered 
 lives, bartered, hunted, kept the lower clergy in a proper state 
 of subjection, and were eventually buried beneath epitaphs suit- 
 able to their temporal state. &ut so far as the poets who lived 
 in the time of "great Anna" were concerned, this mass of the 
 English nation was unknown or despised. Going to the country 
 lor a Londoner meant a bouncing journey over a rough road in a 
 clumsy coach, and he seldom made such a journey of his own ac- 
 cord. Since all life centered in “Town", which meant then as 
 now London and the suburbs, the attitude toward the country 
 
 was one of undisguised distaste; toward the rural "looby”, one 
 of undisguised contempt. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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-54- 
 
 Gay shows what this e ighteenth century attitude was when 
 he tells how we, unlike our"pristine sires", do not seek the cool 
 retreat with "sublimest joy" to rest from the noisy clatter of 
 the city. Rather, the city man would betake himself to the 
 Devil tavern, where he might find other companions like himself 
 to help him while away the hours. (1) Pope himself adored the 
 Town and loathed all that country which lay beyond his own estate 
 at Twickenham. There is something artificial and modish about 
 his essay on gardening, in which he professes to scorn "the 
 nicer elegancies of art" and prefers a greater fidelity to unadorn- 
 ed nature. He was following "the Pindaric manner". (2) His 
 heroine, Arabella Blount, after the coronation, returns to the 
 terrible ennui of the country seat, where polite talk did not 
 exist, where guests came seldom, where diversions were few, and 
 
 where peerless woe I she dined at noon instead of at 
 
 four. (5) Mathew Prior, Dean Swift, and humbler He a Ward add 
 their praise of Town life. In the chorus of Queen Anne singers 
 only obscure Hlijah Fenton speaks for a quiet refuge away from 
 disillusionment s of the city, (4) and Thomas Parnell sees in 
 the rural scene a place in which to regain health after years 
 spent "softening till high noon in down". (5) 
 
 (1) Gay, Wine . L 140 ff 
 
 (2) Guardian, no 175. "My compositions in gardening are al^.- 
 gether after The Pindaric manner, and run into the beautiful /nature 
 without affecting the nicer elegancies of art." 
 
 ( 3) Bpistle to Arabella 31 ount . vol III , p 226 . 
 
 (4) - Fenton, -^pis tie to Mr . Southern 
 
 (5) Parnell, Health . 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 c 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-55- 
 
 The town life of Pope, in which the park represented exter- 
 nal nature, was not quickly repudiated hy the evangelists of the 
 hack to nature movement; and consequently the first gentlemen 
 who became mildly enthusiastic over the rural scene and vh o for- 
 sook London for their estates recast nature nearer to their heart T s 
 desire and introduced ideas similar to those which had created 
 the precision of Versailles. Sculptured nymphs and pagan goddess- 
 es peeped chastely through English holly; meticulously correct 
 walks gave a glimpse of meticulously correct vistas; Virgilian 
 wildness, with waterfalls, grottoes, and hermitages, gradually 
 became fashionable. But before the century had passed irregular- 
 ity was popular, and ruins had become the mode. If none was avail- 
 able, the landscape artists constructed a fane with a broken arch 
 to meet the popular demand. Even before 1V50 there had been a 
 general exodus from the city by the cultivated, whereby the 
 poetry of nature became less artificial; for even at the 
 Leasowes, where Shenstone was decorating the countryside with 
 summer pavilions and geometric paths, the real nature v/as so 
 close at hand that even an obtuse observer must perforce have 
 become familiar with it. 
 
 After James Thomson published The Reasons (published 
 entire in 1750), the first great nature poem of the new era, the 
 
 rural scene became fashionable. The poets vh o followed modified 
 the rules of taste laid down by the School of Pope. Thomson 
 was working with his eye on the object. He did not break entirely 
 
I 
 
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 - 56 - 
 
 wi th neo- classic tradition, but lie did not slavishly follow any 
 neo-classic model either in form or content* He knew the 
 country he described because he had lived there; so, for that 
 matter, did Shenstone, who created at Leasowes the most famous 
 
 I 
 
 ferme orn e in England , the model for all ladies and gentlemen 
 who would keep abreast of the fashion* Pope, the leader of the 
 Queen Anne wits, had spent his boyhood at Windsor in an atmosphere 
 far from rural. As the splendor of his school began to fa.de, 
 the star of the nature-loving school began to brighten. Other 
 poets followed Thomson’s lead in describing the country. Some 
 undoubtedly accepted the new mode in the spirit of Shenstone , 
 who went to his estates because he lacked funds, rather than 
 because he loved them, but who helped, nevertheless, to establish 
 the new manner. 
 
 Hearly all the poets of nature who followed Thomson were 
 country-bred. That in itself explains why they could reproduce 
 so accurately the rural locale. He himself' had been born in 
 Bo xburghe shire . Dyer came from south Wales. Akenside was rear- 
 ed at Newcastle- on- Tyne , in a district with many border traditions. 
 William Junius Mickel and Allan Bamsay both knew the country 
 in their youth. Somerville was a Warwickshire squire. Henry 
 Brooke was born in Ireland and spent the greater part of his 
 life there. Gray, though born in London, lived in his mature 
 
 years amid the placid beauties of Cambridgeshire. Cowper, also 
 townbred, spent the most tranquil period of his life at Olney. 
 
f 
 
 
 
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- 57 - 
 
 (1) Lady Winchilsea, who really belongs to the earlier period, 
 had been a writer of society verse until after James II 1 s debacle 
 after which she had been forced into retirement, from that time 
 on she wrote poems about nature far superior to similar work 
 by the other writers of her times. 
 
 The first reason for the return to nature movement, then, 
 was that the poets of the new era came from the country and 
 knew what they were talking about. They were not trying to 
 make the English landscape a replica of that inti® classic 
 bucolics. It was this perfectly natural interest in a familiar 
 locale and the revulsion from a no longer novel form of writing 
 that resulted in an increased observation of country insteaxL of 
 city life. Animals, hitherto mentioned most casually in the 
 poetry of siueen Anne’s time, became a fit subject for poetry. 
 
 Poets whose primary interest is in man will love the town, just 
 as the neo-classicists did. Human nature is their field. They 
 will know it thoroughly. Poets whose primary interest is external 
 world will love the country, just as the followers of Thomson did. 
 
 (1) When Cowper was in London, he tried to write satire in the 
 neo-classic manner. But his years in rural England, when he broke 
 away from the imitators of the classics, Yi/ere as successful and 
 probably far more useful than any other in his pitiful life, de- 
 spite the Reverend John Hewton and his overweening interest in 
 the fires of hell. 
 
- 58 - 
 
 All nature is their field. Many other creatures besides man live 
 in meadow and wood. Quite naturally, the new school became 
 sympathetic with an almost entirely new kind of life. 
 
 I have already shown how sensitiveness to human suffering 
 had developed after the callousness of the Restoration period. 
 
 I intend in this section of my essay to study the causes of 
 eighteenth century humanitarian feeling toward animals and to 
 examine the various sources of its philosophic justification. 
 
 I shall point out how the new philosophic theories and the love 
 of animal life were applied to such secure English institutions 
 as the hunt, last of all, I want to point out how the sensitive- 
 ness to suffering was democratized so as to include almost all 
 sentient creatures and how this love affected English poetry. 
 
 2 . 
 
 Undoubtedly, the English were prepared for a revival of 
 the healthy sympathies and the exultant gusto of late Elizabethan 
 romanticism. The early eighteenth century had been moved by 
 the sufferings of slaves. It had found a pleasurable thrill in 
 the newly-discovered beauty of the country. It was prepared, 
 therefore, to be positively tender to animals. It was prepared, 
 therefore, to observe them more closely. The intellectual and 
 emotional self-restraint of the previous century was becoming 
 
-59- 
 
 irritating. The Guardian had spoken tenderly of animals and de- 
 clared that even the fierce ones never attacked unless they were 
 molested. It had gone further and had declared it man’s duty 
 to be kind, because the lower species were not entitled to everlast- 
 ing life and because man had been placed here below as trustee. 
 
 Even hunting, that thoroughly secure British institution, mas 
 wrong, because it tended to make the human race more brutal. (1) 
 Defoe in the first three decades of the new century was to write 
 his sociological novels. Agitation for reform followed one 
 another, wave after wave, throughout the era. Hence the 
 spirit of the Elizabethans was tempered with new elements, and 
 for that reason the early sentimentalists of the 1700’s went 
 as far from the English norm in the direction of hurnani tarianism 
 as the seventeenth century had gone in the direction of cold- 
 blooded scientific investigation. The movement was justified 
 philosophically to the new century by the deists of the School 
 of Shaftesbury. (2) 
 
 (1) Guardi an . vol I, no 61, (1715) 
 
 (2) Mr. 0. A. Moore 1ms explained with a great deal of clarity the 
 influence of Shaftesbury and his philanthropic system in Character- 
 istics . He demonstrates that eighteenth century hurnani tarianism owes 
 its origin to the great deist. Though it is quite obvious that the 
 earl’s doctrine of divine benevolence had an enormous influence on 
 the poets of the caitury, Mr. Moore has failed to realize that there 
 were other very tangible factors involved in shaping the movement. 
 
 He has forgotten that most of the poets of the period knew the 
 country well and loved it in their childhood, that agitation agains' 
 slavery had paved the v/ay for increased tenderness, and that an ac- 
 curate observation of and love of the human race and other species 
 may, as in the present case, precede its philosophic justification. 
 Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets of England . 1700-1760, P.L.I1.A. 
 new series, vol 24. Certainly Winchilsea and Gay were expressing 
 their love of a few animals wi thout making any attempt to justify 
 ■khfimspi nyi a. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 p < 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 60 - 
 
 Since this was a period in which the thinkers of the per- 
 iod were torn between the conflicting evidence of science and re- 
 velation, the followers of Shaftesbury have their choice. They 
 might, like the ostrich, hide themselves from the disturbances of 
 modernity by trusting to the Thirty-liine Articles, or they might 
 betake themselves to the canp of the materialists, leaving all 
 religious baggage behind. Plainly, there had to be some kind of 
 compromise for those who could not deny recently produced evidence 
 but who still demanded some spiritual balm in a world which was 
 becoming too rationalistic for comfort. One solution was the sent- 
 imental system of Lord Shaftesbury, which rejected revelation as 
 the source of knowledge but which saw in the world around ample 
 evidence of divine benevolence and love for everything that lives. 
 God had given to the human species the high gift of reason with 
 which it might solace itself. (1) God is good. Virtue is the 
 chief excellence of man. It alone brings happiness. There are 
 
 two forces in man a desire for selfish betterment and a desire 
 
 for social welfare. When he yields to the latter, he really is 
 doing that which in the end m 11 redound most fully to his own 
 welfare. (2) The moral sense helps man to distinguish between 
 
 (1) The Return to Hature in Engl i s h Poetry « N. C, Studies in Phil, 
 vol 14, p 260-1. 
 
 (2) Characteristics . vol 2, p 165. 
 

 
 
 
 , 
 
 
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 t 
 
 t * 
 
 » 
 
 * 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 4 
 
 « < 
 
 ■ 
 
 * 
 
 • t 
 
 
 
 
 
-61- 
 
 right and wrong; and just as God is good, so man, his greatest 
 work, is naturally a creature whose chief desire is to he like Hirn. 
 
 Therefore, any desire to commit wrong is unnatural. 
 
 "Of this kind (unnatural affections) is that unnatural 
 and inhuman Delight in beholding' Torments, and in viewing Distress, 
 Calamity, Blood, Massacre and Destruction, with a peculiar Joy and 
 Pleasure. This lias been the reigning Passion of many Tyrants, and 
 
 and belongs, in some degree, to such Tempers 
 Courteousness of Behaviour, which retains in 
 of Mankind, and prevents the Growth of Harsh- 
 ... To see the Sufferance of an snemy with 
 may proceed from the height of Anger, Revenge, 
 other extended Self-passions: -out to delight in the tor- 
 
 barbarous Nations; 
 as have thrown that 
 us a just Reverence 
 ness and Brutality 
 cruel 
 Pear and 
 
 Del ight , 
 
 ture and Iain of other Creatures indifferently. Natives or foreign- 
 ers, of our own or of another Species, Kindred or no Kindred, known 
 or unknown, to feed, as it were, on Death, and to be entertain’d 
 with dying Agonies: this has nothing in it accountable in the way 
 
 of Self-interest or private Good above -mention’d, but is vholly 
 and absolutely unnatural, as it is horrid and miserable." (1) 
 
 The conception of God held by Shaftesbury appears often 
 in those writers who best illustrate the changing attitude, in the 
 years that followed, toward all the species. Thomson, first poet 
 of the new century to dwell extensively upon the need of kindness 
 to animals, was also the first to emphasize the goodness of a 
 
 deity who reveals Himself in the order of "the rolling planets" 
 
 "the God of nature". (2) Though The Castle of Ind olence is filled 
 With the same philosophic doctrine, the most unequivocal acknowledge- 
 ment of divine benevolence appears at the conclusion of Summer (1727). 
 Taught by a tender and loving God, men will prosper greatly; and 
 
 if they obey their Master, He will teach them 
 
 (1) Characteristics . vol 2, p 165 
 
 ( 2 ) Hymn' to God’s Power . 
 

 
 
 T 
 
 
 
-62- 
 
 To live like brothers, and, conjunctive all. 
 
 Embellish life, (l) 
 
 Thomson reiterates Shaftesbury 1 s doctrine that reason aids mankind 
 to proceed from truth to truth. Some mysteries, however, it shall 
 never be permitted to pierce, for those things are forbidden. 
 Suffice it to know that God works only in "boundless Love and per- 
 fect Wisdom." (2) 
 
 The deistic rhapsody is better illustrated by Henry 
 Brooke’s Uni versal Beauty (1755) than by Thomson’s Summer , for 
 not only does he preach the deism of Shaftesbury but he shows 
 how the shackles of neo-classic restraint on the emotions had been 
 cast aside. He rises with ecstatic apostrophes to the great 
 climax when he finally addresses God, "Thou Voluntary Goodness I" 
 
 (5) Everywhere there are examples of His kindness in this de- 
 mocracy of nature. The to rid is not made for man alone. If he 
 wishes to learn truths, he should go to the beasts, which heed the 
 divine law, instead of arrogantly setting himself above even God’s 
 commands, and butchering carelessly and ceaselessly in a world 
 society where all should live in mutual tolerance. 
 
 (1) Summer. L 1776-7 (2) Ibid, I 1804 
 
 (5) Brooke, Universal Beauty , book 4 1 85 
 
 01 whence to us? or whence to aught? but theel 
 The word, the bliss, the privilege to be — 
 
 Or if to be, for thee alone to be, 
 
 Derivative Great Author Sole! 
 
-63' 
 
 Another poet who accepts the Shaftesburian doctrine and 
 who applies it to world conditions is Soame Jenyns. He combines 
 Christian theory with sentimental deism by rejecting revelation as 
 the only dependable means of knowledge and by retaining his be- 
 lief, entirdy through revelatory evidence, in the immortality of 
 the soul. Jenyns* s Essay on V irtue . plainly an imitation of 
 Pope*s Essay on Man , appeared in Dodley’s Miscellanies in 1748, 
 and the author also translated The Immortality of the ooul 
 from the Latin of Isaac Hawkins Browne (1759), a poem which lad 
 a great vogue. Man only, writes Jenyns, refuses to listen to the 
 eloquent voice of external nature, ignoring the Creator *s will 
 and refusing obstinately to see that each animal is here to pro- 
 mote the general good. But the human race, though lord of all, 
 is slave to vice, folly, and pride. 
 
 *Tis he that*s deaf to this command alone. 
 
 Delights in others woe, and courts his own; 
 
 Racks and destroys with tort* ring steel and flame, 
 
 Eor lus*ry brutes, and man himself for fame. (1) 
 
 The poet was interested only in carrying out his ideas without 
 
 elaborating extensively upon the conditions resulting from man*s 
 
 ignorance of the great realities, and consequently he is content 
 
 merely to state his illustration without discussing it at great 
 
 (1) An Essay on V irtue . Chalmers, vol. 17 
 
-64- 
 
 length as did Thomson, who loved animals for their own sake and 
 who probably would have loved them even if he had never heard of 
 Characteristics . 
 
 Browne has a good deal more courage than the majority of 
 ethical poets, certainly more than Jenyns. He resolutely tackles 
 the problem of evil, though he leaves it exactly as he found it. 
 
 Man cannot know, he declares, but he will know when the trump of 
 doom sounds and when God explains all those mysteries in Nature 
 that reason has been unable to pierce. Browne T s system of univers- 
 al love was based on the social institutions he knew. He recogniz- 
 ed the brotherhood of man; but his cosmopolitanism was tempered 
 by his patriotism, and unlike the radical of the last years of the 
 century, he places nationality before world fraternity. ?or 
 Isaac Hawkins Browne, Brittania was still ruling the waves. 
 
 the patriots soul 
 
 Knows not self-centr*d for itself to roll. 
 
 But warms, enlightens, animates the whole; 
 
 Its mighty orb embraces first his friends. 
 
 His country next, then man, nor here it ends, 
 
 But to the meanest animal descends. (l) 
 
 These early preachers of the doctrine of benevolence 
 
 show very clearly how poetic taste was changing. Jenyns with 
 
 his neo-classic diction and his heroic couplets is. distinctly a 
 
 follower. So is Browne, and Brooke, too, shows little originality. 
 
 (1) Immortality of the Soul , Book II, Chalmers, vol 17, p 65£ 
 

-65- 
 
 Yet the nark of the sentimental school is upon them, bince they 
 are all deists, they value rationalism highly, but they value 
 feeling more highly. The same spirit of benevolence which man- 
 ifests itself in them appears again and again until the end of 
 the century, sometimes accompanying deism and sometimes with all 
 traces of early rationalism lost in a direct appeal to the heart. 
 
 The greatest exponent of Shaftesbury 1 s doctrines, un- 
 relieved by any original thought, is Mark Akenside, whose 
 Pleasures of the Imagination (1744-77) is little more than a blank 
 verse rendition of the Characteristics . In the second book 
 "sovran good" is his theme. God has given man a sphere of in- 
 fluence to which he bears the same relation as the deity does 
 to the whole. In this area man is supreme; within its juris- 
 diction the human heart, filled with radiant love for all, has 
 an infinite capacity for wishing well. Whoever doubts this, 
 says Akenside, surely 1ms never stood by the ocean when a. ship 
 lies aground in a dangerous sea and has surely never observed 
 the distress of those ashore as they watch with vicarious agony 
 the straggles of the endangered ones "while holy Pity melts the 
 general eye". (1) Universal brotherhood in the God of 
 
 (1) Pleasures of the Imagination , book £, p 91, Chalmers, vol 14. 
 Crabbe has quite a different picture of the erstwhile humanitarian 
 longshoremen who 
 
 Wait on the shore, and, as the waves run high. 
 
 On thetaxt vessel bend their eager eye, 
 
 Which to' the coast directs its vent’rous way: 
 
 Theirs, or the oceans, miserable prey. The Village , bool 
 Crabbe in his realism faces the actual, vh ich the sentimental 
 deists liked to pass over lightly or to ignore completely. 
 
 1 : 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 , 
 
 
66 
 
 nature is the dear gift of all our race, regardless of the stings 
 of a capricious Fortune, for there is in sorrow a kind of mob sym- 
 pathy which brings the human kind together. The prime mover is the 
 altruistic Deity, who bends lovingly over the world and guides 
 it along according to a philosophic system in which the problem 
 of evil seldom bothers. Akenside is not particularly interested 
 in turning over his finely wrought tapestry to see the reverse 
 of this philanthropic design. He knows only that somewhere there 
 is a God, who somehow guides us aright. His is an anemic philosophy 
 which does not look at the facts, lest it find among them something 
 which will mutilate this sickly, sentimental offspring of reason 
 and unreason. 
 
 The same paternal hand. 
 
 From the mute shell-fish gasping on the shore, 
 
 To men, to angels, to celestial minds. 
 
 Will ever lead the generations on 
 Through higher scenes of being. (1) 
 
 The later writers of the century still retain the idea 
 of God T s gentleness, but the rationalizing element in the con- 
 ception sometimes disappears. Goldsmith*s Edwin is a vegetarian, 
 who brings a "guiltless feast" of herbs and fruits from the 
 mountains , and who lives at peace with nature and man, because 
 he preys on nothing. He has been taught by the infinite pity 
 of God to pity those about him. This perhaps is a deistic lesson, 
 though the poem (2) develops no very extended philosophic system. 
 
 In Hhe Mysteries of Udolpho the theme of benevolence is also 
 
 (1) PI ensures of the Imagination , book 2, p 88, Chalmers 14 
 
 (2) The Hermit~TlV66) 
 
-67 
 
 present, but Shaftesbury^ system is superseded by an erratic, 
 
 but still sentimental, pantheism. M. St* Aubert and krnily, 
 
 who have been pursuing their journey across France with many 
 
 pauses for tears, but few for lunch, linger in the solitudes 
 
 and "indulge in sublime reflections, which soften, while they 
 
 elevate the lie art and fill it with the certainty of a present 
 
 GodI " (1) Goleridge T s Ancient Mariner (1798) shows no trace 
 
 of this gentle ineffectiveness, but the plot does turn on the 
 
 theme of universal benevolence. The mariner lias lain for days 
 
 in stupefaction and watches the living, crawling sea, when 
 
 suddenly the great change occurs and the spell is broken. 
 
 0 happy living things J no tongue 
 Their beauty might declare; 
 
 A spring of love gushed from my heart. 
 
 And I blessed them unaware. 
 
 The self-same moment I could pray; 
 
 An& from my neck so free 
 
 The albatross fell off and sank 
 
 Like lead into the sea. (2) 
 
 And in the moral of the tale we are given the famous preachment 
 that he who prays best loves beat, because the "dear God who 
 loveth us" made all creatures and loves them. It is the super- 
 natural element here that would preclude any relationship between 
 
 £1 ) Mysterie s o f Udolpho . (17£4) 
 
 (2) Anc i ent mariner . L 282 ff 
 

 
 
 
 0 ■ f 
 
 
 C 
 
 
 
 
 l 
 
 r 
 
 
- 68 - 
 
 Go le ridge a nd the ethical poets of the Shaftesbury school. 
 
 The influence of the benevolent theory, so prevalent throughout 
 the century, is present, whether it be there because of con- 
 scious effort on the part of the poet or not. The theme belongs 
 not to the deists only. It permeated almost the whole of eight- 
 eenth century literature. 
 
 3 . 
 
 The arguments advanced during the century for increased 
 sensibility in man 1 s relations with animals were proved in a 
 variety of ways, but, as is to be expected, most of the poets 
 and novelists were inclined to prove their theses by an appeal 
 to heart instead of to head. To the majority, man appeared as 
 the benevolent dictator, or, as some of the extremists insisted, 
 as a hind of demi-god with derived powers from the Omnipotent One. 
 The great duty was that man, the stronger, should protect and love 
 the weaker creatures which were not endowed as was the monarch 
 of the earth. Hone before the advent of Cowper carried humanitar- 
 ianism to his extremes, who scarcely differentiated between his 
 affections for his pets and those for the human species: or of 
 
 Blake, whose attitude will be described later. 
 
 To Thomson, the greatest influence among the early 
 eighteenth century humanitarians, should go the credit of inaugurat- 
 ing the new poetic movement. Though Lady Winchilsea had observed 
 
-69- 
 
 the life about her closely, she had confined her attention to the 
 inmates of her mansion park in Kent. Though Gay had been the 
 champion of the abused hackney, his interests were largely urban, 
 and he had little opportunity to broaden his humanitarian ideas. 
 
 But Thomson’s sensibility, like his observation, was more cath- 
 olic, principally because he knew genuinely wild country in the 
 Scottish home of his boyhood, and because he was able to .justify 
 himself philosophically by allying himself with the rhapsodic 
 followers of the Earl of Shaftesbury, during his life he preached 
 vegetarianism, but he did not carry out his theories assiduously; 
 certainly he did not go so far in his advocacy as Ritson or even 
 as Shelley. Thomson came down to London in 1725 with the manu- 
 script of Winter, published the following year, and by 1750 the 
 completed Seasons was in the hands of the booksellers. 
 
 In the "glad creation", writes Thomson, man walks super- 
 ior ( 1 ), but too often he becomes a tyrant who mistreats both his 
 own kind and the beasts. Unmindful of divine example, he reckless- 
 ly persecutes his fellows by imprisoning them in filthy jails (2) 
 and wreaks his savage pleasure on all living things. Since he is 
 the lord of creation, it naturally follows that he should act the 
 part of benevolent guardian to all the earth. The golden age, 
 when men were kindly and friendly, has passed away, because their 
 debased spirit disturbs the ordinary course of nature. 
 
 (1) Spring . 1 170 ff 
 
 (2) Winter . 1 559 ff 
 
-70- 
 
 William Somerville followed closely the philosophic 
 tradition of the sentimental deists and shows unmistakable signs 
 of having written -under the influence of the fashion set by 
 Thomson. The Chase fl7S5) has passages of considerable descriptive 
 power and vigor; and in this poem, written in blank verse, he 
 finds it necessary to explain, after the manner of the newly aris- 
 ing school, the exact relationship betwe n the human race and the 
 lower species. Somerville, despite his deistic leanings , is hard 
 
 put to explain how man has become a predatory animal man who 
 
 formerly load been lord of the earth and vho had ruled in gentle- 
 ness. He therefore compromises. 
 
 Devotion pure, 
 
 And strong necessity, thus first began 
 The chase of beasts (1) 
 
 The huqisn race was forced to abandon the peace of nature because 
 it did not have enough food and because God demanded animal sac- 
 rifices. The first reason given is a rational one; the second 
 must be justified by the revelatory book of Genesis. God has 
 given nan the right to hunt other living creatures for food and 
 has made him overlord of the world; but, nevertheless, hunting 
 the ,T tim l rous bare" is a "vile offense", since he is no match for 
 the whooping riders and baying dogs. 
 
 (1) The Chase . Chalmers, vol 11, p 155 
 
-71- 
 
 There are other points of view, however, of the relation 
 of man and the lower species in which man does not play so dom- 
 inant a role. Though the poets who were trying to effect a com- 
 promise between traditional belief and new thought were sincere 
 preachers of humaa itarianism , they fought hard to retain man in 
 their system as the chosen of God. But Vincent Bourne, the lazy 
 dreamer of Westminster school, the teacher of William Cowper, 
 ignores the philosophic problem entirely and lavishes on animal 
 life a sympathy unjustified by a rationalized system, and he 
 carries his ideas of a democratic universe far beyond the other 
 men of his time. Though he wrote but one thin volume of verse, 
 and that in Latin (1754) , his influence must have been profound 
 on Gowper, who translated his poems and carried on his doctrine 
 of sentimental communism. Bourne's work shows an external re- 
 semblance to the fables of an earlier generation, as if he had used 
 a classic model which he quickly set aside. Borne of his versified 
 stories, such as A Tale . exist only for the moral; but, like Lady 
 V/inchilsea, he enlivens his didacticism with a sprightly humor 
 and joyous sympathy. 
 
 According to Vinnie Bourne, there must exist between the 
 human race and beasts a spirit of mutual toleration and re- 
 ciprocity. This idea appears in his pretty little poem, To a 
 Gri cket ; a fair exchange is no robbery. 
 
i 
 
-72- 
 
 Pay me for they warm retreat 
 With a song more soft and sweet; 
 
 In return thou shalt receive 
 Such a strain as I can give. (1) 
 
 And, again, from the very nature of his title for the story of 
 
 Androcles, Reciprocal kindness the Primary Lav/ of Uature , Bourne 
 
 explains his idea of a gentle and tolerant society. Why should 
 
 the Romans wonder at seeing the erstv/hile peevish lion purring 
 
 ingratiatingly Before the considerably agitated Androcles? 
 
 All this is natural; nature bade him rend 
 An enemy, she bids him spare a friend. 
 
 When small Lydia is scratched by a kitten (2), the poet explains 
 
 away the pet’s venial sin in a spirit of reciprocal sportsmanship. 
 
 If one must play with a cat, one should be willing to bear the 
 
 animal’s jests in return. 
 
 In 1776 the doctrine of Rousseau begins to manifest 
 itself in those writings which stress the need of a greater kind- 
 ness to the brute creation. Humphrey Primatt wrote a whole book 
 it) about the natural rights of the lower animals. There is a 
 duty incumbent upon man to treat kindly the other occupants of the 
 world, which was not made for his happiness only. In fact, beasts 
 have a greater right to happiness in this world than the human 
 race has, because they w ill not share in the bliSs of the hereafter. 
 
 (1) This is Cowper’s translation and appears in practically all 
 editions of his work. 
 
 (2) familiarity Dangerous . 
 
 ( f ) A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to 
 Brute inimals . London, 1776. 
 
-73- 
 
 They have no souls, (l) Now there are certain natural rights 
 given to living things, writes Primatt, of which none has the 
 privilege of depriving another, livery living thing is entitled to 
 present happiness. In addition to his right to happiness, man has 
 been given, as gifts , his reason, his immortality, and his do- 
 minion over the wo rid • Here below all sentient creatures "sub- 
 sist together as the joint and temporary tenants of the earth, 
 alike as to passion, sense, and appetite." (2) There is constant 
 argument on the part of the author from an assumption in "the 
 reasonable and equitable claims of brutes" .(3 )Primatt , of course, 
 is chiefly interested in humanitarianism as applied to animals, 
 but after establishing his thesis to his own satisfaction he 
 applies the same method of reasoning to the problem of negro 
 slavery, as Pay did when he wrote to the American planter his 
 Housseaui sti c opinions on slavery. Therefore, it is apparent that 
 the favorite topic of conversation and polemic in the Europe of the 
 late eighteenth century, the natural rights of man, eventually 
 was utilized by the extreme human itarians , who proceeded to dis- 
 cuss the natural rights of sentient creatures. 
 
 ( 1 ) A Bissertation on the Puty of IJercy and the Sin of Cruelty to 
 Brut e Animals . 
 
 ( 2 ) This assertion is particularly interesting if compared with 
 Blake 1 2 3 s ideas of a hereafter, in which animal life plays a very 
 important part. 
 
 (3) Ibid, p 106 
 
* 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 — 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 * 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 74 - 
 
 It has been impossible in this paper to discuss 
 chronologically the growth of ideas regarding the relationship 
 of human beings with animals, because the century presents no 
 orderly scheme of development. The conception of a benevolent 
 deity appears again and again long' after Rousseauism had gi en 
 writers a new ar ument against cruelty. Vincent Bourne is 
 distinctly ahead of his time with his ideas of universal re- 
 ciprocity. These theories of man’s relation with the brutes 
 show , however, that humanitari ani sra a pears in company with 
 many distinctly different groups of ideas. It is not the 
 property, therefore, of any one group of thinkers. It belonged 
 to many poets and prose writers who had little besides their 
 humanitarianism in common. Just as the antipathy to the slave 
 trade did not remain the exclusive property of any religious 
 group, so this antipathy to other forms: of cruelty became a pretty 
 general doctrine. Many schools were agreed on the one point of 
 keenly appreciating snnsibility — - a word and an emotion which 
 characterize so well the eighteenth century temper. (1) 
 
 4 . 
 
 In the foregoing discussion of humanitarianism as applied 
 
 (1) Ritson wrote a treatise on vegetarianism which has not been in- 
 cluded in this discussion, because it adds no tiling new to the growth 
 of ideas and because his practical influence in the humanitarian 
 movement was not great. His sanity, when he wrote An Hssay on Ab- 
 stinence from Animal Rood , lias been questioned. 
 
- 75 - 
 
 to animals I have shorn how the writers, particularly the poets, 
 began to manifest an aversion to cruelty of all kinds and how they 
 sought to justify themselves philosophically. The real test of 
 sincerity, however, is not to be found in glittering generalities. 
 
 If a writer becomes specific and if in his desire for reform he 
 attacks institutions generally favored by society, then his honesty 
 cannot be doubted. 
 
 To the average Briton hunting lias been and still is as 
 sacred an institution as the Common La w or the Bui of Rights or 
 hot cross buns on Bood Friday, an institution which should be 
 preserved, despite the steady march of events, the increasing dense- 
 ness of population, and the independence of yeoman who no longer 
 submit tamely to domination by some noisy country squire. The 
 literature of the hunt in all ages has been voluminous, and in the 
 eighteenth century still a favorite subject for poets, who dwelt 
 with pleasure on the smiling landscape, the howling sportsmen, 
 and the whooping hunters. It was a sport for kings and certainly 
 a sport for the red-blooded English, the conquerors of the world. 
 
 But when The Seasons appeared, it contained a new point of view. 
 
 The poet described the hunt not as the scarlet-coated horsemen saw 
 it but as the pursued saw it, and with a new conception of justice 
 he scorned the hitherto glorious sport which brought out a pack 
 
 of hounds, a score of rural aristocrats, and a throng- of spectators 
 to see a hare run to cover and finally killed. The poets from 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 i 
 
 ! 
 
 
 
 
 
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- 76 - 
 
 Thomson’s first publication to the end of the century treat the 
 hunt in various ways; but most of them condemn certain aspects of 
 the chase, and others are obviously on the defensive, as if they 
 were not quite sure of their ground. 
 
 There are two characteristic s worthy of notice in the 
 poetry of the hunt; first, the efforts of the apologists to de- 
 fend British sport; second, the tendency of poets in the 
 opposite camp gradually to extend their sympathies, first to the 
 hare and deer and afterward to all living creatures. 
 
 When Thomson describes the rural scene in Autumn . he, 
 of course, devotes some attention to the rural sports of that 
 season. In 1713, thirteen years before the Scottish poet had 
 come to London, Pope had published his Windsor forest and Gay his 
 Rural Sports ; the one with a spirited reproof of the evil men 
 do by teaching beasts to pursue their fellows, the other em- 
 phasizing the zest fcf the chase with a few lines of sympathy for 
 the hare. But Pope, when he says 
 
 , Beasts, urg’d by men, their fellow beasts pursue. 
 
 And learn of men each other to undo, 
 
 did not have his eye upon the suffering animal. Like a true 
 neo-classicist he was adorning his poem with a moral; and his real 
 purpose is to point out man’s shortcomings, not to attach a system 
 which would appeal so strongly to his splendor -loving heart. Gay 
 too, though his love for country was stronger than that of his 
 age in general, is filled only v/ith a passing pity. 
 
- 77 - 
 
 Thomson, however, sounds the new note. In his philosophic 
 
 system there is no place for such institutions as the hunt. His 
 
 tender, ease-loving heart revolted at the system of taking lives 
 
 for tribute in a morning’s heedless pleasure. To state flatly 
 
 at that period that he disapproved of the chase must have taken 
 
 courage, since he was quite likely to he looked upon as either 
 
 a crank or a fool, The fact that he spoke out plainly proves 
 
 him not to have been an entirely sedentary sentimentalist. 
 
 Poor is the triumph o’er the timid hare! 
 
 Scar’d from the corn, and now to some loan seat 
 Retir’d; the rushy fen; the ragged furze 
 Stretch’d o'er the stony heath (1) 
 
 This is a glorious arid sportsmanlike performance! he indignantly 
 
 adds. One snail animal, never very brave and absolutely harmless, 
 
 is run to death without the slightest chance of escape in such an 
 
 une qua 1 c omb at • 
 
 The pack full -opening various; the shrill horn 
 Resounded from the hills; the neighing steed, 
 
 Wild from the chase; and the loud hunter's shout; 
 
 O'er a weak, harmless, flying creature, all 
 Mix’d in mad tumult, and discordant joy. (2) 
 
 The deer, too, finds a defender in Thomson, who speaks again of his 
 
 stand at bay with the pack, "blood-happy” . tearing at his heart. 
 
 (1) Autumn . 1 405 ff 
 
 (2) Ibid, 1 421 ff. 
 
-78- 
 
 If, however, the Englishmen must give up simple destruction 
 ns a means of fighting off rural ennui, Thomson is quite willing 
 that they should continue their sport, hut they should pursue only 
 the anii-social members of rural society. There are lions to be 
 chased, which do not cringe before the spears of a "coward band". 
 There are wild boars and wolves which do not fear to fight. Ever 
 if there are no wild boars or lions in England , there is still 
 the fox. 
 
 give, ye Britons, then 
 
 Your sportive fury, pitiless to pour 
 
 Loose on the nightly robber of the fold. (1) 
 
 In Thomsons ideal world, even the dogs and cats have be- 
 come pacific. The house-dog and the greyhound lie side by side, 
 dozing luxuriously in hie manner the poet knows so well how to 
 describe. Instead of dreaming of c&nine joys such as the pur- 
 suit of a rabbit or at least a cat, one attacks the nightly thief, 
 and the other "exults o’er hill and dale" with no particular object, 
 so far as Thomson is concerned, for his exhilaration. (2) And 
 Lizy, when she says farewell to her cat, remarks upon that tender- 
 hearted creature’s abstemiousness from earthly pleasures. 
 
 Joy of my youth! that oft lias licked my hands 
 
 With velvet tongue ne’er stained by mouse’s blood. (3) 
 
 Like Thomson, Somerville is interested primarily in the 
 higher animals, but he manifests in The Chase ?1755), the next 
 
 (1) Ibid, L 470 ff 
 
 (2) Summer , L 232 ff 
 
 (3) Lizy 1 s . Parting with Her Cat 
 

 
 
 
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-79- 
 
 important hunting poem after Autumn , that an apologist for the 
 sport is necessary, Somerville's poem belongs to that group 
 which marks the revival of interest in blank verse and a demand 
 for almost pure description. That there is evil in the system, 
 
 Somerville admits; but if man were not permitted to kill 
 
 and God has given him this permission ---, the world would soon 
 be so overcrowded that there would not be room for all. The 
 brute creation is man's property, it is true , but he should de- 
 vote his whole attention to exterminating: only the unsocial 
 animals and to keeping down the population. The hare and the deer 
 are harmless. They should not be molested. Only murderers 
 would enjoy killing such gentle creatures. (l) But, on the 
 who 1b, he kills those that are harmful and preserves those v/hich 
 are useful. When Somerville talks of useful animals, of course, 
 he means those which make the world more comfortable for man to 
 live in. This poet is no philosopher, and he is forced from 
 time to time to justify Ms thesis from such incompatible sources 
 as Hebrew revelation and sentimental deism. His significance 
 in this discussion of the hunt lies in his apologetic tone as he 
 follows in the footsteps of Thomson. It never occurred to a|iy cf 
 the older poets that an apology was necessary. Brooke, too, has 
 a similar point of view in The kox Chase . He reviews minutely 
 
 (1) The Chase . Chalmers, vol. 11, p 156 
 
-80- 
 
 the crimes of the fox and then proceeds cheerfully to describe 
 the kill* He explains, however, that the sport is justified be- 
 cause of the fox T s crimes against society. 
 
 From his Virgilian retreat at the Leasowes comes Shenstone ’s 
 Rural Elegance in 1750, in praise of country life. It is a de- 
 scriptive poem in manner much like The Seasons and The Chase , but 
 it goes further than eifher of them in its attack on hunting, 
 llature does not"smooth her lawns" for the "rural thane" who 
 goes whooping across country after the by this time well-known 
 timorous hare. Shenstone includes in his sympathies the peasant 
 as well as the defenseless animals. (1) 
 
 Ye rural Thanes! that o’er the mossy down 
 Some panting timorous hare pursue, 
 
 Does nature mean your joys to crown? 
 
 Say, does she smooth her lawns for you? 
 
 Dor you does Echo bid the rocks reply, 
 
 And urged by rude constraint, resound the jovial cry? 
 
 See from the neighboring hill, forlorn. 
 
 The wretched swain your sport survey; 
 
 He finds his faithful fences torn. 
 
 He finds his labour’d crops a prey; 
 
 He sees his flocks no more in circles feed. 
 
 Haply beneath your ravage bleed. 
 
 And with no random curses load the deed. (2) 
 
 Shenstone makes no provision for hunting even the anti-social 
 animals. His inclusion of "the wretched swain" in his pity is 
 good Whig doctrine, for that party during the century had been at- 
 tacking the system of game preserves with a good deal of vigor. (5) 
 
 (1) Rural Elegancy . II (2) Rural Elegance 
 
 ( 5) England under the Stuarts , p 8, p 472 
 

 
 
 
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- 81 - 
 
 Between 1730, then, and 1750 the humanitarian movement 
 liad developed by utilizing various philosophies. The love for ex- 
 ternal nature had become increasingly apparent in poetry, but 
 the application of theory to practice, so far as the hunt was 
 concerned, did not yet include any but the higher animals. It 
 remained for Blake, Cowper, and Erasmus Darwin to carry eighteenth 
 century sensibility to its highest point. 
 
 In the meantime, there is a cons icuous lack of sympathy 
 for cold-blooded animals. fishes were not included In the game 
 preserves of the sentimentalists. Gay had urged that they be pro- 
 tected and. that otters be killed because they spoiled the fishixg . 
 Thomson objected to the unsportsmanlike custom of hunting the 
 higher animals, but describes the chase of the mischievous fox 
 with much delight. When it came to fishing, his heart beat 
 tenderly for the worm, but quickened not a beat for the fish on 
 the hook. There seems to be no esoteric explanation for not in- 
 cluding fishermen in the numerous attacks on rural sports; yet 
 the reason is not far to seek. Nobody ever seems to get up a 
 very lively affection for a gold fish . They are such impersonal 
 and characterless creatures. That seems to be the only explana- 
 tion for their exclusion from the rapidly widening sympathies of 
 
 the sentimental wr iters. 
 
 Thomson 1 s knowledge of fishing is too accurate to be light- 
 ly passed over, particularly since his' wrath at the hunter had 
 
-82- 
 
 been so unequivocally stated. When the first freshets begin to 
 
 ebb, he writes, get out the rod, line, and fly, and "issuing 
 
 cheerful, to thy sports prepare". The poet knows exactly where 
 
 to cast and where the trout vail be waiting. 
 
 Then fix, with gentle twitch, the barbed hook; 
 
 Some lightly tossing to the grassy bank, 
 
 And to the shelving shore slow dragging some, 
 
 With various hand proportioned to their force ... (1) 
 
 The young fishes may be thrown back with fitting compassion for 
 
 the "speckled infant". But if a real game trout seizes the fly, 
 
 then the sportsman must play him with the utmost skill. 
 
 • .....At once he darts along. 
 
 Deep-struck, and runs out all the lengthened line; 
 
 Then seeks the farthest ooze, the she It* ring weed. 
 
 The covered bank, his old secure abode; 
 
 And flies aloft, and flounces round the pool, 
 
 Indignant of the guile (2) 
 
 William Junius Mickle T s poem. The Concubine (1767), is 
 the only one I have discovered in all the poetry of the century 
 which treats the fish with any sympathy at all, and he introduces 
 it incidentally. He is comparing his knight to a fish, and his 
 description is similar to that of Pope in Windsor forest , where 
 Pope speaks of the dying pheasant. The very fact that he intro- 
 duces the trout in a simile and disposes of it in six lines em- 
 phasizes its unimportance. (3) 
 
 Toward the end of the century, however, the fisli, too, was 
 accepted into the great kinship by Mrs. Radcliffe's character. 
 
 (1) Spring , li 413, ff 
 02) Ibid, L 436 ff 
 
 (3) Poems and a Tragedy . William Junius Mickle, Sir .lartyn 
 

 
 
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- 83 ' 
 
 M. St« Aubert, who, after his wife's death load prostrated him, 
 began to recover slowly and visited first in his convalescence 
 his favorite fishing- house . But it really was not a fishing- 
 house. "A basket of provisions was sent thither, with books 
 and Emily's lute; for fishing tacki he had no use, for he never 
 could find amusement in torturing or destroying." (1) 
 
 5 . 
 
 Though the attack on the institution of hunting was the 
 first and almost the only exa&ple of a practical application of 
 humanitarianism in the century, so far as animals were concerned, 
 the democratising tendency was manifest. Sympathies were widen- 
 ing. Cibber and Steele championed the oppressed but faithful 
 wife. Addison championed the abused dog which went beneath the 
 vivisectionist * s knife. Cay championed the horse. Then Thomson 
 widened the field of sensibility and championed the hare, the 
 deer, cattle, birds, and even the worm. 
 
 When he describes the merry sport of casting for trout, 
 he warns against the use of the "tortur'd worm", which twists 
 convulsively but uncomplainingly on the hook. Birds are to be 
 treated tenderly. They should neither be killed nor put in cages, 
 
 (1) Hysteries of Udolpho . p 8 
 
- 84 - 
 
 and he describes v/ith characteristic pity how the female returns 
 to her nest to find it robbed by "the hard hand of unrelenting 
 clowns". Thomson was probably more fond of birds than of any 
 other animal, for they appear in The Seasons with great frequency* 
 He appreciates the finesse of the "aerial courtship" as if he 
 had watched it closely. He likes to dwell upon the fledgling's 
 first attempt at flying. He enjoys the annual visit in winter- 
 time of the redbreast which pays its annual visit to man and is 
 rewarded v/ith food. He is filled with love for the cattle which 
 return from the snow-covered fields. 
 
 "And ask, with meaning low, their wonted stalls." 
 
 He urges the shepherds to be gentle and kind to their charges. 
 Thomson's humanitarianism, however, lacks the leaven of sound 
 sense and humor, without which sensibility generally becomes the 
 most fulsome bathos. Though Cowper carries his love of the species 
 much further than any poet before him, he is saved from a 
 sicklied sentiment by the very fact that, instead of treating 
 all living creatures in groups, he appreciates their individuality 
 and forgets at times that his poetical profession is to be kind. 
 
 His sentimentalism is not self-conscious. 
 
 This point of view held by Cowper is similar to that of 
 Vincent Bourne, whom he knew at Westminster school. Bourne's 
 sympathies were limited, because he spent most of his life in 
 

 
 
 
 
 
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- 85 - 
 
 L onion, and so the animals that came beneath his notice are the 
 ones to be found in a metropolitan area. His birds have an in- 
 dividuality of their own. He does not treat them collectively, 
 arid he includes in his society even the glow-worm. 
 
 Perhaps indulgent Nature meant. 
 
 By such a lamp bestow'd 
 To bid the traveller as he went 
 Be careful where he trod; 
 
 Nor crush a worm, whose useful light 
 Might serve, however small, 
 
 To show a stumbling-stone by night, 
 
 And save him from a fall, (l) 
 
 The jackdaw, the cricket and the parrot have almost as much 
 character as Chanticleer and Pertelote, or the eagle which carried 
 Chaucer to the house of fame. The difference between Bourne's 
 fables and those which became popular after the L 'Estrange 
 translations is that Bourne's animals are no longer men in beast- 
 ly shape. The Bourne fables are often moral in purpose, but he 
 never sacrifices his story because of his didacticism. His 
 tribute to the housefly shows clearly the fraternal spirit in 
 which he viewed the life about him. 
 
 Busy, curious, thirsty fly, 
 
 Drink with me, and drink as I; 
 
 Preely welcome to my cup, 
 
 Couldst thou sip and sip it up, 
 
 Make the most of life you may, 
 
 Life is short and wears away. 
 
 Lawrence oterne's Uncle Toby expresses the same sentiment twenty- 
 six years later. 
 
 (l) The Glow- Worm . Cowper ' s translation. 
 
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- 86 - 
 
 Shenstone’s democracy was not quite so catholic as 
 Bourne’s, for he could never feel the proper fraternal glow for 
 the moths which got into his wardrobe and devoured his clothing 
 ( 1 ) ; hut he was moved to rhythmic eloquence over the hare, the 
 blackbird, and the various domestic animals which appear so 
 often in the poetry of the period. Like Thomson, he objected, 
 in a time when universal love was becoming fashionable, to the 
 robber of bird’s nests. He advises his friend, Jago , in 1747, 
 to keep a bird or two about the house as pets. (2) 
 
 In The Fleece (1757) John ^yer includes the customary 
 councils to the rural swains and advises them to be gentle with 
 their "blameless fellow creatures”, particularly with sheep, 
 since they are the subjects of his work, and he tells them to 
 
 (1) Progress of Taste. 
 
 (2) He writes to Jago in 1739 "a latter in the manner of Pamela", 
 an imitation rather than a parody, telling him how his housekeeper, 
 Mrs. Arnold, came in to tell him of some newly-hatched chicks aid. in 
 viting him out to see them. "’Poor pretty ere tars I says she I look 
 here, Master, this has got a speck of black upon her tail.’ — *Ay, 
 
 I thought you weren’t without one about you, says I -- I don’t 
 think, says I, Mrs Arnold, but your soul was designed for a hen 
 originally. 'Why, and if I had been a hen, says she, I believe I 
 should have done as much for my chicks as yonder great . black-and- 
 white hen does, tho ' I say’t that should not say’t, said she. 
 vo 1 3, p 5, Though written jokingly nothing could more adequately 
 express Shenstone’s own sentimentalism. 
 
-87- 
 
 be like "Brahma* s Healthy s ons" , whose hands are innocent of slaughter 
 
 and who subsist happily on fruit and herbs. (1) The man who 
 
 kills them for food is a glutton, And 
 
 Ev*n to the reptile every cruel deed 
 
 Is high impiety. (2) 
 
 By 1760, then, humanitarian thought had broadened sufficient- 
 ly to include practically all living things in a world where man's 
 supremacy was not doubted. He was morally obliged to be a genial 
 overlord on earth, the champion of the helpless instead of the 
 leader in persecution. Before Cowper and Blake the general at- 
 titude toward animals was one of pity. With them, pity is trans- 
 formed into fraternal sympathy. As succeeding sentimentalists 
 joined the chorus of protest against the slave trade, they began 
 to be more sensitive of the woes in other species. The practical 
 reformers who attacked the slave trade profited at once by the 
 humanitarian agitation which load become more eactensdv©. But there 
 
 ( 1 ) It is generally believed that eastern influence is responsible 
 for the origin of eighteenth century human! tar ianism toward an- 
 imals. There are, however, but few references to eastern human- 
 itarian! sm and vegetariani an , and they are generally incidental 
 like this one in Dyer. Ritson, of course, uses the Brahmans as 
 an example when he makes his attack on animal food; but his 
 erudition was infinitely greater than that of the mass of writers, 
 and he calls up examples from a variety of places to pjrove his 
 point • 
 
 (2) Eleece . book 2, vol 9. p 563 
 
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- 88 - 
 
 were no practical reformers in the eighteenth century to make the 
 burden of the lover animals lighter. The latter movement was 
 purely literary. But the literary influences were not in- 
 significant, The widening sympathies of the time encouraged a 
 closer observation of animal life, and this change in attitude 
 brought forth some of the finest lyric poetry that the English 
 had produced since the Renaissance. Had there been no interest 
 in nature, had there been no reaction against intellectualism, 
 had there been no increasing appreciation of human affections 
 and emotions, we might have been spared some of the treacly 
 gabble of a Ehenstone, but we might also have lost some of the 
 peerless beauties of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Heats, 
 
 6 . 
 
 To show how enormous was the progress in observation of 
 animal life no more typical group of poems can be selected than 
 those which treat of the skylark. I have already remarked how 
 Thomson expurgated even the dreams of his dogs, and yet how 
 keenly appreciative he was of them as a species and how well he 
 k new their habits. Cats received some attention from eighteenth 
 century poets. Domestic fowls of all sorts were described with 
 care. Even insects found a place in poetry, for the first 
 time in English literary history, according to Lafcadio Hearn. 
 Before that time little had been said of them, because the coldre ss 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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-89- 
 
 of the British climate prevented the poets from being very familiar 
 with them and because the mediaeval church looked upon them as 
 mysterious and sinister. (1) 
 
 Though the skylark had been a favorite among English poets 
 even in the neo-classical period, it was used largely for the 
 purposes of simile, and there had been practically no admiration 
 and certainly no keen observation of the bird. (2) 
 
 "English poetry about birds," writes Lafcadio Hearn, 
 "represents a very large proportion of lyrical expression of the 
 very highest order. It is emotional or meditative poetry of the 
 most complex kind at its best. Perhaps there i s no other subject 
 winch poets have treated in a higher end more complex way." (3) 
 
 But it is obvious after examining the treatment of the bird in 
 Pope T s time that even the "feather'd tribe" had become sophisticat- 
 ed; for the skylark of Windsor Eorest prepared her little notes 
 
 (1) Lafcadio Ilesrn, p 265-9 
 
 (2) Reynolds, Treatment o f Uatur e in English Poetry , p 27. The 
 lark lias its own established set of applications. Lryden, V/aller, 
 and Savage represent the poet as a lark singing when the sun 
 shines, and Waller suits the figure to the times by making the 
 Queen the Sun. Tickel called himself an artless lark. Somerville 
 is a morning lark. Wycherly compares both Virgil and Pope to 
 larks. Any fair one lias a voice like a lark, and to Byer's de- 
 lighted ear the maidens who spun English yarn sang like a whole 
 choir of larks. Hot infrequently comparisons are drawn from the 
 old custom of daring larks by mirors or objects that would excite 
 terror . 
 
 (3) Hearn, Interpretations of Literature , vol 2, p 319 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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-90- 
 
 cpu.it e like a pseudo-classic poet and appeared to have a carefully 
 studied technique. Gay’s skylark is a most humanly gullible crea- 
 ture. 
 
 Pride lures the little warbler from the skies; 
 
 The light- enamour ’d bird deluded dies. (l) 
 
 In She ns tone the lark is still far from ingenuous; he is a- con- 
 scious artist and is invited to display his vocal powers under 
 Daphne’s window* 
 
 Go, tuneful -Bird, that glad’st the skies. 
 
 To Daphne 1 2 * 4 s window speed they way; 
 
 And there on quivering pinions rise. 
 
 And there they vocal art display. 12) 
 
 The next poet of importance to observe the skylark is 
 Joseph Warton; he speaks of the shrill lark that wakes the wood- 
 man to his early task. (5) It is Gray, however, who marks con- 
 spicuously the changing attitude toward the poets 1 bird, when that 
 valetudinarian Cambridge don anticipated the greatest of skylark 
 poems to come with Shelley. 
 
 But still the skylark warbles high 
 His trembling, thrilling ecstasy, 
 
 And , lbs sening from the dazzled sight. 
 
 Melts into air and liquid light. (4) 
 
 (1) Gay, Rural Sports , canto II, 1 560 
 
 (2) Shenstone, The Skylark 
 
 (2) J. Warton, 'The Enthusiast . 
 
 (4) Gray, Pleasures of Yiscis si tude . 
 
-91- 
 
 Gray’s poem was written 1754-5, but was not published until 1775, 
 seventeen years after Joseph Warton’ s verse. Gray T s bird, it is 
 scarcely necessary to remark, sings with pure joy as it soars 
 skyward; so it is very obvious from his closer observation that 
 Gray must have found pleasure as he listened to the invisible 
 singer and must have found his pleasure the keener because of the 
 mystery. Thomas Warton next voices his appreciation (1777). 
 
 Fraught with a transient, frozen shower, 
 
 If a cloud should haply lower, 
 
 Sailing o’er the landscape dark. 
 
 Mute on a sudden is the lark; 
 
 But when gleams the sun again 
 0 T er the pearl-besprinkled plain. 
 
 And from behind his wat T ry veil 
 Looks through the thin descending hail; 
 
 Salutes the blithe return of light, 
 
 She mounts, and lessening to the sight. 
 
 And high her tuneful track pursues 
 
 Mid the dim rainbow 1 s scattered hues. (1) 
 
 The Oxford antiquarian gives new information about the bird, for 
 
 he has added a new and lovely habit of the singer which stops its 
 
 song when the sun goew behind a cloud, a true poetic conception, 
 
 and like Gay, he speaks of it "lessening to the sight". William 
 
 Y/hitehead also pays his devoirs and adds another -pretty idea when 
 
 he speaks of the bird T s silence when it reaches the apogee of its 
 
 flight • 
 
 See how the Lark, the bird of day. 
 
 Springs from the earth, and wings her way I 
 To heaven 1 s high vault her course she bends. 
 
 And sweetly sings as she ascends. 
 
 .But wh en , contents d wi t h he r he i ght , 
 
 She shuts her wings and checks her flight, 
 
 ITo more she chants the melting strain. 
 
 But sinks in silence to the plain. (2) 
 
 (1) T. Warton, Ode X 
 
 (2) Y/hitehead, Skylark 
 

 
 
 
 
 7 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-92- 
 
 Cowper speaks of the lark and is impressed with the gayety of the 
 innocent. (1) In all the passages mentioned the poets con- 
 spicuously fail to draw morals from the lark T s song, a point which 
 was not lost upon such didactic poets as Gay, who never failed to 
 draw a lesson or a similitude whenever the bird was mentioned. 
 
 Much poetic lore is utilized by Shelley; his predecessors were 
 preparing the way for his crowning achievement in poetry about 
 birds. And he adds a great deal of his own. Pope’s lark pre- 
 pares its song. Shelley’s sings with "profuse strains of un- 
 premeditated art". He speaks, too, of "the soaring bird", "the 
 
 ecstatic song", the "unseen singer" all the fine phrases 
 
 whi c h have preceded him are combined to create the most mag- 
 nificent bird poem in the English language, a perfect tribute to 
 the poet’s rival* 
 
 V. 
 
 The progress of the poets and prose writers, then, in tin 
 eighteenth century was away from the neo-classic tradition of 
 intellectualism , though many, like the followers of the School 
 of Shaftesbury, carefully rationalized their positions. They 
 sought a reasonable as well as an emotional justification for 
 
 (1) Cowper, Task . I, p 285 
 

 
 
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- 92 - 
 
 their points of view. The poets, particularly, sought inspira- 
 tion in the country instead of in the town, because most of them 
 knew the country and because they were tired of the neo-classic 
 adaptation of worn-out themes. Thei r knowledge of the rural 
 scene and of animal life had been therefore obtained at first- 
 hand, whereas the poets before Thomson, with few exceptions, had 
 been content to study nature vicariously through the medium of 
 the Latin pastoral. The sensitiveness during the century to 
 human suffering prepared the way for a sensitiveness to d 1 
 suffering. Nearly all the poets mentioned in this chapter, 
 Thomson, Shenston^ , and Dyer, who deplore cruelty to animals, 
 also criticise the conditions in jails, the oppression of the 
 peasant, or the evils of the slave trade. During the first two 
 decades of the century the sentimentalists established a system 
 of ethics which conceived of God as benevolent and of human 
 na-ture as essentially good. I.Iany poets took from the deism of 
 Shaftesbury the philosophical justificati on of a position they 
 were already prepared to take, though the doctrine of humanitar- 
 ianism is preached by many poets who show no evidence of ahaftes- 
 bury T s influence. Benevolence and sensibility had places in all 
 branches of sentimental activity and thought. Neither Dyer nor 
 Shenstone is a sentimental deist. Primatt obtains his system 
 from Rousseau. Rousseau talks only of the rights of man; Primatt 
 talks of the natural rights of beasts. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 . 
 
 
 
- 94 - 
 
 As sympathies widened, to include all things , there was 
 a tendency to democratize all nature, and the literary men showed 
 first pity for the higher animals and then for all living 
 creatures. But the fraternal spirit was not yet strongly felt. 
 The writers before Cowper were compassionate; they were not 
 sympathetic. The chief contribution made by them to their times 
 is their accuracy in observing animal life and the high quality 
 of lyric poetry they helped to develop. 
 
 It has not always been possible to examine their work 
 chronologically, because the development of literature about 
 animals was erratic and does not lend itself to any systematic 
 treatment. The humanitarian emotions were appearing here and 
 there, now unequivocally , now by implication, in a variety of 
 philosophic systems, just as did the agitation against the slave 
 traffic which confined itself to no one creed or school of 
 thought. This fact will be more apparent after a study of 
 such poets as Cowper, Blake , and Barwin, in whom literary 
 catholicity of feeling reached its height. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 , 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-95- 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 TEE CULMINATION OF HUMANITARIAN PEELING IE TIE EIGHT- 
 EENTH CENTURY . 
 
 1. Cowper and the spiritual kinship. 2. Blake and the 
 ideal kinship. 3. Darwin and the scientific ki ship. 
 
 1 . 
 
 I have shown in the foregoing chapters how the humanitar- 
 ianism of the eighteenth century became more popular; how it 
 formed alliances without number; how it tended gradually to ex- 
 tend the confines of democracy and to concede to the inferior 
 animals a more dignified place in the scheme of things. In the 
 literature before the Restoration a fondness for lower forms of 
 life is apparent, but it never became such a persistent force 
 as in the eighteenth century, never made before such a conscious 
 demand for tolerance. In the concluding chapter of this essay, 
 
 I shall make brief studies of three later humanitarians to show 
 to what extremes the champions went and to show in what diversified 
 systems Cowper, 31ak§ and Darwin carried on the movement which lad 
 gradually developed during the century. Cowper in many respects 
 carried on the doctrines which haVe been stated before. Darwin 
 in his method is prophetic of the coming age of science. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 96 - 
 
 Temp erarn entail y, Cowper was never fitted to accept the 
 relentless and self-effacing logic of Calvinism. Had he lived 
 farther away from the noise of conflict, had he never met the 
 Reverend John Newton, he might have been far happier and might 
 have found in the common sense of St. Paul the spiritual balm 
 to cure his stricken soul. He was a gentle, amiable, sensitive 
 person to whom the terrible God of the Genevans simply would 
 not remain terrible. God is all-good and all-wise and all- 
 powerful, C a lvin assumed. He works out destinies in His own 
 way, and it is not for the individual to worry about his own 
 salvation or his own place in the mighty scheme. To God, pre- 
 determined damnation or election are but parts in the divine pro- 
 gram. Nothing could be more logical than this if one accepts 
 the general assumption that a frowning deity sits somewhere in 
 space with a book of rules in one hand and a syllogism in the 
 other. 
 
 Cowper* 8 Olney Hymns and some of his other poetry show 
 precisely how this agonizing religion had gripped a gentle soul 
 who never intentionally harmed anyone in the world, but whose 
 spirit suffered the most damnable torments. And yet, through 
 the black midnight of Calvinism, there breaks occasionally the 
 Pauline sunlight. God is love. So does Cowper insist again 
 and again until he finds himself once more in the gloom of a 
 philosophical system which he did not have the temperament tran- 
 quilly to dispel or utterly to reject. 
 
-97- 
 
 In his youth he had gone to Westminster school, .vhere he 
 received a sound classical training under Vincent Bourne, whose 
 Latin verses about animals have been mentioned in the foregoing 
 chapter. In his later years he acknowledged his debt to Bourne 
 with interest, for he said his instructor had taught him in- 
 dolence as well as Latin; but Bourne must also have encouraged 
 in him the development of the delicate humor which remains to 
 this day his greatest charm. 
 
 After Ms first attack of insanity, which came while he 
 was seeking a political sinecure through the aid of wealthy 
 relatives, he went to the village of Huntingdon, a soporific 
 market town of two thousand, and there he met the Unwins. His 
 religious delusions developed after he went mad, not before, when 
 worry over examination for the political appointment had ag- 
 gravated his morbidity. When living with the Unwins, his days 
 were passed in ~oing to church, praying, and s inging hymns. 
 
 When the Reverend Hr. Unwin died in 1767 as a result of 
 an accident. Gov/per continued to live with his widow. The Reverend 
 John Hewton, having heard of the religious zeal of Mrs. Unwin, 
 sought an introduction to her and finally procured for them a 
 residence in Olney, Buckinghamshire , where he held a curacy. Here 
 
-98- 
 
 Cowper had a second attack of madness with an accompanying de- 
 sire to kill himself. ITewton was his faithful friend, but the 
 Calvinistic element in his piety must have contributed new and 
 exquisite forms of mental torture. It was after the departure of 
 ITewton for his new charge of St. Mary Woolnoth that Mrs. Unwin 
 persuaded Cowper to make some sustained literary effort. In 
 1780-1 he produced Truth, Table - Talk . and The Progress of Error . 
 
 He became interested in animals and gardening two occupations 
 
 which kept his mind off the puzzling problems of his spiritual 
 destiny. After ITewton, the greatest influences in his life were 
 women. After the separation from ITewton and under the kindly 
 protection of Mary Unwin, lady Kesketh, and lady Austin, his life 
 was as tranquil as such a person's may be. He lived a quiet and 
 sedentary existence, in a score of years never going more than 
 ten miles from home, but living intensively, nevertheless, the 
 life of his village and taking a lively interest in the affairs 
 of its people. 
 
 In the country, where he was surrounded by the little 
 group that loved him, Cowper worked out his life. He had an 
 abundance of leisure , which sometimes bored him, and plenty of 
 time in which to develop his idealism with Eesleyan eloquence if 
 not with Y/esleyan militance. Yet he was not able completely to 
 escape the harsher aspects of Calvinism as V/esley did when he 
 
-99- 
 
 rejected logic and declared that works and faith precede election, 
 thus completely reversing the Genevan doctrine. 
 
 But Cowper in the main wor shipped a God who "moves in a 
 mysterious way" and who fills the recalcitrant with such utter 
 and stupefying terror that he shrieks , 
 
 For the sinner the Bible is a rule of life and worship. He need 
 not incur the penalty of his own depravity if he accepts the in- 
 spired word. 
 
 The book shall teach you; read, believe, and live. (2) 
 
 Upon the throne sits triumphant Grace, reigning alone and scorn- 
 ing any rival as a means to eternal bliss. The mere fact that 
 one lias lived an exemplary life will not save. (5) Works, 
 however, are to be esteemed, because they are man’s highs st 
 pleasures; yet he cannot take comfort or solace in them, for 
 God alone, as Galvin had said before, puts charity in the hearts 
 of the blessed. (4) Even the harlot, in her humility, may 
 somehow be bat lied in regenerating light while the proud are re- 
 jected by this terrifying deity. (5) 
 
 Crush me, ye rocks; ye falling' mountains hide. 
 Or bury me in ocean’s angry tide I 
 The scrutiny of those all-seeing e i 
 I dare not 
 
 Certainly with a conception of the divine like this. 
 
 (1) Truth. 1 269 .ff 
 
 (2) Ibid, 1 274 
 
 ( 0 ) Hot of Works, Hymn LZIV 
 
 (4) Chari ty . 1 7 
 or . 1 511 
 
 ( 5 ) Progress o f Brro r 
 
- 100 - 
 
 Cowper would have rejected and did reject the sentimental 
 God of the deists, who exposes His secrets through the reason 
 and who leaves the sole evidence of His handiwork in mountain 
 and flood. If man is not perversely blind, then God will show 
 him the way, and 
 
 Nature, employed in her allotted place, 
 
 Is handmaid to the purposes of grace. (l) 
 
 Thus far, the deistic position is tenable; hut Nature is the 
 
 handmaid and may by no means be accepted as the truth which 
 
 sets us free, as the deist would have us believe. 
 
 , Yet through the clouds of doubt there comes the vision 
 of a time when all will be different, when the sternness of 
 God T s face shall relax, when the Golden Age shall return to 
 a world long cursed because of original sin. At the sound 
 of the last trump, God will come, 
 
 Propitious in his chariot paved with love. (2) 
 
 The real God of Cowper, if we may take- him without the influence 
 of religious terror, is a God of love and benevolence, who held 
 
 (1) Hope, 1 145 
 
 (2) Task , VI L 744 
 
- 101 - 
 
 the world as dear as the poet held all living things. Time and 
 again his optimism struggles with that relentless logic. Man 
 has an "elective voice" and may choose between good and evil, 
 but despair throws him back again on the horns of the dilemma. 
 How can a man be free and at the same time be predestined be- 
 fore his birth? There was no answer, and Cowper found none 
 which satisfied him for more than a moment. (1) 
 
 There are joys to be had in life, however, notwithstand- 
 ing that destiny is so uncertain and the chances of election 
 to eternal bliss a matter of such heartbreaking doubt. He care- 
 fully discriminates between valid pleasures and invalid. Card- 
 playing is wicked , hunting is wi eked , intemperance is wicked, 
 the tavern is wicked, desecrating the Sabbath is wicked. The 
 highest good is altruism; the highest pleasure, the brother- 
 hood of man. 
 
 Ho pleasure! Are domestic comforts dead? 
 
 Are all the nameless sweets of friendship fled? 
 
 Has time worn out, or fashion put to shame, 
 
 Good sense, good health, good conscience, and good fame? 
 All these belong to virtue, and all prove 
 That virtue hasa title to your love. 
 
 Have you no touch of pity that the poor 
 Stand starved at your inhospitable door? 
 
 Or if yourself, too scantily supplied, 
 lleed help, let honest industry provide. 
 
 Earn, if you want; if you abound, impart. 
 
 These both are pleasures to the feeling heart. (2) 
 
 (1) Progress of Error, L 45 
 
 (2) Ibid, L 24S ff 
 

 
 
 
 * 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 \ 
 
 
 
 
102 - 
 
 And Gowper practised what he preached. Wherever he 
 lived he was loved. Man in the abstract he despised. Man in 
 the flesh he helped in a practical way when he could, and 
 was during his whole life the champion of liberty and ifche rights 
 of men to share in the world from which Christian communism 
 had temporarily been banished. When he moved to Olney, he be- 
 came the eager assistant of John Newton in his pastoral duties, 
 aiding his parishioners with gifts against their immediate 
 needs and with his eloquence trying to influence public- s irit- 
 ed men to ameliorate social conditions in the village. Lace- 
 making was the principal occupation of the poor in Olney, and 
 Gowper was the friend of them all. To Joseph Hill he wrote of 
 his charitable activities; how he load taken blankets to the 
 homes of the poor and how delighted they had been, one old 
 woman being unable to sleep the first night because of the un- 
 wonted luxury. (1) In the same letter he protested against 
 the hardship of a tax on candles which made illumination pro- 
 hibitive in neighboring cottages. The villagers called the 
 poet "the squire" and "Sir Gov/per"; and a parliamentary can- 
 didate recognized his powers among the voters by seeking his po- 
 litical support, much to Gowper 's surprise and amusement .( 2) 
 
 He was a passionate sympathizer with the cause of the op- 
 pressed everywhere, though his practical activity was confined 
 
 (1) Letter to Joseph Hill 3 July ’84. (2) ibid 29 Mar '84 
 
-103- 
 
 to the little group in which he lived. He watched with ecstasy 
 the growth of liberal feeling throughout Europe and looked for- 
 ward delightedly to the forced abdication of princes who thwart- 
 ed the public will. He recognized the menace of the Bastille to 
 liberty, but Ms hopes for the future were that some form of 
 constitutional democracy like England’s would be as far as the 
 revolt should go. "What is man?" (1) he asks, and then pro- 
 ceeds to tell how his noblest acts are nothing in the Master’s 
 sight. But to the question, "What are men?" the events of 
 his life answer far differently. Men belong to a brotherhood 
 transcending the narrow confines of nationality. 
 
 I think, articulate, I laugh and weep. 
 
 And exercise all functions of a man. 
 
 How then should I and any man that lives 
 Be strangers to each other? (2) 
 
 And in his eagerness for fraternity with the patriots of Erance 
 
 he sets the loss of the American colonies at naught. 
 
 True, we have lost an empire -- let it pass. (3) 
 
 All that counts is manhood, virtue, and truth. 
 
 To such a temperament as Gowper’s, slavery was absolutely 
 
 insufferable; and though he took no active part in the battle 
 
 waged by Granville Sharp, his heart was in the cause. The only 
 
 difference between white and. black lies in the color of their 
 
 skins. ( * ) "Slavery," he wrote to the Reverend Walter Bagot, 
 
 (l) Truth . 1 382 (2) Task. Ill 1 200 ff 
 
 T3 ) Ibid, II 1 263. ~ ("* ) U e gr o T s C omp la int . 
 
-104- 
 
 "and especially negro slavery, because the cruelest, is an odious 
 and disgusting subject. Twice or thrice I have been assailed to 
 write a poem on that theme.... There are some scenes of horror 
 on which ray imagination can dwell, not without some complacence. 
 But then they are such scenes as God, not man, produces. -But when 
 man is active to disturb, there is such rneaness in the design, 
 and such cruelty in the execution, that I both hate and de- 
 spise the whole operation, and feel it a degradation of poetry 
 to employ her in the description of it." (1) 
 
 The poet's la;e for animals was as sincere as his love 
 for men; he loathed hunting in all forms and was even willing to 
 let the suspect go in peace so long as self-defense permitted the 
 general armistice to last. Unlike those earlier poets who ex- 
 ulted over the chase or who wrote apologetically of the great 
 English sport, he includes in his world society all living crea- 
 tures. "Ivllan may dismiss compassion from his heart, but Uod will 
 never. " 
 
 I would not enter on my list of friends 
 
 (Though graced with polish'd manners and fine sense, 
 
 Yet wanting sensibility) the man 
 Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm, 
 
 An inadvertent step may crush the snail 
 That crawls at evening in the public path; 
 
 But he that has humanity, forewarn'd, 
 
 Will tread aside and let the reptile live. 
 
 The creeping veimin, loathsome to the sight, 
 
 (l) To Rev, Walter Bagot, 1788, Southey ed. vol 6. 
 

 
 
 . ^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 < 
 
 r 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ , 
 ■ 
 
 
 
-105- 
 
 And charged perhaps mth venom, that intrudes 
 
 A visitor unwelcome, into scenes 
 
 Sacred to neatness and repose, the alcove. 
 
 The chamber, or refectory, may die* 
 
 A necessary act incurs no blame. (1) 
 
 In the first days before "sin marred all", man ruled as God’s 
 viceroy on earth; but now his erstwhile subjects have rightfully 
 revolted, and mutual mistrust is the appalling result. (2) Far 
 off in the future there will come again a peace of nature when all 
 animals will once more live together in perfect harmony and con- 
 tentment , when every infant may with impunity "dally with the 
 crested worm" . (5) 
 
 For vegetarianism Gowper sensibly had no use. He had no 
 quarrel with the eater of flesh in a world where every animal 
 must prey on sane living thing in order to exist. Over all, 
 
 God gave to man the right of life and death, but killing for 
 the mere joy of killing was as alien to Gov/per as it was to the 
 fastidious and highly civilized Utopians of Sir Thomas More. 
 
 (4) The true lesson to be learned is that God loves us, but that 
 the world is not created for men only. Other creatures on earth 
 besides men have an interest in the Father's love. 
 
 The Gowper rabbits will live in literature with less 
 fame than Horace Walpole* s cat, which was drowned in a gold- 
 fishing expedition, but with more , perhaps, than Dr. Johnson’s 
 
 (1) Task, I L 560 
 
 (2) Ibid, I L 568 
 
 (3) Ibid, I L 773 
 
 (4) Ibid, VI. L 450 
 
-106- 
 
 feline gutter friend, one Hodge, which Boswell abominated almost 
 as much as he did the doctor T s other pensioners. There is one story 
 of Cowper which illustrates well what a place of consideration 
 Puss occupied in the 01neym£nage. He was in the parlor one 
 day when Mr. Grenville, who sought to represent the Olney con- 
 stituency in Parliament, called on the poet. The poor gentle- 
 man was announced, but was forced to enter by the back door, be- 
 cause Puss was not to be given a nervous shock by the si ght of a 
 stranger. As soon as he was safely in his hutch, the politician 
 was permitted to enter. (1) 
 
 To Cowper every creature had an individuality as dis- 
 tinct from others of the species as men are distinct, and he 
 found the subject interesting enough to write an article about. 
 
 "You observe, sir," he wrote to the Gentlemen 1 s Magazine , "that 
 I describe these animals as having each a character of is 
 own. Such they were in fact, and their faces were so expressive 
 of that character, that, when I looked only on the face of 
 either, I immediat ely knew which it was... I doubt not that the 
 same discrimination in the cast of countenances v/ould be dis- 
 coverable IP hares, and am persuaded that among a thousand 
 
 (1) Letter to Joseph Hill, 3 July ’84. 
 
- 007 - 
 
 of them no two could be found exactly similar; a cir cumstance 
 little suspected by those who have not had an opportunity to 
 
 i 
 
 observe it." (l) 
 
 In Gowper 1 s view, then, the world was originally in- 
 tended by God as a democracy in which all creatures that live, 
 from men to fireflies, had a natural share with man as ben- 
 evolent viceroy having delegated powers from the Almighty; but 
 because of the original sin, the peace of nature was superseded 
 by incessant strife and universal mistrust. This is not a man’s 
 world only. He has no right to assume that it is. Instead, 
 it is intended to be a communal sphere. Man should love all 
 living things for two reasons: first, because all are creatures 
 
 of the God who loves all alike; second, because it is inhuman 
 and unnatural that man should not sympathize with the creatures 
 about him. As to the relationship of man with man, the bounds 
 of human society are the only bounds to heed, not the frontiers 
 of nations with patriots snarling across them, over mindful of 
 their own group interests. Brotherhood transcends all other 
 
 relationships a brotherhood of the creatures of God, a 
 
 spiritual kinship. 
 
 2 . 
 
 When William -Slake was a child of four, he saw God peer- 
 ing through the window. When he was a snail boy on his wqy to 
 (1) Reprinted in the Aldine edition of Gowper ' s works. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 9 
 
 
 
 
 
 ' 
 
 9 
 
 . 
 
- 108 - 
 
 sc.hool, he saw a tree full of angels near Peckham. Throughout 
 a long life of seventy years, he came and went in a world in- 
 visible to the nomal eye, in which he saw "Ezekiel sitting on 
 a green how", in which thistles became old men, in which Ihe 
 sun become Los, the symbol of time, He wandered in strange 
 lands peopled by pre-Adamite giants and the disembodied spirits 
 who dwelt beyond reality on the frontiers of time and space; 
 he communed with such aspiring beings as fill the apocalyptic 
 pages of the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg, the strange lore 
 of the Alexandrian Platonists, and The Qelestial Hierarch y 
 of the pseudo Dionysius. Y/hen in company with earthly friends, 
 he sometimes would begin to sketch furiously from some model 
 invisible to those who, unlike him, had only one world to dwell 
 in instead of four. 
 
 How I a fourfold vision see. 
 
 And a fourfold vision is given to me; 
 
 'Tis fourfold in my supreme delight, 
 
 And threefold in soft Beulah's night, 
 
 And twofold always. May God us keep 
 
 Prom single vision, and Eewton’s sleep! (l) 
 
 A.t the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to an engraver 
 and afterward studied, though without much effect, at the Royal 
 Academy, where the lectures of ^ir Joshua Reynolds and the con- 
 ventionalized art of the neo-classic school drove him into a fury 
 of indignation and revolt; for Blake insisted that the artist 
 should see not with but through the eye. With the aid of his 
 
 (1) Verses . p 155 
 
- 109 - 
 
 fourfold vision he painted with utter disregard for tradition 
 of form and composition, reproducing through his engravings the 
 fantastic and awful creatures of a super-earthly imagination, 
 and declaring that to paint from living models was to paint 
 dead things. M He possesses the large range of primordial 
 emotion, from the utter innocence and happy unconsciousness 
 instinct of infancy, up to the fervours of the prophet, inspired 
 to announce, to judge, and to reprohate.” (1) In the Songs 
 of Innocence he writes with loving sympathy of children and with 
 the charming ingenuousness which the adult mind can seldom 
 approach, because he himself remained, in many respects, a child 
 until the day of his death. His ethical code, which developed 
 its fullest expression in Jerusalem , is a sta-tement of this 
 childlike faith in a philosophy of infinite love and infinite 
 forgiveness for sins committed. It was a doctrine workable only 
 in that land where his fancy wandered am would have been absolute 
 ly impossible in a world uninhabited by the spirits of his vision. 
 
 At the time of the rench revolution the poet was assoc- 
 iated with such English radicals as Priestley, Paine, Holcroft, 
 and Mary Wollstonecraft . It was he vifoo warned Paine to flee 
 after the publication of I he Rights of Han drew upon him the 
 indignation of the British government. Blake was the sort of 
 
 (1) Introduction, by W, M. Rosseti, p CXil 
 
- 110 - 
 
 dreamer who in all ages attach themselves to liberal movements, 
 useless so far as action goes, hut, nevertheless, in such accord 
 with the prevailing thought that their presence is tolerated. 
 
 In theory he was far more liberal than any of the English group 
 he knew so well, but his theories always remained only theories. 
 Had they been peit in operation, one can imagine the horror of 
 even such dissenters as Godwin, Paine, or Mary ./ollstonecraft • 
 Nothing could be more dangerous in studying a mystic 
 than to attempt a thorough interpretation of his symbolism and of 
 his peregrinations in the supernatural. In this discussion I 
 intend to make only a general consideration of the ideas under- 
 lying Blake T s poetry and to make no effort at an elaborate ex- 
 planation of a puzzle which it i s impossible for any, except for 
 men of similar temperament, to understand or to sympathize with. 
 Blake is related in spirit with such earlier mystics as PlQtinus, 
 Pico, and the pseudo Dionysius. He may have derived his im- 
 mediate inspiration from Swedenborg, but Bwedenborg himself be- 
 longs to the same group. They may have differed in details; 
 indeed, there is no very close correspondence between those 
 mentioned when it comes to particulars, but their geniuses are 
 in sympathy one with another, regardless of their separation in 
 point of time. 
 

- 111 - 
 
 The most significant characteristic that these men have 
 
 in common is aspiration the desire of the ethereal element 
 
 in man to disengage itself from the earthly and to rise by 
 stages in an almost infinite progression to the pre-eminent per- 
 fection, which is God. In the system of Plotinus, the One, God, 
 generates all; but this derived existence is subject to a dim- 
 inishing completeness, just as the created is always less than 
 the creator. The finite being has the choice of imiting with 
 the corporeal world, or it may, by perfecting itself through 
 ascetic virtues and the contemplation of the Primordial -Being, 
 eventually approach it. All life, then, according to Plotinus, 
 is a journey toward the infinite perfection of this Super-Being, 
 and all of us are parts in this scheme of dynamic pantheism. 
 
 (1) The soul created by God, and also a part of God, longs to 
 return. It i s impossible, says the neo-Platoni st , to speah of 
 the Deity T s attributes without limiting Him within space and time 
 The mind of mortals cannot conceive Him. The nearest 
 it can approach is through the system of inferior spirits called 
 angels by biblical seers, emanations by cabbalistic writers, who 
 dwell between earth-born creatures and God. It is this note of 
 aspiration, this love of peopling "the to rid with beautiful myths 
 
 (1) Encyclopaedia Brittanica art. on Heo -Platonism. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 t 
 
 
 9 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 t 
 
 
 - 
 
 y 
 
 . 
 
 
 r 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 112 - 
 
 v/hich Blake has in common with the mystics of Alexandria and 
 Judea. His world of idea transcends the corporeal world, be- 
 cause it is peopled wth disembodied ghosts which have £h aken 
 off the limits of earthly existence. 1'he greatest consummation 
 is to be joined in eternal bliss with the Spirit, to lose one’s 
 entity in pure Being. This is almost identical with the 
 system of Swedenborg (1), who describes the conjunction of the 
 soul with the lord in the second chapter of The Divine Providence . 
 
 The correspondence of Blake’s system to those which have 
 been so hastily described and his idea of God and his relation 
 to God are repeated so often in his poetry that there i s no 
 mistaking his meaning. Let us take, for example, a perfectly 
 clear little poem with an idea apparent and familiar to every 
 lover of the poet. 
 
 Ah, Sunflower, weary of time. 
 
 Who co untest the steps of the Sun; 
 
 Seeking after that sweet golden clime, 
 
 Where the traveller’s journey is done; 
 
 Where youth pined away with desire. 
 
 And the pale virgins shrouded in snow, 
 
 Arise from their graves, and aspire 
 
 Where my Sunflower wishes to go l (2) 
 
 The note of aspiration is very apparent. The humanitarian ism of 
 
 Blake is not based, as in Cowper, on the spiritual kinship of 
 
 (1) "This conjunction (with the Lord) by continued approach may 
 go on increasing to eternity, and with the angels it does increase 
 to eternity.” The Divine Providence . Chapter II, Paragraph 32. 
 
 (2) Ah Sunflower . p 108, Bosetti edition 
 

I 
 
 -113- 
 
 man in the love of a Creator with a separate entity, hut it is 
 based, on the loss of the soul’s personality in a Deity of pure 
 idea. 
 
 This union of God is described in Biake* s poem, _To Mr. 
 Butts (1), when he says we descend to earth like infants and 
 that life is but a shadow of reality. Heavenly men are bring- 
 ing light to the expanding eyes of the visionary, who is the 
 poet himself. Gradually these men become one, and the synthetic 
 man begins to infold within himself the limbs of the poet, so 
 that all earthly dross and clay are purged in the purifying 
 light of the One. On earth we are but faint shadows of the 
 divine, just as everything, even the sands on the shore, are 
 parts of the great Whole. 
 
 ^n the same tone speaks the little black boy in The 
 Song s of Innocenc e to whom Blake’s heart goes out with all the 
 tenderness of his gentle and erratic nature. We are put on 
 earth a little space, (2) the black boy^s mother tells him, 
 so that we may bear the beams of love. 
 
 And these black bodies and this sunburnt face 
 
 Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove. 
 
 When our souls are able to bear the celestial radiance, the 
 
 (1) Amu, p. In, 
 
 (2) Mttle Blaek Boy , p 81 
 
-114- 
 
 clouds will vanish. The black race is imprisoned in a black 
 cloud, the white in a white cloud, but both have the same oppor- 
 tunity to make the long journey to ideal bliss and to a far less 
 tawdry heaven than Calvinism places before our eyes. 
 
 'hat is the place of man in this welter of reality and 
 unreality, of objects indiscriminately mingled with ideas, in 
 this world where thistles are old men and winds are the rustling 
 of angels 1 wings? Though the material world presents itself 
 to the eye as plural, as if it were made up of many objects 
 and individualities, all are a part of the One. His answer to 
 any Question concerning the position Of man is given in Songs o f 
 Innocenc e . "Can I see another’s woe?" he asks, and not also feel 
 that sorrow as intensely as if it were his om. Gan there be 
 any feeling but compassion and a desire to give relief when one 
 sees a fellow in distress? 
 
 He (God) doth give his Joy to all; 
 
 He becomes an infant small; 
 
 He becomes a man of woe; 
 
 He doth feel the sorrow too. (l) 
 
 The brotherhood of man is a mystical brotherhood. The human 
 race is enveloped in a greater, because God feels our sorrow/ 
 and can become a man of suffering, even as He enters into the 
 angels in the system of Swedenborg. (2) 
 
 (1) On Another’s Sorrow . p 94 
 (2) The Oivine Providence , Heav en and Hell 
 

 
-115- 
 
 This, then, is the “basis for -Blake 1 s humani tarianism. 
 Lathing lives for itself alone. In The Book o f The 1 . the daughters 
 of the Seraphim lead round their flocks, but the youngest is 
 sad and venders why these earthly beauties must fade, ohe talks 
 with the lily of the valley, the worm, the cloud, and even the 
 clod; and each preaches to her a lesson of infinite love. She 
 
 x 
 
 laments to the cloud that one day she must become the food of 
 worms, to which it replies. 
 
 Then if thou art the food of worms, 0 virgin of the skies, 
 How great thy use, how great they blessing! 
 
 Everything that lives 
 Lives not alone nor for itself, (l) 
 
 Into this altruistic fraternity which includes not only livirg 
 
 things but those thihgs which seem to the mortal eye inorganic, 
 
 even the devil himself may enter, because he, too, is a part of 
 
 God. (2) There must be in this life infinite sinning so that 
 
 there may be infinite forgiving. There could be no mercy if there 
 
 were no poor. There could be no mercy if all were happy. Hence, 
 
 evil is a part of the world scheme, because it gives all things 
 
 a chance to be more humane, more gentle, more godly. (5) Man 
 
 is not an independent being, nor is he alone the favorite of God. 
 
 He is but one creature in many millions who bask in the celestial 
 
 effulgence; and all the feelings of the higher altruism are 
 
 put within his ken that he may be regenerated and cleansed and 
 
 (1) The Book of Thel, p 72-5 
 
 { 2 ) The Little Vagabond 
 
 ( 5) The Human Abstract and Jerusalem . 
 
-116- 
 
 that he my have the o-pportunity to climb to spiritual perfection. 
 
 With such a philosophical justification for humanit arianisn; 
 democracy in nature must necessarily follow. All creatures 
 must live together in mutual, toleration and, more than that, 
 in mutual love, livery evil, every cruelty, is to be accepted 
 thankf ully, for they are present in the world that our finer feel- 
 ings may be aroused. The lot of all creatures is alike. 
 
 Am not I 
 
 A fly like thee? 
 
 Or art not thou 
 
 A man like me? (l) 
 
 In Augur ies of Innocence he enumerates the ways in which man 
 abiises the lower animals. All heaven rages at the sight of 
 caged bird. A skylark wounded causes a cherub to stop his 
 singing. A horse misused, a dog starved, a fly wantonly killed 
 all crimes as enormous as those which Lafayette v/as fight- 
 ing across the channel. Blake goes further than any humanitarian 
 of his time. Cowper permitted the killing of an animal in self- 
 defense, but in Blake 1 s world of ideas such a possibility seems 
 not to have presented itself. All hunting is wrong, ITo animal 
 may be pursued under any circumstances, because it is contrary 
 to celestial compassion. 
 
 (1) The Bly . p 105 
 
- 117 - 
 
 Every wolf's and lion*s howl 
 Raises from hell a human soul. 
 
 Each outcry of the hunted Imre 
 A fibre from the brain doth tear ... 
 
 And last of all, he includes the slave, for the poor man , s far- 
 thing is worth more than all the gold in Africa. Auguries of 
 Innocence is the benedictine rule of humanitarianism. It is a 
 formless piece of verse with no intrinsic merit; as a matter 
 of fact , it seems like a score of couplets put down at random 
 and finally herded together in one poem. But it sums up in those 
 couplets exactly what the humanitarians of the century had been 
 preparing for. If Blake in the mass of his poetical works illus- 
 trates the sum total of romantic progress during the eighteenth 
 century, (1) this one bit of verse illustrates the humanitarian 
 progress over the same length of time. 
 
 Blake's work, "therefore, is the culmination of all that 
 1ms been. Beyond his inclusiveness it was impossible to go. 
 
 Man and beast and clod are parts of the divine and mystic vtiole 
 
 joint sharers in a world where evil exists, because it aids 
 
 the earthly creatures to escape corporeal existence. Cowper 
 sang the brotherhood of the animate creatures of God. He was 
 a cosmopolite, a lover of. all living creatures, and. a relentless 
 foe to oppression, whether it were oppression of slave or the 
 
 (1) Unpublished lecture notes of Prof. S. P. Sherman 
 
- 118 - 
 
 hu ted animals of the forest. He sympathi zed wl th revolution so 
 long as it stayed within the bounds of constitutional progression. 
 He believed firmly that the ethical laws were laid dorm forever 
 in the booh that God had given to man as his earthly guide. Blabe 
 sang the brotherhood of the animate and inanimate creatures 
 God. Sometimes he seems to believe in a personal deity or, at 
 least, one with some human attributes. More often he is enamoured 
 with a progressive pantheism. He sympathized vri. th revolution 
 because he could not, as he so often says, see another suffer with- 
 out suffering at the same time. His ethical system finds no 
 foundation in any booh. His whole philosophy is based upon a 
 neo-Platonic system of love and of an inclusive .God whose whole 
 attitude toward the faint shadows of the real world is one of 
 paternal affection. A golden age will come when all shall be 
 r generated end shall become brothers in the great hinship. 
 
 And there the lion’s ruddy eyes 
 
 Shall flow with tears of gold, 
 
 And pitying the tender cries 
 And- walking round the fb Id 
 Saying: -'rath by His meehness, 
 
 And by his health sichness, 
 
 Are driven away 
 
 Prom our immortal day. 
 
 And now beside thee, bleating lamb, 
 
 I can lie dovm and sleep, 
 
 Or thinh on Him who bore thy name, 
 
 Graze after thee, and weep; 
 
-119- 
 
 Por, washed in life’s river. 
 
 My bright main forever, 
 
 Shall shine like the gold 
 
 As I guard o'er the fold. (1) 
 
 5 . 
 
 In the discussion of Lilliam ^owper's poetry and life, 
 I have shown how humani tari anism was not. only compatible vdth 
 his nature but was also congenial to the C a i V inistic "beliefs 
 which he had adopted after his first attach of madness. In the 
 discussion of william Blake’s poetry and life, I have shown how 
 humani tari anism was congenial to his Christi an- neo -Platonic 
 mysticism. In the discussion of Erasmus Darwin’s poetry and 
 the elaborate notes which he attaches to his works, I shall 
 show how congenial humani tari anism was to his scientific temper. 
 
 Darwin w as graduated from Cambridge, which had been, 
 and still is, the school of his family, and early in his career 
 he evinced the scientific talent v/hich lias always been apparent 
 among his people. Several Darwins had shorn, a marked aptitude 
 for botanical investigation before his time, so that his re- 
 lation with eighteenth century science appears not to have been 
 caused solely by an individual bent. Prom Cambridge he went to 
 Edinburgh for his. medical instruction, settling, after pro- 
 ceeding to his degree, at Nottingham and later moving to Lich- 
 field, where he built up a practice which brought him both fame 
 
 (1) Night, p 89 
 
- 120 - 
 
 and fortune. There he became a member of an intellectual grou} • 
 He met Jean Jacques Rousseau during his English sojourn, and 
 corresponded with him after his return to his own country. 
 
 Among the citizens of Lichfield he practised his pro- 
 fession diligently and tirelessly, winning for himself the 
 sobriquet of "the benevolent" because of his gruff but kindly 
 labor among the poor and the impecunious lower clergy of the 
 diocese. He despised cant, it is said, but he was always actively 
 helpful to the needy. He did not possess Cowper’s emotional 
 religiosity; yet his life of practical charity was much like 
 that of the poet of Olney. At Lichfield he established a 
 dispensary and constructed a botanical garden which afterward 
 gave him the inspiration for his largest poetical work. 
 
 His principal interest for the modern is certainly 
 not because he was a great scientist or a great poet, nor is 
 it because his personality was so conspicuous as to make him live 
 in the memory of succeeding ages. It is because in science he 
 was an early propounder of evolutionism, in which field his 
 grandson later became famous. He believed with Lamarck that 
 animals purposefully adapt themselves to their surroundings (1), 
 whereas the theory of Ms grandson, Charles Darwin, was just 
 the opposite . ilature forces the adaptation. The animal or plant 
 is the passive object of external forces. In Erasmus Larv.ih, 
 however, we can see how the romantic theology of Blake and the 
 
 (1) Temple of nature . canto II L 50-1 
 
- 121 - 
 
 Calvinistic theology of Cowper would have been uncongenial . 
 Science to him was far from an unemotional study, hut lie always 
 tries to base his system upon an inductive observation of life. 
 He is near to the deists in his religious beliefs and without 
 the enthusiasm of the two men just studied. 
 
 His poetry is written in the closed heroic couplet 
 of Pope, and very good poetry it is, so far as xirosody is con- 
 cerned. It lias a dignity and a sonorousness that make it pleas- 
 ing to the modern ear, but it fails to excite any interest 
 nowadays, just as Darthfs Dispensary wit-hits discussion of 
 oontemporary scientific facts leaves the reader as drowsy as if 
 he had taken an opiate. There is beauty in some of his lines 
 and even distinction of diction; there are emotional passages, 
 too, as he tries to endow the plants with the same erotic 
 character that animals 'possess. Yet the history of poetry 
 shows that human experience, human feeling-, human aspiration, 
 not scientific facts, are the true subjects tor poetical ex- 
 pression. A true poem should strike a responsive note in the 
 breast of the reader, and Darwin leaves him crancjuil with nis 
 intellect unstimulated and with his emotions unappeased. His 
 poetical theory he observes meticulously enough, that me 
 subjects of verse should be concrete anci Ghat such a subject 
 
- 122 - 
 
 only is suitable for poetry. (1) The truly sublime, he 
 says, is best expressed in prose, and abstractions are abhorrent 
 to the true poet. Perhaps this explains why Darwin is ever 
 anxious to personify in order to be as close as possible on 
 every occasion to the concrete, but no subject is likely to 
 cause a response in the reader when he must constantly have 
 the matter of the poem explained to him by a series of notes, 
 and every page of Erasmus Darwin presents to the eye a few 
 verses and a solid mass of explanatory matter. 
 
 In this study the principle most apropos is the Dar- 
 winian theory of vital democracy. Blake and Cowper establish 
 their democracy in God. Darwin establishes his democracy in 
 physical nature. Blake would have us love all things, because 
 all are parts of a One to which everything aspires to be joined. 
 Darwin would remind us that the experience of all living things 
 is the same. Regeneration is purely physical. Plants have the 
 same feelings as animals. 
 
 Life was spontaneously generated in the beginning, and 
 after that time has been continued by reproduction. The sub- 
 stance from which all tilings are created is never destroyed but 
 undergoes a perpetual transmutation. 
 
 The wrecks of Death are but a change of forms. (2) 
 
 (1) L ove s o f the Plant s , vol II Botanic Garden , Interlude .Canto 
 1 and. 11 . p 62-5. 
 
 (2) Temple of Nature, Iy, p 597 
 
-125- 
 
 All are alike in the toils of the inexorable rule of life. 7/hen 
 
 a monarch or a mushroom dies, the organic matter remains inert for 
 
 a while, (l) Then from the body springs new life, spontaneously 
 
 generated from the decaying’ mass. Mountain, valley, and tree 
 
 flourish through the material that once existed in another form. 
 
 Thus the tall mountains, that emboss the lands 
 Are mighty monuments of past delight. (2) 
 
 The titanic battle, however, between life and death goes on with 
 
 each trying to conquer the other. Life builds. Death destroys. 
 
 In this perpetual conflict Darwin sees 
 
 The immense munificence of nature’s LordI (5) 
 
 The laws of nature are the creation of God and are immutable# 
 
 Man may discover the truth through his reason by a study c£ the 
 
 external world. But Darwin does not accept entirely the 
 
 deistic position, for he follows pretty closely at times the 
 
 biblical histories. 
 
 In the physical scheme that the poet-physician builds 
 up the attributes of sympathy and sensibility hold an important 
 place. It is true that man has a larger proportion of talents 
 than the other creatures of the universe; but he is, nevertheless. 
 
 (1) Ibid, IV, L 585, cf. note p 160. 
 
 (2) Ibid, L 446 - 50 
 (5) Ibid, L 456 
 
-124- 
 
 like them, the creature of nature and must live according to the 
 
 rules. Lien and beasts alike possess "volitions", which differ only 
 
 in degree. These volitions are the agents through which all life 
 
 selects or rejects means to a desired end. Modern science would 
 
 term this quality instinct, for it is the same motivating force 
 
 which prompts a bird to line its nest before laying its eggs and 
 
 which causes the bee to store up honey. In these volitions lies 
 
 the resemblance between man and beast. (1) 
 
 Wise to the present, nor to future blind. 
 
 They link the reasoning reptile with mankind! 
 
 Sto&p, selfish Pride! survey they kindred forms. 
 
 They brother Emmets, and thy sister Worms ! (2) 
 
 To show how all organic life is prompted by similar emotions, 
 
 Darwin wrote The Loves of the Plants , an interminable poem in 
 
 which he describes the generation of plant life, applying to 
 
 vegetable "amours" the same terminology that he would apply to 
 
 human passion, the same terminology for plant life as animal 
 
 life. Both the dormouse and the tulip hibernate in winter. 
 
 Plants protect themselves in an active as well as a passive 
 
 way against their enemies. He demonstrates by experiment that 
 
 plant life is sensitive to light and darkness and to certain 
 
 stimuli of pleasure and pain. They adapt themselves to their 
 
 (1) Temple of Nature III 1 401 
 
 (2) Ibid, 1 451 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
-125- 
 
 surroundings, In The Temple o f Ilature the courtship of the 
 flowers becomes fast and furious vh ile the gay vegetables engage 
 in "clandestine loves" and quiver with amourous woes. 
 
 The wakeful Anther in Ms silken bed 
 O f er the pleased Stigma bows his waxen head; 
 
 With meeting lips and mingling smiles they sup 
 Ambrosial dewdrops from the nectar 1 d cup; 
 
 Or buoy’d in air the plumy Lover springs. 
 
 And seeks his panting bride on Hymen- wings . (1) 
 
 The analogy between plant and animal life is never forgotten. 
 
 The mimosa has a "nice sense" and from every touch chastely 
 
 withdraws. (2) "She" shuts her eyes at approaching night and 
 
 feels throughout her whole being the approach of a storm. It 
 
 may be said, of course, that Darwin was speaking figuratively, 
 
 and so he was; but he supports his couplets as usual with 
 
 elaborate notes, thereby proving his thesis to his own satisfaction. 
 
 His verses are based very often upon his own observations and 
 
 conclusions which he obtained from experiments, and his hooks 
 
 contain the Jottings of a scientist converted into poetry and 
 
 decorated with poetical language. 
 
 In this physical world where men, vo men, plants, and 
 
 animals are composed of the same matter, sympathy and benevolence 
 
 are the highest emotions and the most praiseworthy, just as 
 
 certainly as they are in the ideal world of William Blake. They 
 
 ire the foundations for universal love, of which Darwin had his 
 
 (l) Temple of nature II 1 26 5 
 
 1 (2) Loves of the Plants. I I 299 
 
-126- 
 
 share; for he, like the other poets discussed, hated slavery, 
 whether political or bodily. 
 
 The Seraph, By^pathy, from Heaven descends. 
 
 We are in such close accord with the other beings of the 
 universe that "people of delicate fibres" have been known, when 
 seeing others in pain, to feel pain in the same parts of their 
 bodies as those injured (5). "Children," he writes, "should 
 be taught in their early education to feel for all the remediable 
 evils, which they observe in others; but they should at the 
 same time be taught sufficient firmness of mind not entirely to 
 destroy their own happiness by their sympathizing with the 
 numerous irremediable evils, which exist in the present system 
 of the world; as by indulging that kind of melancholy they 
 decrease the sum total, of human happiness; which is so far 
 rather reprehensible than commendable . " (2) 
 
 The purpose of this study of Blake, Cowper, and Darwin 
 has been to see how humanitarianism manifested itself in three 
 
 .such different personalities the one a mystic, the second a 
 
 religious enthusiast,, the third a scientist. By virtue of their 
 very diversity, they should occupy the most important place 
 
 (1) Temple of Hature .III L 466, iiote. 
 
 (2) Temple of nature . Ill note to 1. 466. 
 

- 127 - 
 
 in any study of this phase of eighteenth century sentimentalism. 
 They show how congenial humani tarianism was to widely different 
 schools of thought and prove that this movement toward a higher 
 form of benevolence was not the exclusive property of any one 
 school, hut that it was adaptable and could find a place in 
 almost any philosophy that lias long prevailed. To Blake, there 
 was a brotherhood of all creatures in ideal love; to Gowper 
 there was a brotherhood of all creatures in Christian love; to 
 Darwin there was a brotherhood of all things, organic or inorganic , 
 because of their similar physical experience. All three agree, 
 though they have come to their conclusions by such different and 
 devious routes, that no living thing may be mistreated; for the 
 world is communal property, v/e should live in a society of 
 reciprocal kindness, though it be the ideal kinship of Blake, the 
 spir itual^kinship of Cowper, or the physical kinship of Darwin. 
 
- 128 - 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 G01TGLU3IQI . 
 
 The poetry of Cowper, Blake, and Darwin is the culmin- 
 ation of the eighteenth century tendency to broaden the field 
 of human sympathy and democracy. It shows very conclusively how 
 compatible liumanitarianism was to greatly diversified types of 
 thought and how it found itself in complete accord with the 
 spiritual in Gov/per, the mystic in Blake, and the scientific in 
 Darwin. It shows that humanitariani sm was not the property of 
 a single group but of many which, by traversing vastly different 
 paths, arrived at the same conclusion, that all must live to- 
 gether in harmony and mutual accord, because the experienc es of 
 life, though differing in degree, are essentially the same in 
 all creatures. The positions of these three poets illustrate 
 in a remarkable manner the eighteenth century desire for a 
 larger and more inclusive democracy and a firm belief in 
 universal communism. 
 
 I have shown how the seventeenth century held the view 
 that the little groups, the aristocracies of blood and intellect, 
 loitering in the ante-rooms of a restored court, depending for 
 
- 129 - 
 
 their very existence on a patron’s gift, excursioning promis- 
 cuously into the fields of art, literature, and science, were 
 the only members of the human race that really counted. Theirs 
 was the very spirit one should expect to find surrounding a mon- 
 arch v/ hose willing genius had been trained in the royal French 
 philosophy of divine right. Society was exclusive, nature 
 meant human nature as they observed it in smart drawing rooms. 
 The great mass of humanity they ignored. They accepted the 
 good things of earth as their own due and looked upon all other 
 living things as so many interesting but inferior creatures 
 whom they might study, dissect, or destroy. The ’’noble savage” 
 was a literary convention of the heroic stage or the object of 
 the competitive zeal of warring sects. 
 
 This attitude was caused by the suddenness with which 
 the problems of physical phenomena presented themselves to 
 human curiosity. Pseudo-science was partly to blame for the 
 indifference of the century to suffering a.nd the rights of 
 the majority. Yet pseudo-science was also pa,rtly the cause of 
 the changing point of view. The world was full of mysteries , and 
 the seventeenth century abhorred mysteries. Investigation pro- 
 ceeded heartlessly, but it eventually showed the investigator 
 the similarity of human experience. The conception of nature 
 
- 150 - 
 
 began to broaden. The conventional idea of Christian brother- 
 hood began to revive. The oppression of slaves is contrary to 
 Christian precepts. But the energetic investigators also en- 
 larged their idea of nature and observed the organic and psycho- 
 logical resemblance between races. Consequently, to Addison 
 and Defoe oppression of one race by another was abhorrent on 
 both natural and Christian grounds. Hence, the )elief became 
 prevalent that this is not the world of only a few but of all 
 men, regardless of color or place of residence. 
 
 At the same time the deist, rejecting revelatory 
 evidence for the knowledge gained through science and reasnn, 
 came to the conclusion that the world is ruled by a kindly and 
 loving deity; and, of course, cruelty could not be pleasing to 
 such a ruler. Man should act upon His example and be kind. 
 
 All men are essentially alike, and even animals should be treat- 
 ed with compassion. At the same time the nature poets, a few 
 of whom belonging to the aforementioned class, began to write of 
 the real country, rejecting the neo-classicist’s desire to do- 
 mesticate Attic shepherds in an English landscape. Animals were 
 a part of the re-discovered genre, and the natural affection that 
 British poets have always felt for animal life again found ex- 
 pression. Man, said the first nature poet £, is a benevolent dictat- 
 or. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
- 151 - 
 
 V/ith this idea gaining new literary adherents, the centur y 
 progressed through both logic and emotion to new conceptions of 
 the relations between the creatures. Hunting, the favorite 
 English sport, was an institution for which apology must be 
 made. Only the non-social animals might be pursued. At the time 
 of the American war, we find Humphrey Primatt applying’ the 
 
 doctrine of Rousseauism that man is entitled to life, 
 
 liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all living creatures; 
 
 and the compassion of the earlier poets became an active 
 sympathy in Gowper. The democracy of the creatures had 
 arrived. The idea of Christian communism was expanding. In 
 the neo-Platonic philosophy of Blake, the relationship of 
 man, beast, and clod is based upon the kinship of all thirg s 
 in the One. There is no favoritism in God, for nothing is 
 without a use; and love and altruism are the highest goods. 
 
 In the deity all man, worms, clods, and the devil 
 
 are parts. Darwin arrives at the same conclusion. He champion- 
 ed the cause of altruism, but his method was that of scientific 
 investigation instead of mystical experience* There is 
 similarity, he found, in the vital experience of all things, 
 and even the mountain is but a record of "past joys”. His 
 life he made a practical observance of this scientific 
 democracy. 
 
- 132 - 
 
 Y/hat has been the result of this humanitarian 
 movement which bent all philosophies to its purpose and which 
 became so congenial to such different personalities and tem- 
 peraments? The power of the movement at the end of the century 
 had just begun in poetry, liberal thought, and practical re- 
 form. It enriched poetry and gave us much literature of a 
 high quality which otherwise we should have missed. Because 
 of its constant emphasis on altruism and benevolence it se- 
 cured in England a hospitable reception for liberal thought, 
 such as the utilitarianism of the nineteenth century. It 
 was responsible for the abolition of the slave trade. It 
 advanced the cause of a larger democracy and a higher com- 
 munism, not, of course, without an enormous amount of naus- 
 eating cant, and prepared the way for the practical reforms 
 of the revolutionary era to come. 
 

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