Poetical Works of Akenside by Mark Akenside (suggested reading TXT) 📕

THE LIFE OF AKENSIDE.


Mark Akenside was born at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the 9th of November 1721. His family were Presbyterian Dissenters, and on the 30th of that month he was baptized in the meeting, then held in Hanover Square, by a Mr. Benjamin Bennet. His father, Mark, was a butcher in respectable circumstances--his mother's name was Mary Lumsden. There may seem something grotesque in finding the author of the "Pleasures of Imagination" born in a place usually thought so anti-poetical as a butcher's shop. And yet similar anomalies abound in the histories of men of genius. Henry Kirke White, too, was a butcher's son, and for some time carried his father's basket. The late Thomas Atkinson, a very clever litterateur of the West of Scotland, was also what the Scotch call a "flesher's" son. The case of Cardinal Wolsey is well known. Indeed, we do not understand why any decent calling should be inimical to the existence--however it may be to the adequate development--of genius. That is a spark of supernal inspiration, lighting where it pleases, often conforming, and always striving to conform, circumstances to itself, and sometimes even strengthened and purified by the contradictions it meets in life. Nay, genius has sprung up in stranger quarters than in butcher's shops or tailor's attics--it has lived and nourished in the dens of robbers, and in the gross and fetid atmosphere of taverns. There was an Allen-a-Dale in Robin Hood's gang; it was in the Bell Inn, at Gloucester, that George Whitefield, the most gifted of popular orators, was reared; and Bunyan's Muse found him at the disrespectable trade of a tinker, and amidst the clatter of pots, and pans, and vulgar curses, made her whisper audible in his ear, "Come up hither to the Mount of Vision--to the summit of Mount Clear!"

It is said that Akenside was ashamed of his origin--and if so, he deserved the perpetual recollection of it, produced by a life-long lameness, originating in a cut from his father's cleaver. It is fitting that men, and especially great men, should suffer through their smallnesses of character. The boy was first sent to the Free School of Newcastle, and thence to a private academy kept by Mr. Wilson, a Dissenting minister of the place. He began rather early to display a taste for poetry and verse-writing; and, in April 1737, we find in the Gentleman's Magazine a set of stanzas, entitled, "The Virtuoso, in imitation of Spenser's style and stanza," prefaced by a letter signed Marcus, in which the author, while requesting the insertion of his piece, pleads the apology of his extreme youth. One may see something of the future political zeal of the man in the boy's selection of one of the names of Brutus. The Gentleman's Magazine was then rising toward that character of a readable medley and agreeable olla podrida , which it long bore, although its principal contributor--Johnson--did not join its staff till the next year. Its old numbers will even still repay perusal--at least we seldom enjoyed a greater treat than when in our boyhood we lighted on and read some twenty of its brown-hued, stout-backed, strong-bound volumes, filled with the debates in the Senate of Lilliput--with Johnson's early Lives and Essays--with mediocre poetry--interesting scraps of meteorological and scientific information--ghost stories and fairy tales--alternating with timid politics, and with sarcasms at the great, veiled under initials, asterisks, and innuendoes; and even now many, we believe, feel it quite a luxury to recur from the personalities and floridities of modern periodicals to its quiet, cool, sober, and sensible pages. To it Akenside contributed afterwards a fable, called "Ambition and Content," a "Hymn to Science," and a few more poetical pieces (written not, as commonly said, in Edinburgh, but in Newcastle, in 1739). It has been asserted that he composed his "Pleasures of Imagination" while visiting some relations at Morpeth, when only seventeen years of age; but although he himself assures us that he spent many happy and inspired hours in that region,

"Led
In silence by some powerful hand unseen,"

there is no direct evidence that he then fixed his vague, tumultuous, youthful impressions in verse. Indeed, the texture and style of the "Pleasures" forbid the thought that it was a hasty improvisation. When nearly eighteen years old, Akenside was sent to Edinburgh, to commence his studies for the pulpit, and received some pecuniary assistance from the Dissenters' Society. One winter, however, served to disgust him with the prospects of the profession--which he resigned for the pursuit of medicine, repaying the contribution he had received from the society. We know a similar case in the present day of a well-known, able litterateur --once the editor of the
Westminster Review --who had been educated at the expense of the Congregational body in Scotland, but who, after a change of religious view and of profession, honourably refunded the whole sum. What were the special reasons why Akenside turned aside from the Church we are not informed. Perhaps he had fallen into youthful indiscretions or early scepticism; or perhaps he felt that the business of a Dissenting pastor was not then, any more than it is now, a very lucrative one. Presbyterian Dissent at that time, besides, did not stand very high in England. The leading Dissenting divines were Independents--and the Presbyterian body was fast sinking into Unitarian or Arian heresy. On the other hand, the Church of England was in the last state of lukewarmness; the Church of Scotland was groaning under the load of patronage; and the Secession body was newly formed, and as yet insignificant. In such circumstances we cannot wonder that an ardent, ambitious mind like that of Akenside should revolt from divinity as a study, and the pulpit as a goal, although some may think it strange how the pursuit of medicine should commend itself instead to a genial and poetic mind. Yet let us remember that some eminent poets have been students or practisers of the art of medicine. Such--to name only a few--were Armstrong, Smollett, Crabbe, Darwin, Delta, Keats, and the two Thomas Browns, the Knight of the "Religio Medici," and the Philosopher of the "Lectures," both genuine poets, although their best poetry is in prose. There are, besides, connected with medicine, some departments of thought and study peculiarly exciting to the imagination. Such is anatomy, with its sad yet instructive revelations of the structure of the human frame--so "fearfully and wonderfully made"--wielding in its hand a scalpel which at first seems ruthless and disenchanting as the scythe of death, but which afterwards becomes a key to unlock some of the deepest mysteries, and leads us down whole galleries of wonder. There is botany, culling from every nook and corner of the earth weeds which are flowers, and flowers of all hues, and every plant, from the "cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop which springs out of the wall," and finding a terrible and imaginative pleasure in handling the fell family of poisons, and in deriving the means of protracting life and healing sickness from the very blossoms of death. And there is chemistry, most poetical save astronomy of all the sciences, seeking to spiritualise the material--to hunt the atom to the point where it trembles over the gulf of nonentity--to weigh gases in scales, and the elements in a balance, and, in its more transcendental and daring shape, trying to interchange one kind of metal with another, and all kinds of forms with all, as in a music-led and mystic dance. Hence we find that such men as Beddoes, the author of the "Bride's Tragedy," have turned away from poetry to physiology, and found in it a grander if also ghastlier stimulus to their imaginative faculty. Hence Crabbe delighted to load himself with grasses and duckweed, and Goethe to fill his carriage with every variety of plant and mountain flower. Hence Davy, and the late lamented Samuel Brown, analysed, in the spirit of poets as well as of philosophers, and gave to the crucible what it had long lost, something of the air of a weird cauldron, bubbling over with magical foam, and shining, not so much in the severe light of science as in the

"Light that never was on sea or shore.
The consecration and the poet's dream."

And hence, in the then state of Church matters, and of his own effervescent soul, Akenside felt probably in medicine a deeper charm than in theology, and imagined that it opened up a more congenial field for his powers both of reason and of imagination.

In December 1740, Akenside was elected a member of the Edinburgh Medical Society. This society held meetings for discussion, and in them our poet set himself to shine as a speaker. His ambition, it is said, at this time, was to be a member of Parliament; and Dr. Robertson, then a student in the University, used to attend the meetings of the society chiefly to hear the speeches of the young and fiery Southron. Indeed, the rhetoric of the "Pleasures of Imagination" is finer than its poetry; and none but an orator could have painted Brutus rising "refulgent from the stroke" which slew Caesar, when he

"Call'd on Tully's name,
And bade the father of his country hail!"

Englishmen are naturally more eloquent than the Scotch; and once and again has the Mark Akenside, the Joseph Gerald, or the George Thompson overpowered and captivated even the sober and critical children of the Modern Athens. While electrifying the Medical Society, Akenside did not neglect, if he did not eminently excel in his professional studies; and he continued to write sonorous verse, some specimens of which, including an "Ode on the Winter Solstice," and "Love, an Elegy," he is said to have printed for private distribution.

In Edinburgh he became acquainted with Jeremiah Dyson, a young law-student of fortune, who was afterwards our poet's principal patron. He seems to have returned to Newcastle in 1741; and we find him dating a letter to Dyson thence on the 18th of August 1742, and directing his correspondent to address his reply to him as "Surgeon, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne." It is doubtful, however, if he had yet begun to practise; and there is reason to believe that he was busily occupied with his great poem. This he completed in the close of 1743. He offered the manuscript to Dodsley for L150. The bookseller, although a liberal and generous man, was disposed at first to
boggle a little at such a price for a didactic poem by an unknown man. He carried the "Pleasures of Imagination" to Pope, who glanced at it, saw its merit, and advised Dodsley not to make a niggardly offer--for "this was no everyday writer." It appeared in January 1744, and, in spite of its faults, nay, perhaps, partly in consequence of them, was received with loud applause; and the author--only twenty-three years of age--"awoke one morning, and found himself famous;" for although his name was not attached to the poem, it soon transpired. One Rolt, an obscure scribbler, then in Ireland, claimed the authorship, transcribed the poem with his own hand; nay, according to Dr. Johnson, published an edition with his own name, and was invited to the best tables as the ingenious Mr. Rolt. His conversation did not indeed sparkle with poetic fire, nor was