Editors Note: "Seems to have lived in Edinburgh" (Jackson) Walter Scott subscribed to Tranquillity.

Edgar, Mary, fl. 1810-1824

By Stephen C. Behrendt

Critical Essay

In 1810 appeared a volume of some 136 pages of poetry, ambitiously titled Tranquillity; A Poem. to which are added, Other Original Poems, and Translations from the Italian. Printed in Dundee, it was sold in Edinburgh by the major booksellers Archibald Constable and John Ballantyne, as well as by agents in Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Montrose. The collection bore no author's name. Fourteen years later, however, when a second edition (in 258 pages, and now containing translations also from Spanish) was published by subscription, the author was identified as "Miss Edgar." Among the subscribers to this later, larger edition was Walter Scott, who pledged for two copies.

Virtually nothing is known about "Miss Edgar." Neither the 1810 nor the 1824 edition appears to have been reviewed in the periodical press, and there are no reliable biographical records of the author. Internal evidence in the title poem suggests that her Christian name may have been Mary (25). She seems to have been well read among English and Scottish authors, and the presence in both volumes of translations suggest that she was also relatively well educated, although there is no evidence that her skills in languages extended beyond the modern to the classical, something that would of course not be unusual for a period during which women were generally excluded from advanced education. Among the Anglophone writers she mentions in "Tranquillity" are Pope, Thomas Campbell, Goldsmith, Gray, and Scott, along with "hapless BURNS, to Genius dear" (19), "JOHNSON strong, and SHENSTONE sweet" (20). These names help to define the neoclassical orientation of much of her verse. At the same time, however, Edgar is clear about her Scottish literary heritage, just as she is elsewhere equally clear about her Scottish cultural heritage and as she is obviously proud of both. Discussing the work of mid-century Scottish poets, she singles out for particular notice the chastening influence upon them of "HAMILTON's maturer store" of wisdom (23); this is the militant Jacobite poet William Hamilton of Bangour (1704-54) whose Poems on Several Occasions appeared in 1748 and 1749. But her warmest tribute is reserved for a mentor and friend whose identity is tantalizingly screened as "G****" and who might just possibly be Anne Macvicar Grant (a less likely possibility is the vernacular poet Mrs. Grant of Carron, ?1745-1814). This shadowy figure is commemorated in "Tranquillity" as one who stands among those few who are

Not proud, or jealous, or severe,
But ever candid, kind, sincere.
Few such there are; but this to you
My grateful tribute G**** is due.
While others act a borrow'd part,
By mingled vanity and art,
Talents with piety combine,
And in thy life conspicuous shine. (25)

Directly addressing this person, whom she calls "Virtue's friend," Edgar couches her praise thus:

Blush not to find thy honour'd name
In a poor verse unknown to fame:
For interested venal praise
Has ne'er polluted M**Y's lays;
Nor would she forfeit G****'s esteem
For aught that worldlings precious deem. (25)

Anne Grant was, we know, actively involved in literary circles in Stirling and then in Edinburgh after her husband's death in 1801, corresponding with many publishing and aspiring writers. Indeed, one of her daughters, Mary Grant, was herself a poet. Might "G****" have been Anne Grant, then? Certainly it is hard to dismiss the possibility, especially in light of what Pam Perkins has written about Grant elsewhere in this electronic archive:
The simple fact that Grant was being sent poems by promising young authors whom she knew only by reputation is noteworthy in itself; Grant's response is more so. Her measured praise and reservations about the excessive "ornament" in the style — a quality that she always disliked and insisted she avoided in her own work — indicates that she took such unpublished poetry seriously. She read it critically, and she assumed that her correspondents were sufficiently serious themselves to value critical response. (Perkins)

The 1810 volume contains a preface that both follows and resists the paradigm of special pleading prefaces that were the hallmark of many women writers during the period. It begins with the familiar authorial declaration that "none of [the poems] were originally composed with a view of meeting the public eye," but then suggests that unspecified "peculiar circumstances" led the author to consider publishing not just the present poems but in fact a larger volume. These "peculiar circumstances" would most likely have involved some sort of financial reversals or other economic distress, given what this sort of language typically denotes in such prefaces. She points out in a rather acid parallel that although "particular friends" found her original plan for a subscription volume to be "disagreeable," by the time they made their objections known she had already received positive responses to her poems from "people of talents and taste." At the same time, she continues, still others had tried to dissuade her from publishing by "holding up the Edinburgh Reviewers as objects of terror." Faced with all this conflicting advice and admonition, she reports, she soldiered on in "candid and unprejudiced" fashion with her plan, "trusting . . . that [the poems] will meet with no other than fair and reasonable criticism" ([iii]).

Miss Edgar's poems are, for the most part, unremarkable. Most of them are too long for what they attempt to do, intellectually or poetically. Thus "over-written," they desensitize their readers with their abundant didactic moralizing (a characteristic also of the poetry of William Hamilton for which she professes admiration), as well as with a surfeit of minor and often inconsequential detail. The title poem, "Tranquillity," for instance, runs some 27 pages and is organized in four parts, each with a prefatory descriptive sketch of the sequence of rhymed octosyllabic couplets that follow. These summaries in fact help the reader navigate the often rambling discursive verse, whose theme is the emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually healthy state of tranquillity, which state constitutes the preferred alternative both to "joy" and to "its opposite[:] excessive joy" that "always agitates both body and mind; leaving them in that comfortless, exhausted state, which leads directly to the opposite extreme of Melancholy" that is in turn "but too frequently productive of misery" (1). This is a renunciation of enthusiasm and sensibility of which Dr. Johnson (whom Edgar numbers among her luminaries) would be proud. Indeed, he would applaud the poem's moral agenda generally, for Edgar counsels as the antidote to all such pernicious influences a few "well-chosen books" (9), the beauties of nature (represented, significantly, by the wholly domestic image of a cultivated flower garden [Part II]), calm and dispassionate friendship and companionship (Part III), and, finally, the "pure and rational devotion" that is the essence of "a truly Christian character" (Part IV). Both the poem's didactic nature and its characteristic "over-writtenness" are evident in this passage from late in Part IV:

Devotion, rational and pure!
Thou canst eternal joys insure;
And, even while here, on us bestow
A healing balm for every woe.
And Fortitude, by sorrows tried,
Is ever near thy sacred side;
And Resignation, still composed, —
To bind the wounds by Pity closed;
Till, sooth'd and cheer'd, again we see
The smiling fair Tranquillity, —
Perpetual inmate of the mind,
Which pure Devotion makes resign'd
To each event of adverse fate,
And humble in the happiest state. (33)

The capitalized nouns and liberal use of interjections, exclamation points, and em-dashes unmistakably associate the poem with Christian moral and devotional poetry.

The 1810 volume contains twenty-two poems, including "Tranquillity," twelve sonnets, several miscellaneous works (including a satire on fashionable life, "The 'Home' of Ton; 1809"), and seven short poems translated from Italian originals. Edgar's twelfth and final sonnet, "Sensibility," examines that power's multifaceted nature in a particularly interesting way. An "enchantress wild," Sensibility is said to possess "various powers" to delineate "soften'd features," "stormy passions," and "dire Calamity" in the poet's "votive verse." But it responds as well to less tempestuous impulses when "vernal prospects shine"; then "the thronging thoughts combine" in a single "tumultuous whirl of joy." Edgar sees in Sensibility, which is such a catch-word during the period, what she calls an "all-dubious gift" of questionable value, a power that can as easily lead to misery as to joy: "for what wert thou design'd? — / To bliss, torment, expand, or warp the mind?" (115). In this direct question — a question that might as well be addressed to human free will and to humanity's perilous postlapsarian existence generally — we glimpse again the distinctively moral underpinning of Edgar's poetry.

Edgar clearly wishes to direct this "all-dubious" power of Sensibility to constructive purposes, as she does in different ways in the two most interesting poems in her volume, "Elegiac Verse, to the Memory of Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore" and "Reflections on a Harvest Storm." The former poem commemorates the death of Sir John Moore (1761-1809), the circumstances of whose death she compares explicitly to those of General James Wolfe (1727-59), whose death at the very moment of apparent victory at the Siege of Quebec on 13 September 1759 had been the subject of countless poems and visual works, including Benjamin West's famous and much-imitated (and often parodied) painting of 1767. When Edgar published her volume Moore's death was still a popular subject. A career soldier who had served in the war against the American colonies and later under Sir Ralph Abercromby in the West Indies, the handsome and imposing Moore had more recently emerged as a prominent figure during the Peninsular campaign. In the wake of the ignominious and widely ridiculed Convention of Cintra, Moore had been ordered to Portugal in 1808 to command some 35,000 troops charged with assisting the Spanish, who were supposed to contribute an additional 60,000 troops for their united resistance to the French invaders. Moore took his troops into Spain in what he himself foresaw to be a gloomy and unpromising campaign; things turned worse when the promised Spanish troops never materialized. Nevertheless, by 23 December 1808 Moore and 29,000 excellent British soldiers had drawn to within two hours of the enemy when they received word that Napoleon had recently occupied Madrid and that the British force was now cut off by some 300,000 French troops. Against all odds, Moore oversaw a retreat of more than 250 miles in bitter midwinter conditions, reaching Corunna with his forces on 13 January 1809. The rescue transports arrived three days later and Moore's troops began to embark even as the French mounted an attack on the dispirited army. Nevertheless, the British made a courageous stand, during the course of which Moore received a wound that shattered his shoulder. Carried from the field, he heard that happy news that the French had been repulsed and were in full retreat. Moore died that evening. Despite considerable outcry in Britain over Moore's unsuccessful campaign, he was largely exonerated from blame; "popular feeling soon accepted the view that his life was sacrificed in an enterprise which, under the circumstances, was impracticable" (DNB, 818). Parliament voted his troops a vote of thanks, and monuments were erected to Moore in St. Paul's Cathedral and in Glasgow, his native city.

According to Edgar's poem, Moore, like Wolfe, has been "snatch'd away / In the meridian of his brilliant day" from the nation he had loved and served (55). And despite the fatigues of their "forced retreat" and the decampment that followed, the fate of Moore and his troops was not without its heroism. In circumstances that eerily anticipate those which Tennyson immortalized in his "Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), they are described as making a heroic stand, though outnumbered. Indeed, in relating how their gallant stand "the course of glory rendered] thus complete," Edgar even anticipates Tennyson's language and rhetorical gestures:

When press'd by numbers, in the unequal field,
Our British heroes nobly scorn'd to yield:
But, all the astonish'd adverse host withdrawn,
With haste dispatchful, ere the morning dawn,
Their sick removed, — the brave venturous band
Regain'd their ships, and sought their native land. (52)

Even though victory is thus snatched from the jaws of defeat, according to Edgar, "Still from a double source our feelings flow, / And shouts of triumph mingle with our woe" (53). For together with the patriotic fervor that attends Britain's participation in Spain's liberation from Napoleonic occupation comes both the public, national grief that attends the death of a hero and the private, personal grief of the hero's "afflicted mother," the "poor widowed mourner" whose grief is at once assuaged and increased by the public rituals of mourning. War spares no one. Consolation — for mother and for nation — has to come therefore from the knowledge of how "a chosen few withstood / A Numerous army, long inured to blood," a knowledge whose consequence informs the poem's nationalistic final lines:

And still Britannia shines in armour braced,
To humble tyrants and support the oppress'd.
May gracious Heaven her generous efforts crown
With full success, and safety, and renown! (57)

"Reflections on a Harvest Storm" was, the author's note tells us, "among the author's first attempts in verse." Despite its early genesis, however, she tells us that even in 1810 "she is still inclined to regard [it] as one of the best of what she must term her mediocre compositions" (46). It is not clear whether Edgar means by this that she sees among her works two classes, one mediocre and the other significantly better, or whether she is employing conventional self-deprecation in calling all her poems mediocre and then singling this one out as above par. Either way, the poem is better than most of the others, both in content and in style. The poem, which she says is founded on fact, examines the actual and the imagined effects of a sudden late-season storm upon late-maturing crops held by Scottish small farmers and peasants. An October storm descends on the opening pastoral scene, threatening the crop and therefore the lives of those who depend upon it for their winter's subsistence. Driven from the fields by the storm's fury, "the harvest's deary train advance, / Who late with light enlivening hopes were borne / To lead their sprightly partners in the dance, / Or jocund reap the richly waving corn" (40). This reversal threatens the entire community and produces general anxiety about the prospect of famine and misery, never far from the minds of those whose existence is marginal at best. This very real threat to real people is, however, presented also as an opportunity for "Divine Philanthropy," which, "Relieving woes, forgets our faults to scan":

If then the gathering clouds should ceaseless pour
Their noxious treasures o'er the foodful land,
Till ghastly famine rise amid the shower, —
Ye blest of Heaven! assist the expecting band. (41)

Edgar continues in this vein, appealing for the assistance of both the fortunate wealthy and the "benignant God" (43) in protecting and preserving the less fortunate whose existence is so perilous. And indeed, characteristically, she turns her tale to a moral one. For not only does the storm pass as quickly as it had arrived, it actually enhances what it might have destroyed; the sun sets now on a glorious scene:

The burnish'd corn with emulous beauty shines;
The glittering grass assumes a livelier green. (44)

Moreover, the threat proves to be a blessing (only slightly disguised) not only to those who have experienced it, but also to those for whom it is yet to come, as the final stanza tells us:

The etherial bow with brilliant colouring glows, —
Its varying dyes by beauteous azure borne;
While grateful millions hie to soft repose,
In sweet expectance of the approaching storm. (44)

As it did after the Deluge, the rainbow signals God's compact with humanity and the promise of blessings and plenty where blights and want seemed at first to inhere.

Despite the artificiality of diction that everywhere characterizes her poetry (as indeed it does all the passages quoted in this essay), Edgar manages at her best moments to create interesting and even compelling images. In the passage quoted earlier, there is real daring in her reference to the rains as the clouds' "noxious treasures." Not mere oxymoron, this figure alerts the attentive reader to the ways in which phenomena may be perceived and interpreted in entirely different fashion, depending upon the circumstances of those who are affected. This oxymoronic character, which recurs fairly often in Edgar's verse, is of course itself part and parcel of moral discourse, in which there is often only a thin line between a blessing and a curse. Indeed, it is the same character that is visible in the final stanza, quoted above, in which the "grateful millions" (who as yet have no reason to be grateful) go to their rest in "sweet expectance" (my emphases) of the storm that has not yet reached them. In a passage like this one (and there are others in poems like the verses on Moore), Edgar conflates past and future in a poetic present that is informed by an understanding (real or assumed) of the unfailing providential presence of God in the affairs of humanity. If Miss Edgar's poems are frequently artificial, over-written, and didactic, they are nevertheless filled with a remarkable optimism about humanity, God, and the dignity of human existence.