The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
§ 1. Thomas Pringle
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But there had been lesser wars and lesser convulsions before that great struggle. The chief advantage of the war just named, so far as literature was concerned, was to make the scene and the main features of the country familiar and intelligible to the general reader. The kopje and the kloof, the veldt and the vlei, the Karroo and the Drakenberg, the Modder, the Vaal and the Orange, became household words. But the earlier poetry had dealt with the same country in quite a different way. To show this in detail and connectedly, to give any continuous and representative account of that poetry, is difficult; for the material is both scanty and scattered. Some day, it may be done by a critic on the spot, who has access to the remains, such as they are, contained, as everyone acquainted with South African literature says, in files of forgotten newspapers, in the dry-as-dust pages of old Cape magazines and journals, and who can trace by family tradition or documents the history and circumstances of the writers. Meanwhile, the present section must be regarded as “autoschediastic,” a first essay, an attempt rather to indicate the lie of the land than to cover the whole ground.
Rudyard Kipling, himself, in a sense, the foremost English poet of South Africa, when asked what South African poetry there was beside his own, replied:
The first thing to do, then, is to give some account of Pringle. Thomas Pringle is called by the South Africans themselves “the father of their poetry.” He was a remarkable man, and in every sense of the word, a pioneer. A somewhat younger contemporary of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott, a nearer contemporary of Byron, Shelley and Keats, he fell under the influences of the former group. Born in 1789, near Kelso, the son of a border-farmer, he achieved a literary position in Edinburgh, gaining the friendship of Sir Walter Scott and the acquaintance of the Edinburgh literati, and became editor of The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, now Blackwood’s Magazine. His first volume of poems was published in 1819; but literature proved unremunerative, and he decided to emigrate to South Africa, and went out to Cape Town in that year. He settled his family in the bush, and then, with a friend, attempted to achieve a literary career in Cape Town, being appointed, through the influence of Sir Walter Scott and others, librarian of the government library. He made a promising start in this office, but was ruined by quarrelling with the governor, Lord Charles Somerset, and in particular by making, as Scott said, “the mistake of trying to bring out a whig paper in Cape Town.” After a farewell visit to his friends in the bush, he returned to London to seek redress, but without avail. He associated himself with the men who were working for the abolition of slavery, notably with Wilberforce, Coleridge and Clarkson, but fell ill just when his labours for abolition were reaching success, in the summer of 1834, and died in London in the same year at the early age of forty-six. In that year, besides a new edition of his poems, he published a prose work, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, which he was revising just before his death. It was a striking work, and made much impression. Its influence may be read in the well-known lines of Locksley Hall:
Coleridge expressed a very high opinion of Pringle’s poems. Little known in Scotland or England, they have had a great and a good influence in South Africa. As a recent South African poet, Vine Hall, sings: