"Forewarned, if little bird their pranks behold,
'Twill whisper in her ear and all the scene unfold."
But the only one among the professed scholars of Spenser who caught the glow and splendor of the master was James Thomson. It is the privilege of genius to be original even in its imitations. Thomson took shape and hue from Spenser, but added something of his own, and the result has a value quite independent of its success as a reproduction. "The Castle of Indolence," 1748,[31] is a fine poem; at least the first part of it is, for the second book is tiresomely allegorical, and somewhat involved in plot. There is a magic art in the description of the "land of drowsy-head," with its "listless climate" always "atween June and May,"[32] its "stockdove's plaint amid the forest deep," its hillside woods of solemn pines, its gay castles in the summer clouds, and its murmur of the distance main. The nucleus of Thomson's conception is to be found in Spenser's House of Morpheus ("Faërie Queene," book i. canto i. 41), and his Country of Idlesse is itself an anticipation of Tennyson's Lotus Land, but verse like this was something new in the poetry of the eighteenth century:
"Was nought around but images of rest:
Sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns between;
And flowery beds that slumberous influence kest,
From poppies breathed; and beds of pleasant green,
Where never yet was creeping creatures seen.
"Meantime unnumbered glittering streamlets played
And hurlëd everywhere their waters sheen;
That, as they bickered through the sunny glade,
Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made."
"The Castle of Indolence" had the romantic iridescence, the "atmosphere" which is lacking to the sharp contours of Augustan verse. That is to say, it produces an effect which cannot be wholly accounted for by what the poet says; an effect which is wrought by subtle sensations awakened by the sound and indefinite associations evoked by the words. The secret of this art the poet himself cannot communicate. But poetry of this kind cannot be translated into prose—as Pope's can—any more than music can be translated into speech, without losing its essential character. Like Spenser, Thomson was an exquisite colorist and his art was largely pictorial. But he has touches of an imagination which is rarer, if not higher in kind, than anything in Spenser. The fairyland of Spenser is an unreal, but hardly an unearthly region. He seldom startles by glimpses behind the curtain which hangs between nature and the supernatural, as in Milton's
"Airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses."
There is something of this power in one stanza, at least, of "The Castle of Indolence:"
"As when a shepherd of the Hebrid Isles,
Placed far amid the melancholy main
(Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles,
Or that aerial beings sometimes deign
To stand embodied to our sense plain),
The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain,
A vast assembly moving to and fro,
Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show."
It may be guessed that Johnson and Boswell, in their tour to the Hebrides or Western Islands, saw nothing of the "spectral puppet play" hinted at in this passage—the most imaginative in any of Spenser's school till we get to Keats'
"Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn."
William Julius Mickle, the translator of the "Lusiad," was a more considerable poet than any of the Spenserian imitators thus far reviewed, with the exception of Thomson and the possible exception of Shenstone. He wrote at least two poems that are likely to be remembered. One of these was the ballad of "Cumnor Hall" which suggested Scott's "Kenilworth," and came near giving its name to the novel. The other was the dialect song of "The Mariner's Wife," which Burns admired so greatly:
"Sae true his heart, sae smooth his speech,
His breath like caller air,
His very foot has music in't,
As he comes up the stair,
For there's nae luck about the house,
There is nae luck at a',
There's little pleasure in the house
When our gudeman's awa',"[33]
Mickle, like Thomson, was a Scotchman who came to London to push his literary fortunes. He received some encouragement from Lyttelton, but was disappointed in his hopes of any substantial aid from the British Maecenas. His biographer informs us that "about his thirteenth year, on Spenser's 'Faërie Queene' falling accidentally in his way, he was immediately struck with the picturesque descriptions of that much admired ancient bard and powerfully incited to imitate his style and manner."[34] In 1767 Mickle published "The Concubine," a Spenserian poem in two cantos. In the preface to his second edition, 1778, in which the title was changed to "Syr Martyn," he said that: "The fullness and wantonness of description, the quaint simplicity, and, above all, the ludicrous, of which the antique phraseology and manner of Spenser are so happily and peculiarly susceptible, inclined him to esteem it not solely as the best, but the only mode of composition adapted to his subject."
"Syr Martyn" is a narrative poem not devoid of animation, especially where the author forgets his Spenser. But in the second canto he feels compelled to introduce an absurd allegory, in which the nymph Dissipation and her henchman Self-Imposition conduct the hero to the cave of Discontent. This is how Mickle writes when he is thinking of the "Faërie Queene":
"Eke should he, freed from fous enchanter's spell,
Escape his false Duessa's magic charms,
And folly quaid, yclept an hydra fell
Receive a beauteous lady to his arms;
While bards and minstrels chaunt the soft alarms
Of gentle love, unlike his former thrall:
Eke should I sing, in courtly cunning terms,
The gallant feast, served up by seneschal,
To knights and ladies gent in painted bower or hall."
And this is how he writes when he drops his pattern:
"Awake, ye west winds, through the lonely dale,
And, Fancy, to thy faerie bower betake!
Even now, with balmy freshness, breathes the gale,
Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake;
Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake,
And evening comes with locks bedropt with dew;
On Desmond's moldering turrets slowly shake
The trembling rye-grass and the harebell blue,
And ever and anon fair Mulla's plaints renew."
A reader would be guilty of no very bad guess who should assign this stanza—which Scott greatly admired—to one of he Spenserian passages that prelude the "Lady of the Lake."
But it is needless to extend this catalogue any farther. By the middle of the century Spenserian had become so much the fashion as to provoke a rebuke from Dr. Johnson, who prowled up and down before the temple of the British Muses like a sort of classical watch-dog. "The imitation of Spenser," said the Rambler of May 14, 1751, "by the influence of some men of learning and genius, seems likely to gain upon the age. . . To imitate the fictions and sentiments of Spenser can incur no reproach, for allegory is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of instruction. But I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction or his stanza. His style was, in his own words and peculiarities of phrase, and so remote from common use that Jonson boldly pronounces him to have written no language. His stanza is at once difficult and unpleasing: tiresome to the ear by its uniformity, and to the attention by its length. . . Life is surely given us for other purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten."[35] In his "Life of West," Johnson says of West's imitations of Spenser, "Such compositions are not to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their effect is local and temporary: they appeal not to reason or passion, but to memory, and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind. An imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom Spenser has never been perused."
The critic is partly right. The nice points of a parody are lost upon a reader unacquainted with the thing parodied. And as for serious imitations, the more cleverly a copyist follows his copy, the less value his work will have. The eighteenth-century Spenserians, like West, Cambridge, and Lloyd, who stuck most closely to their pattern, oblivion has covered. Their real service was done in reviving a taste for a better kind of poetry than the kind in vogue, and particularly in restoring to English verse a stanza form, which became so noble an instrument in the hands of later poets, who used it with as much freedom and vigor as if they had never seen the "Faërie Queene." One is seldom reminded of Spenser while reading "Childe Harold"[36] or "Adonais" or "The Eve of Saint Agnes"; but in reading West or Cambridge, or even in reading Shenstone and Thomson, one is reminded of him at every turn. Yet if it was necessary to imitate anyone, it might be answered to Dr. Johnson that it was better to imitate Spenser than Pope. In the imitation of Spenser lay, at least, a future, a development; while the imitation of Pope was conducting steadily toward Darwin's "Botanic Garden."
It remains to notice one more document in the history of this Spenserian revival, Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faërie Queen," 1754. Warton wrote with a genuine delight in his subject. His tastes were frankly romantic. But the apologetic air which antiquarian scholars assumed, when venturing to recommend their favorite studies to the attention of a classically minded public, is not absent from Warton's commentary. He writes as if he felt the pressure of an unsympathetic atmosphere all about him. "We who live in the days of writing by rule are apt to try every composition by those laws which we have been taught to think the sole criterion of excellence. Critical taste is universally diffused, and we require the same order and design which every modern performance is expected to have, in poems where they never were regarded or intended. . . If there be any poem whose graces please because they are situated beyond the reach of art[37] . . . it is this. In reading Spenser, if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported." "In analyzing the plan and conduct of this poem, I have so far tried it by epic rules, as to demonstrate the inconveniences and incongruities which the poet might have avoided, had he been more studious of design and uniformity. It is true that his romantic materials claim great liberties; but no materials exclude order and perspicacity." Warton assures the reader that Spenser's language is not "so difficult and obsolete as it is generally supposed to be;" and defends him against Hume's censure,[38] that "Homer copied true natural manners . . . but the pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations and conceits and fopperies of chivalry."
Yet he began his commentary with the stock denunciations of "Gothic ignorance and barbarity." "At the renaissance it might have been expected that, instead of the romantic manner of poetical composition . . . a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have succeeded. . . But it was a long time before such a change was effected. We find Ariosto, many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth for magic, and preferring the ridiculous and incoherent excursions of Boiardo to the propriety and uniformity of the Grecian and Roman models. Nor did the restoration of ancient learning produce any effectual or immediate improvement in the state of criticism. Beni, one of the most celebrated critics of the sixteenth century, was still so infatuated with a fondness for the old Provençal vein, that he ventured to write a regular dissertation, in which he compares Ariosto with Homer." Warton says again, of Ariosto and the Italian renaissance poets whom Spenser followed, "I have found no fault in general with their use of magical machinery; notwithstanding I have so far conformed to the reigning maxims of modern criticism as to recommend classical propriety." Notwithstanding this prudent determination to conform, the author takes heart in his second volume to speak out as follows about the pseudo-classic poetry of his own age: "A poetry succeeded in which imagination gave way to correctness, sublimity of description to delicacy of sentiment, and majestic imagery to conceit and epigram. Poets began now to be more attentive to words than to things and objects. The nicer beauties of happy expression were preferred to the daring strokes of great conception. Satire, that bane of the sublime, was imported from France. The muses were debauched at court; and polite life and familiar manners became their only themes."
By the time these words were written Spenser had done his work. Color, music, fragrance were stealing back again into English song, and "golden-tongued romance with serene lute" stood at the door of the new age, waiting for it to open.
[1] A small portion of "The Canterbury Tales." Edited by Morell.
[2] The sixteenth [sic. Quaere, seventeenth?] century had an instinctive repugnance for the crude literature of the Middle Ages, the product of so strange and incoherent a civilization. Here classicism finds nothing but grossness and barbarism, never suspecting that it might contain germs, which, with time and genius, might develop into a poetical growth, doubtless less pure, but certainly more complex in its harmonies, and of a more expressive form of beauty. The history of our ancient poetry, traced in a few lines by Boileau, clearly shows to what degree he either ignored or misrepresented it. The singular, confused architecture of Gothic cathedrals gave those who saw beauty in symmetry of line and purity of form but further evidence of the clumsiness and perverted taste of our ancestors. All remembrances of the great poetic works of the Middle Ages is completely effaced. No one supposes in those barbarous times the existence of ages classical also in their way; no one imagines either their heroic songs or romances of adventure, either the rich bounty of lyrical styles or the naïve, touching crudity of the Christian drama. The seventeenth century turned disdainfully away from the monuments of national genius discovered by it; finding them sometimes shocking in their rudeness, sometimes puerile in their refinements. These unfortunate exhumations, indeed, only serve to strengthen its cult for a simple, correct beauty, the models of which are found in Greece and Rome. Why dream of penetrating the darkness of our origin? Contemporary society is far too self-satisfied to seek distraction in the study of a past which it does not comprehend. The subjects and heroes of domestic history are also prohibited. Corneille is Latin, Racine is Greek; the very name of Childebrande suffices to cover an epopee with ridicule.—Pellissier, pp. 7-8.
[3] "Epistle to Augustus."
[4] "Epistle of Augustus."
[5] I.e., learning.
[6] "Life of Dryden."
[7] "Epistle to Augustus."
[8] The tradition as to Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton is almost equally continuous. A course of what Lowell calls "penitential reading," in Restoration criticism, will convince anyone that these four names already stood out distinctly, as those of the four greatest English poets. See especially Winstanley, "Lives of the English Poets," 1687; Langbaine, "An Account of the English Dramatic Poets," 1691; Dennis, "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712; Gildon, "The Complete Art of Poetry," 1718. The fact mentioned by Macaulay, that Sir Wm. Temple's "Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning" names none of the four, is without importance. Temple refers by name to only three English "wits," Sidney, Bacon, and Selden. This very superficial performance of Temple's was a contribution to the futile controversy over the relative merits of the ancients and moderns, which is now only of interest as having given occasion to Bentley to display his great scholarship in his "Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris," (1698), and to Swift to show his powers of irony in "The Battle of the Books" (1704).
[9] Preface to the "Plays of Shakspere," 1765.
[10] Prologue, spoken by Garrick at the opening of Drury Lane Theater, 1747.
[11] "The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered and Examined," 1678.
[12] "Shakspere Illustrated," 1753.
[13] See Dryden's "Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy" and "Defence of the Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada."
[14] "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712.
[15] "The Art of Poetry," pp. 63 and 99. Cf. Pope, "Epistle to Augustus":
"Shakspere (whom you and every play-house bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite."
[16] Pope's "Shakspere," 1725.
[17] For a fuller discussion of this subject, consult "A History of Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere," in the supplemental volume of Knight's Pictorial Edition. Editions of Shakspere issued within a century following the Restoration were the third Folio, 1664; the fourth Folio, 1685; Rowe's (the first critical edition, with a Life, etc.) 1709 (second edition, 1714); Pope's, 1725 (second edition, 1728); Theobald's, 1733; Hanmer's 1744; Warburton-Pope's, 1747; and Johnson's 1765. Meanwhile, though Shakspere's plays continued to be acted, it was mostly in doctored versions. Tate changed "Lear" to a comedy. Davenant and Dryden made over "The Tempest" into "The Enchanted Island," turning blank verse into rhyme and introducing new characters, while Shadwell altered it into an opera. Dryden rewrote "Troilus and Cressida"; Davenant, "Macbeth." Davenant patched together a thing which he called "The Law against Lovers," from "Measure for Measure" and "Much Ado about Nothing." Dennis remodeled the "Merry Wives of Windsor" as "The Comical Gallant"; Tate, "Richard II." as "The Sicilian Usurper"; and Otway, "Romeo and Juliet," as "Caius Marius." Lord Lansdowne converted "The Merchant of Venice" into "The Jew of Venice," wherein Shylock was played as a comic character down to the time of Macklin and Kean. Durfey tinkered "Cymbeline." Cibber metamorphosed "King John" into "Papal Tyranny," and his version was acted till Macready's time. Cibber's stage version of "Richard III." is played still. Cumberland "engrafted" new features upon "Timon of Athens" for Garrick's theater, about 1775. In his life of Mrs. Siddons, Campbell says that "Coriolanus" "was never acted genuinely from the year 1660 till the year 1820" (Phillimore's "Life of Lyttelton," Vol. I. p. 315). He mentions a revision by Tate, another by Dennis ("The Invader of his Country"), and a third brought out by the elder Sheridan in 1764, at Covent Garden, and put together from Shakspere's tragedy and an independent play of the same name by Thomson. "Then in 1789 came the Kemble edition in which . . . much of Thomson's absurdity is still preserved."
[18] "Faërie Queene," II. xii. 71
[19] "Essay on Satire." Philips says a good word for the Spenserian stanza: "How much more stately and majestic in epic poems, especially of heroic argument, Spenser's stanza . . . is above the way either of couplet or alternation of four verses only, I am persuaded, were it revived, would soon be acknowledged."—Theatrum Poetatarum, Preface, pp. 3-4.
[20] "Observations on the Faëry Queene," Vol. II. p. 317.
[21] "The Faëry Queene," Book I., Oxford, 1869. Introduction, p. xx.
[22] "Canto" ii. stanza i.
"Now had Bootes' team far passed behind
The northern star, when hours of night declined."
—Person of Quality
[23] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 139.
[24] For a full discussion of this subject the reader should consult
Phelps' "Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement," chap. iv., "The
Spenserian Revival." A partial list of Spenserian imitations is given in
Todd's edition of Spenser, Vol. I. But the list in Prof. Phelps'
Appendix, if not exhaustive, is certainly the most complete yet published
and may be here reproduced. 1706: Prior: "Ode to the Queen." 1713-21:
Prior(?): "Colin's Mistakes." 1713 Croxall: "An Original Canto of
Spenser." 1714: Croxall: "Another Original Canto." 1730 (circa):
Whitehead: "Vision of Solomon," "Ode to the Honorable Charles Townsend,"
"Ode to the Same." 1736: Thompson: "Epithalamium." 1736: Cambridge:
"Marriage of Frederick." 1736-37: Boyse: "The Olive," "Psalm XLII."
1737: Akenside: "The Virtuoso." 1739: West: "Abuse of Traveling." 1739:
Anon.: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy Queen." 1740: Boyse: "Ode to the
Marquis of Tavistock." 1741 (circa): Boyse: "Vision of Patience."
1742: Shenstone: "The Schoolmistress." 1742-50: Cambridge: "Archimage."
1742: Dodsley: "Pain and Patience." 1743: Anon.: "Albion's Triumph."
1744 (circa): Dodsley: "Death of Mr. Pope." 1744: Akenside: "Ode to
Curio." 1746: Blacklock: "Hymn to Divine Love," "Philantheus." 1747:
Mason: Stanzas in "Musaeus." 1747: Ridley: "Psyche." 1747: Lowth:
"Choice of Hercules." 1747: Upton: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy
Queen." 1747: Bedingfield: "Education of Achilles." 1747: Pitt: "The
Jordan." 1748: T. Warton, Sr.: "Philander." 1748: Thomson: "The Castle
of Indolence." 1749: Potter: "A Farewell Hymn to the Country." 1750: T.
Warton: "Morning." 1751: West: "Education." 1751: T. Warton: "Elegy on
the Death of Prince Frederick." 1751: Mendes: "The Seasons," 1751:
Lloyd: "Progress of Envy." 1751: Akenside: "Ode." 1751: Smith:
"Thales." 1753: T. Warton: "A Pastoral in the Manner of Spenser." 1754:
Denton: "Immortality." 1755: Arnold: "The Mirror." 1748-58: Mendez:
"Squire of Dames." 1756: Smart: "Hymn to the Supreme Being." 1757:
Thompson: "The Nativity," "Hymn to May." 1758: Akenside: "To Country
Gentlemen of England." 1759: Wilkie: "A Dream" 1759: Poem in "Ralph's
Miscellany." 1762: Denton: "House of Superstition." 1767: Mickle: "The
Concubine." 1768: Downman: "Land of the Muses." 1771-74: Beattie: "The
Ministrel." 1775: Anon.: "Land of Liberty." 1775: Mickle: Stanzas from
"Introduction to the Lusiad."
[25] See Phelps, pp. 66-68.
[26] See the sumptuous edition of Cambridge's "Works," issued by his son in 1803.
[27] "Mr. Walpole and I have frequently wondered you should never mention a certain imitation of Spenser, published last year by a namesake of yours, with which we are all enraptured and enmarvelled."—Letter form Gray to Richard West, Florence, July 16, 1740. There was no relationship between Gilbert West and Gray's Eton friend, though it seems that the former was also an Etonian, and was afterwards at Oxford, "whence he was seduced to a more airy mode of life," says Dr. Johnson, "by a commission in a troop of horse, procured him by his uncle." Cambridge, however, was an acquaintance of Gray, Walpole, and Richard West, at Eton. Gray's solitary sonnet was composed upon the death of Richard West in 1742; and it is worth noting that the introduction to Cambridge's works are a number of sonnets by his friend Thomas Edwards, himself a Spenser lover, whose "sugared sonnets among his private friends" begin about 1750 and reach the number of fifty.
[28] "Life of West."
[29] Lloyd, in "The Progress of Envy," defines wimpled as "hung down"; and Akenside, in "The Virtuoso," employs the ending en for the singular verb!
[30] Cf. "And as they looked, they found their horror grew."
—Shenstone.
"And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew."
—Goldsmith.
"The noises intermixed, which thence resound,
Do learning's little tenement betray."
—Shenstone.
"There in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule." etc.
—Goldsmith.
[31] The poem was projected, and perhaps partly written, fourteen or fifteen years earlier.
[32] Cf. Tennyson's "land in which it seemed always afternoon."—The Lotus Eaters.
[33] Mickle's authorship of this song has been disputed in favor of one Jean Adams, a poor Scotch school-mistress, whose poems were printed at Glasgow in 1734.
[34] Rev. John Sim's "Life of Mickle" in "Mickle's Poetical Works," 1806, p. xi.
[35] Cf. Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 35. "It has been fashionable of late to imitate Spenser; but the likeness of most of these copies hath consisted rather in using a few of his ancient expressions than in catching his real manner. Some, however, have been executed with happiness, and with attention to that simplicity, that tenderness of sentiment and those little touches of nature that constitute Spenser's character. I have a peculiar pleasure in mentioning two of them, 'The Schoolmistress' by Mr. Shenstone, and 'The Education of Achilles' by Mr. Bedingfield. And also, Dr. Beattie's charming 'Minstrel.' To these must be added that exquisite piece of wild and romantic imagery, Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence.'"
[36] Byron, to be sure, began his first canto with conscious Spenserian. He called his poem a "romaunt," and his valet, poor Fletcher, a "stanch yeomán," and peppered his stanzas thinly with sooths and wights and_ whiloms_, but he gave over this affectation in the later cantos and made no further excursions into the Middle Ages.
[37] Pope's, "Snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." —Essay on Criticism.
[38] "History of England," Vol. II. p. 739.
CHAPTER IV.
The Landscape Poets
There is nothing necessarily romantic in literature that concerns itself with rural life or natural scenery. Yet we may accept, with some qualification, the truth of Professor McClintock's statement, that the "beginning and presence of a creative, romantic movement is almost always shown by the love, study, and interpretation of physical nature."[1] Why this should be true, at all events of the romantic movement that began in the eighteenth century, is obvious enough. Ruskin and Leslie Stephen have already been quoted, as witnesses to the fact that naturalism and romanticism had a common root: the desire, namely, to escape into the fresh air and into freer conditions, from a literature which dealt, in a strictly regulated way, with the indoor life of a highly artificial society. The pastoral had ceased to furnish any relief. Professing to chant the praises of innocence and simplicity, it had become itself utterly unreal and conventional, in the hands of cockneys like Philips and Pope. When the romantic spirit took possession of the poetry of nature, it manifested itself in a passion for wildness, grandeur, solitude. Of this there was as yet comparatively little even in the verse of Thomson, Shenstone, Akenside, and Dyer.
Still the work of these pioneers in the "return to nature" represents the transition, and must be taken into account in any complete history of the romantic movement. The first two, as we have seen, were among the earliest Spenserians: Dyer was a landscape painter, as well as a poet; and Shenstone was one of the best of landscape gardeners. But it is the beginnings that are important. It will be needless to pursue the history of nature poetry into its later developments; needless to review the writings of Cowper and Crabbe, for example,—neither of whom was romantic in any sense,—or even of Wordsworth, the spirit of whose art, as a whole, was far from romantic.
Before taking up the writers above named, one by one, it will be well to notice the general change in the forms of verse, which was an outward sign of the revolution in poetic feeling. The imitation of Spenser was only one instance of a readiness to lay aside the heroic couplet in favor of other kinds which it had displaced, and in the interests of greater variety. "During the twenty-five years," says Mr. Goss, "from the publication of Thomson's 'Spring' ['Winter'] in 1726, to that of Gray's 'Elegy' in 1751, the nine or ten leading poems or collections of verse which appeared were all of a new type; somber, as a rule, certainly stately, romantic in tone to the extreme, prepared to return, ignorantly indeed, but with respect, to what was 'Gothic' in manners, architecture, and language; all showing a more or less vague aspiration towards the nature, and not one composed in the heroic couplet hitherto so vigorously imposed on serious verse. 'The Seasons,' 'Night Thoughts' and 'The Grave' are written in blank verse: 'The Castle of Indolence' and 'The Schoolmistress' in Spenserian stanza; 'The Spleen' and 'Grongar Hill' in octosyllabics, while the early odes of Gray and those of Collins are composed in a great variety of simple but novel lyric measures."[2]
The only important writer who had employed blank verse in undramatic poetry between the publication of "Paradise Regained" in 1672, and Thomson's "Winter" in 1726, was John Philips. In the brief prefatory note to "Paradise Lost," the poet of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," forgetting or disdaining the graces of his youthful muse, had spoken of rhyme as "the invention of a barbarous age," as "a thing trivial and of no true musical delight." Milton's example, of course, could not fail to give dignity and authority to the majestic rhythm that he had used; and Philips' mock-heroic "The Splendid Shilling" (1701), his occasional piece, "Blenheim" (1705), and his Georgic "Cyder" (1706), were all avowed imitation of Milton. But the well-nigh solitary character of Philips' experiments was recognized by Thomson, in his allusion to the last-named poem:
"Philips, Pomona's bard, the second thou
Who nobly durst, in rime-unfettered verse,
With British freedom sing the British song."[3]
In speaking of Philips' imitations of Milton, Johnson said that if the latter "had written after the improvements made by Dryden, it is reasonable to believe he would have admitted a more pleasing modulation of numbers into his work."[4] Johnson hated Adam Smith, but when Boswell mentioned that Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow University, had given the preference to rhyme over blank verse, the doctor exclaimed, "Sir, I was once in company with Smith and we did not take to each other; but had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I should have hugged him."
In 1725 James Thomson, a young Scotchman, came to London to push his literary fortunes. His countryman, David Malloch,—or Mallet, as he called himself in England,—at that time private tutor in the family of the Duke of Montrose, procured Thomson introductions into titled society, and helped him to bring out "Winter," the first installment of "The Seasons," which was published in 1726. Thomson's friend and biographer (1762) the Rev. Patrick Murdoch, says that the poem was "no sooner read than universally admired; those only excepted who had not been used to feel, or to look for anything in poetry beyond a point of satirical or epigrammatic wit, a smart antithesis richly trimmed with rhyme." This is a palpable hit at the stronger contrast than between Thomson and Pope, not alone in subject and feeling, but in diction and verse. Thomson's style is florid and luxuriant, his numbers flowing and diffuse, while Pope had wonted the English ear to the extreme of compression in both language and meter. Pope is among the most quotable of poets, while Thomson's long poem, in spite of its enduring popularity, has contributed but a single phrase to the stock of current quotation:
"To teach the young idea how to shoot."
"Winter" was followed by "Summer" in 1727, "Spring" in 1728, and the completed "Seasons" in 1730. Thomson made many changes and additions in subsequent editions. The original "Seasons" contained only 3902 lines (exclusive of the "Hymn"), while the author's final revision of 1746 gave 5413. One proof that "The Seasons" was the work of a fresh and independent genius is afforded by the many imitations to which it soon gave birth. In Germany, a passage from Brockes' translation (1745) was set to music by Haydn. J. P. Uz (1742) and Wieland each produced a "Frühling," in Thomson's manner; but the most distinguished of his German disciples was Ewald Christian von Kleist, whose "Fruhling" (1749) was a description of a country walk in spring, in 460 hexameter lines, accompanied, as in Thomson's "Hymn," with a kind of "Gloria in excelsis," to the creator of nature. "The Seasons" was translated into French by Madame Bontemps in 1759, and called forth, among other imitations, "Les Saisons" of Saint Lambert, 1769 (revised and extended in 1771.) In England, Thomson's influence naturally manifested itself less in direct imitations of the scheme of his poem than in the contagion of his manner, which pervades the work of many succeeding poets, such as Akenside, Armstrong, Dyer, Somerville and Mallet. "There was hardly one verse writer of any eminence," says Gosse,[5] "from 1725-50, who was not in some manner guided or biased by Thomson, whose genius is to this day fertile in English literature."
We have grown so accustomed to a more intimate treatment and a more spiritual interpretation of nature, that we are perhaps too apt to undervalue Thomson's simple descriptive or pictorial method. Compared with Wordsworth's mysticism, with Shelley's passionate pantheism, with Byron's romantic gloom in presence of the mountains and the sea, with Keats' joyous re-creation of mythology, with Thoreau's Indian-like approach to the innermost arcana—with a dozen other moods familiar to the modern mind—it seems to us unimaginative. Thomson has been likened, as a colorist, to Rubens; and possibly the glow, the breadth, and the vital energy of his best passages, as of Rubens' great canvases, leave our finer perceptions untouched, and we ask for something more esoteric, more intense. Still there are permanent and solid qualities in Thomson's landscape art, which can give delight even now to an unspoiled taste. To a reader of his own generation, "The Seasons" must have come as the revelation of a fresh world of beauty. Such passages as those which describe the first spring showers, the thunderstorm in summer, the trout-fishing, the sheep-washing, and the terrors of the winter night, were not only strange to the public of that day, but were new in English poetry.
That the poet was something of a naturalist, who wrote lovingly and with his "eye upon the object," is evident from a hundred touches, like "auriculas with shining meal";
"The yellow wall-flower stained with iron brown;"
or,
"The bittern knows his time, with bill engulfed,
To shake the sounding marsh."[6]
Thomson's scenery was genuine. His images of external nature are never false and seldom vague, like Pope's. In a letter to Lyttelton,[7] he speaks of "the Muses of the great simple country, not the little fine-lady Muses of Richmond Hill." His delineations, if less sharp and finished in detail than Cowper's, have greater breadth. Coleridge's comparison of the two poets is well known: "The love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion, and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. . . In chastity of diction and the harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him; yet I still feel the latter to have been the born poet."
The geologist Hugh Miller, who visited Lyttelton's country seat at Hagley in 1845, describes the famous landscape which Thomson had painted in "Spring":
"Meantime you gain the height from whose fair brow
The bursting prospect spreads immense around,
And, snatched o'er hill and dale and wood and lawn,
And verdant field and darkening heath between,
And villages embosomed soft in trees,
And spiry town, by surging columns marked
Of household smoke, your eye extensive roams. . .
To where the broken landscape, by degrees
Ascending, roughens into rigid hills,
O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds,
That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise."
"That entire prospect," says Miller,[8]—"one of the finest in England, and eminently characteristic of what is best in English scenery—enabled me to understand what I had used to deem a peculiarity—in some measure a defect—in the landscapes of the poet Thomson. It must have often struck the Scotch reader that, in dealing with very extended prospects, he rather enumerates than describes. His pictures are often mere catalogues, in which single words stand for classes of objects, and in which the entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of vast extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. . . Now the prospect from the hill at Hagley furnished me with the true explanation of this enumerative style. Measured along the horizon, it must, on the lowest estimate, be at least fifty miles in longitudinal extent; measured laterally, from the spectator forwards, at least twenty. . . The real area must rather exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles: the fields into which it is laid out are small, scarcely averaging a square furlong in superficies. . . With these there are commixed innumerable cottages, manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the surface is dimpled by unreckoned hollows; there fretted by uncounted mounds; all is amazing, overpowering multiplicity—a multiplicity which neither the pen nor the pencil can adequately express; and so description, in even the hands of a master, sinks into mere enumeration. The picture becomes a catalogue."
Wordsworth[9] pronounced "The Seasons" "a work of inspiration," and said that much of it was "written from himself, and nobly from himself," but complained that the style was vicious. Thomson's diction is, in truth, not always worthy of his poetic feeling and panoramic power over landscape. It is academic and often tumid and wordy, abounding in Latinisms like effusive, precipitant, irriguous, horrific, turgent, amusive. The lover who hides by the stream where his mistress is bathing—that celebrated "serio-comic bathing"—is described as "the latent Damon"; and when the poet advises against the use of worms for trout bait, he puts it thus:
"But let not on your hook the tortured worm
Convulsive writhe in agonizing folds," etc.
The poets had now begun to withdraw from town and go out into the country, but in their retirement to the sylvan shades they were accompanied sometimes, indeed, by Milton's "mountain nymph, sweet Liberty," but quite as frequently by Shenstone's nymph, "coy Elegance," who kept reminding them of Vergil.
Thomson's blank verse, although, as Coleridge says, inferior to Cowper's, is often richly musical and with an energy unborrowed of Milton—as Cowper's is too apt to be, at least in his translation of Homer.[10] Mr. Saintsbury[11] detects a mannerism in the verse of "The Seasons," which he illustrates by citing three lines with which the poet "caps the climax of three several descriptive passages, all within the compass of half a dozen pages," viz.:
"And Egypt joys beneath the spreading wave."
"And Mecca saddens at the long delay."
"And Thule bellows through her utmost isles."
It would be easy to add many other instances of this type of climacteric line, e.g. ("Summer," 859),
"And Ocean trembles for his green domain."
For the blank verse of "The Seasons" is a blank verse which has been passed through the strainer of the heroic couplet. Though Thomson, in the flow and continuity of his measure, offers, as has been said, the greatest contrast to Pope's system of versification; yet wherever he seeks to be nervous, his modulation reminds one more of Pope's antithetical trick than of Shakspere's or Milton's freer structure. For instance ("Spring," 1015):
"Fills every sense and pants in every vein."
or (Ibid. 1104):
"Flames through the nerves and boils along the veins."
To relieve the monotony of a descriptive poem, the author introduced moralizing digressions: advice to the husbandman and the shepherd after the manner of the "Georgics"; compliments to his patrons, like Lyttelton, Bubb Dodington, and the Countess of Hertford; and sentimental narrative episodes, such as the stories of Damon and Musidora,[12] and Celadon and Amelia in "Summer," and of Lavinia and Palemon[13] in "Autumn"; while ever and anon his eye extensive roamed over the phenomena of nature in foreign climes, the arctic night, the tropic summer, etc. Wordsworth asserts that these sentimental passages "are the parts of the work which were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice."[14] They strike us now as insipid enough. But many coming attitudes cast their shadows before across the page of "The Seasons." Thomson's denunciation of the slave trade, and of cruelty to animals, especially the caging of birds and the coursing of hares; his preference of country to town; his rhapsodies on domestic love and the innocence of the Golden Age; his contrast between the misery of the poor and the heartless luxury of the rich; all these features of the poem foretoken the sentimentalism of Sterne and Goldsmith, and the humanitarianism of Cowper and Burns. They anticipate, in particular, that half affected itch of simplicity which titillated the sensibilities of a corrupt and artificial society in the writings of Rousseau and the idyllic pictures of Bernardin de St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia." Thomson went so far in this vein as to decry the use of animal food in a passage which recalls Goldsmith's stanza:[15]
"No flocks that range the valley free
To slaughter I condemn:
Taught by the power that pities me,
I learn to pity them."
This sort of thing was in the air. Pope was not a sentimental person, yet even Pope had written
"The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food.
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."[16]
It does not appear that Thomson was personally averse to a leg of mutton. His denunciations of luxury, and his praise of early rising[17] and cold bathing[18] sound rather hollow from the lips of a bard—"more fat than bard beseems"-who used to lie abed till noon, and who, as Savage told Johnson, "was perhaps never in cold water in his life." Johnson reports, not without some spice of malice, that the Countess of Hertford, "whose practice it was to invite every summer some poet into the country, to hear her verses and assist her studies," extended this courtesy to Thomson, "who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hertford and his friends than assisting her ladyship's poetical operations, and therefore never received another summons."[19]
The romantic note is not absent from "The Seasons," but it is not prominent. Thomson's theme was the changes of the year as they affect the English landscape, a soft, cultivated landscape of lawns, gardens, fields, orchards, sheep-walks, and forest preserves. Only now and then that attraction toward the savage, the awful, the mysterious, the primitive, which marks the romantic mood in naturalistic poetry, shows itself in touches like these.
"High from the summit of a craggy cliff,
Hung o'er the deep, such as amazing frowns
On utmost Kilda's shore, whose lonely race
Reigns the setting sun to Indian worlds."[20]
"Or where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."[21]
Compare also the description of the thunderstorm in the mountains
("Summer," 1156-68), closing with the lines:
"Far seen the heights of heathy Cheviot blaze,
And Thule bellows through her utmost isles."
The Western Islands appear to have had a peculiar fascination for Thomson. The passages above quoted, and the stanza from "The Castle of Indolence," cited on page 94, gave Collins the clew for his "Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," which contained, says Lowell, the whole romantic school in the germ. Thomason had perhaps found the embryon atom in Milton's "stormy Hebrides," in "Lycidas," whose echo is prolonged in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper"—
"Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides."
Even Pope—he had a soul—was not unsensitive to this, as witness his
"Loud as the wolves, on Orcas' stormy steep,
Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep."[22]
The melancholy which Victor Hugo pronounces a distinguishing badge of romantic art, and which we shall see gaining more and more upon English poetry as the century advanced, is also discernible in "The Seasons" in a passage like the following:
"O bear me then to vast embowering shades,
To twilight groves and visionary vales,
To weeping grottos and prophetic glooms;
Where angel-forms athwart the solemn dusk
Tremendous sweep, or seem to sweep along;
And voices more than human, through the void,
Deep-sounding, seize the enthusiastic ear;"[23]
or this, which recalls "Il Penseroso":
"Now all amid the rigors of the year,
In the wild depth of winter, while without
The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat
Between the groaning forest and the shore,
Beat by the boundless multitude of waves,
A rural, sheltered, solitary scene;
Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join
To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit
And hold high converse with the mighty dead."[24]
The revival again, of the preternatural and of popular superstitions as literary material, after a rationalizing and skeptical age, is signalized by such a passage as this:
"Onward they pass, o'er many a panting height,
And valley sunk and unfrequented, where
At fall of eve the fairy people throng,
In various game and revelry to pass
The summer night, as village stories tell.
But far around they wander from the grave
Of him whom his ungentle fortune urged
Against his own sad breast to life the hand
Of impious violence. The lonely tower
Is also shunned, whose mournful chambers hold,
So night-struck fancy dreams, the yelling ghost."
It may not be uninstructive to note the occurrence of the word romantic at several points in the poem:
"glimmering shades and sympathetic glooms, Where the dim umbrage o'er the falling stream Romantic hangs."[25]
This is from a passage in which romantic love once more comes back into poetry, after its long eclipse; and in which the lover is depicted as wandering abroad at "pensive dusk," or by moonlight, through groves and along brooksides.[26] The word is applied likewise to clouds, "rolled into romantic shapes, the dream of waking fancy"; and to the scenery of Scotland—"Caledonia in romantic view." In a subtler way, the feeling of such lines as these is romantic:
"Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart,
As home he goes beneath the joyous moon;"
or these, of the comparative lightness of the summer night:
"A faint, erroneous ray,
Glanced from the imperfect surfaces of things,
Flings half an image on the straining eye."
In a letter to Stonehewer (June 29, 1760), Gray comments thus upon a passage from Ossian:
"'Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night: Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind: Their songs are of other worlds.'
"Did you never observe (while rocking winds are piping loud) that pause, as the gust is re-collecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive note, like the soul of an Aeolian harp? I do assure you, there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit. Thomson had an ear sometimes; he was not deaf to this, and has described it gloriously, but given it another, different turn, and of more horror. I cannot repeat the lines: it is in his 'Winter.'" The lines that Gray had in mind were probably these (191-94):
"Then, too, they say, through all the burdened air,
Long groans are heard, shrill sounds and distant sighs
That, uttered by the demon of the night,
Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death."
Thomson appears to have been a sweet-tempered, indolent man, constant in friendship and much loved by his friends. He had a little house and grounds in Kew Lane where he used to compose poetry on autumn nights and loved to listen to the nightingales in Richmond Garden; and where, sang Collins, in his ode on the poet's death (1748),
"Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore,
When Thames in summer wreaths is drest,
And oft suspend the dashing oar
To bid his gentle spirit rest."
Collins had been attracted to Richmond by Thomson's residence there, and forsook the neighborhood after his friend's death.
Joseph Warton, in his "Essay on Pope" (1756), testified that "The Seasons" had been "very instrumental in diffusing a taste for the beauties of nature and landscape." One evidence of this diffused taste was the rise of the new or natural school of landscape gardening. This was a purely English art, and Gray, writing in 1763,[27] says "It is not forty years since the art was born among us; and it is sure that there was nothing in Europe like it": he adds that "our skill in gardening and laying out grounds" is "the only taste we can call our own, the only proof of our original talent in matter of pleasure." "Neither Italy nor France have ever had the least notion of it, nor yet do at all comprehend it, when they see it."[28] Gray's "not forty years" carries us back with sufficient precision to the date of "The Seasons" (1726-30), and it is not perhaps giving undue credit to Thomson, to acknowledge him as, in a great measure, the father of the national school of landscape gardening. That this has always been recognized upon the Continent as an art of English invention, is evidenced by the names Englische Garten, jardin Anglais, still given in Germany and France to pleasure grounds laid out in the natural taste.[29] Schopenhauer gives the philosophy of the opposing styles as follows: "The great distinction between the English and the old French garden rests, in the last analysis, upon this, viz., that the former are laid out in the objective, the latter in the subjective sense, that is to say, in the former the will of Nature, as it manifests (objektivirt) itself in tree, mountain, and water, is brought to the purest possible expression of its ideas, i.e., of its own being. In the French gardens, on the other hand, there is reflected only the will of the owner who has subdued Nature, so that, instead of her own ideas, she wears as tokens of her slavery, the forms which he has forced upon her-clipped hedges, trees cut into all manner of shapes, straight alleys, arched walks, etc."
It would be unfair to hold the false taste of Pope's generation responsible for that formal style of gardening which prevailed when "The Seasons" was written. The old-fashioned Italian or French or Dutch garden—as it was variously called—antedated the Augustan era, which simply inherited it from the seventeenth century. In Bacon's essay on gardens, as well as in the essays on the same subject by Cowley and Sir William Temple, the ideal pleasure ground is very much like that which Le Notre realized so brilliantly at Versailles.[30] Addison, in fact, in the Spectator (No. 414) and Pope himself in the Guardian (No. 173) ridiculed the excesses of the reigning mode, and Pope attacked them again in his description of Timon's Villa in the "Epistle to the Earl of Burlington" (1731), which was thought to be meant for Canons, the seat of the Duke of Chandos.
"His gardens next your admiration call,
On every side you look, behold the wall!
No pleasing intricacies intervene,
No artful wildness to perplex the scene;
Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
The suffering eye inverted nature sees,
Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees;
With here a fountain, never to be played;
And there a summer house, that knows no shade;
Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers;
There gladiators fight, or die in flowers;
Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn,
And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn."
Still the criticism is not merely fanciful which discovers an analogy between the French garden, with its trim regularity and artificial smoothness, and the couplets which Pope wrote: just such an analogy as exists between the whole classical school of poetry and the Italian architecture copied from Palladio and introduced in England by Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren. Grounds were laid out in rectangular plots, bordered by straight alleys, sometimes paved with vari-colored sand, and edged with formal hedges of box and holly. The turf was inlaid with parterres cut in geometric shapes and set, at even distances, with yew trees clipped into cubes, cones, pyramids, spheres, sometimes into figures of giants, birds, animals, and ships—called "topiary work" (opus topiarium). Terraces, fountains, bowling-greens (Fr. boulingrin) statues, arcades, quincunxes, espallers, and artificial mazes or labyrinths loaded the scene. The whole was inclosed by a wall, which shut the garden off from the surrounding country.
"When a Frenchman reads of the Garden of Eden," says Horace Walpole, in his essay "On Modern Gardening" (written in 1770, published in 1785), "I do not doubt but he concludes it was something approaching to that of Versailles, with clipped hedges, berceaux and trellis work. . . The measured walk, the quincunx and the étoile imposed their unsatisfying sameness on every royal and noble garden. . . Many French groves seem green chests set upon poles. . . In the garden of Marshal de Biron at Paris, consisting of fourteen acres, every walk is buttoned on each side by lines of flower-pots, which succeed in their seasons. When I saw it, there were nine thousand pots of asters, or la reine Marguerite. . . At Lady Orford's, at Piddletown, in Dorsetshire, there was, when my brother married, a double enclosure of thirteen gardens, each I suppose not much above a hundred yards square, with an enfilade of correspondent gates; and before you arrived at these, you passed a narrow gut between two stone terraces that rose above your head, and which were crowned by a line of pyradmidal yews. A bowling green was all the lawn admitted in those times: a circular lake the extent of magnificence."[31]
Walpole names Theobalds and Nonsuch as famous examples of the old formal style of garden; Stourhead, Hagley, and Stowe—the country seat of Lyttelton's brother-in-law, Lord Cobham—of the new. He says that mottoes and coats of arms were sometimes cut in yew, box, and holly. He refers with respect to a recent work by the Rev. Thomas Whately, or Wheatley, "Observations on Modern Gardening," 1770; and to a poem, then and still in manuscript, but passages of which are given by Amherst,[32] entitled "The Rise and Progress of the Present Taste in Planting Parks, Pleasure Grounds, Gardens, etc. In a poetic epistle to Lord Viscount Irwin," 1767.
Gray's friend and editor, the Rev. William Mason, in his poem "The English Garden," 1757, speaks of the French garden as already a thing of the past.
"O how unlike the scene my fancy forms,
Did Folly, heretofore, with Wealth conspire
To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene
Which once was called a garden! Britain still
Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound
Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid
From geometric skill, they vainly strove
By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears
To form with verdure what the builder formed
With stone. . .
Hence the sidelong walls
Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms
Trimmed into high arcades; the tonsile box,
Wove in mosaic mode of many a curl
Around the figured carpet of the lawn. . .
The terrace mound uplifted; the long line
Deep delved of flat canal."[33]
But now, continues the poet, Taste "exalts her voice" and
"At the awful sound
The terrace sinks spontaneous; on the green,
Broidered with crispëd knots, the tonsile yews
Wither and fall; the fountain dares no more
To fling its wasted crystal through the sky,
But pours salubrious o'er the parchëd lawn."
The new school had the intolerance of reformers. The ruthless Capability Brown and his myrmidons laid waste many a prim but lovely old garden, with its avenues, terraces, and sun dials, the loss of which is deeply deplored, now that the Queen Anne revival has taught us to relish the rococo beauties which Brown's imitation landscapes displaced.
We may pause for a little upon this "English Garden" of Mason's, as an example of that brood of didactic blank-poems, begotten of Phillips' "Cyder" and Thomson's "Seasons," which includes Mallet's "Excursion" (1728), Somerville's "Chase" (1734), Akenside's "Pleasures of Imagination" (1742-44), Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health" (1744), Dyer's "Fleece" (1757) and Grainger's "Sugar Cane" (1764). Mason's blank verse, like Mallet's, is closely imitative of Thomson's and the influence of Thomson's inflated diction is here seen at its worst. The whole poem is an object lesson on the absurdity of didactic poetry. Especially harrowing are the author's struggles to be poetic while describing the various kinds of fences designed to keep sheep out of his inclosures.
"Ingrateful sure,
When such the theme, becomes the poet's task:
Yet must he try by modulation meet
Of varied cadence and selected phrase
Exact yet free, without inflation bold,
To dignify that theme."
Accordingly he dignified his theme by speaking of a net as the "sportsman's hempen toils," and of a gun as the
"—fell tube Whose iron entrails hide the sulphurous blast Satanic engine!"
When he names an ice-house, it is under a form of conundrum:
"—the structure rude where Winter pounds,
In conic pit his congelations hoar,
That Summer may his tepid beverage cool
With the chill luxury."
This species of verbiage is the earmark of all eighteenth-century poetry and poets; not only of those who used the classic couplet, but equally of the romanticizing group who adopted blank verse. The best of them are not free from it, not even Gray, not even Collins; and it pervades Wordsworth's earliest verses, his "Descriptive Sketches" and "Evening Walk" published in 1793. But perhaps the very worst instance of it is in Dr. Armstrong's "Economy of Love," where the ludicrous contrast between the impropriety of the subject and the solemn pomp of the diction amounts almost to bouffe.
In emulation of "The Seasons" Mason introduced a sentimental love story—Alcander and Nerina—into his third book. He informs his readers (book II. 34-78) that, in the reaction against straight alleys, many gardeners had gone to an extreme in the use of zigzag meanders; and he recommends them to follow the natural curves of the footpaths which the milkmaid wears across the pastures "from stile to stile," or which
—"the scudding hare Draws to her dew-sprent seat o'er thymy heaths."
The prose commentary on Mason's poem, by W. Burgh,[34] asserts that the formal style of garden had begun to give way about the commencement of the eighteenth century, though the new fashion had but very lately attained to its perfection. Mason mentions Pope as a champion of the true taste,[35] but the descriptions of his famous villa at Twickenham, with its grotto, thickets, and artificial mounds, hardly suggest to the modern reader a very successful attempt to reproduce nature. To be sure, Pope had only five acres to experiment with, and that parklike scenery which distinguishes the English landscape garden requires a good deal of room. The art is the natural growth of a country where primogeniture has kept large estates in the hands of the nobility and landed gentry, and in which a passion for sport has kept the nobility and gentry in the country a great share of the year. Even Shenstone—whose place is commended by Mason—Shenstone at the Leasowes, with his three hundred acres, felt his little pleasance rather awkwardly dwarfed by the neighborhood of Lyttelton's big park at Hagley.
The general principle of the new or English school was to imitate nature; to let trees keep their own shapes, to substitute winding walks for straight alleys, and natural waterfalls or rapids for jets d'eau in marble basins. The plan upon which Shenstone worked is explained in his "Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening"[36] (1764), a few sentences from which will indicate the direction of the reform: "Landscape should contain variety enough to form a picture upon canvas; and this is no bad test, as I think the landscape painter is the gardener's best designer. The eye requires a sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon probable nature. A wood or hill may balance a house or obelisk; for exactness would be displeasing. . . It is not easy to account for the fondness of former times for straight-lined avenues to their houses; straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every kind of straight line, where the foot has to travel over what the eye has done before. . . To stand still and survey such avenues may afford some slender satisfaction, through the change derived from perspective; but to move on continually and find no change of scene in the least attendant on our change of place, must give actual pain to a person of taste. . . I conceived some idea of the sensation he must feel from walking but a few minutes, immured between Lord D——'s high shorn yew hedges, which run exactly parallel at the distance of about ten feet, and are contrived perfectly to exclude all kind of objects whatsoever. . . The side trees in vistas should be so circumstanced as to afford a probability that they grew by nature. . . The shape of ground, the disposition of trees and the figure of water must be sacred to nature; and no forms must be allowed that make a discovery of art. . . The taste of the citizen and of the mere peasant are in all respects the same: the former gilds his balls, paints his stonework and statues white, plants his trees in lines or circles, cuts his yew-trees, four-square or conic, or gives them what he can of the resemblance of birds or bears or men; squirts up his rivulets in jets d'eau; in short, admires no part of nature but her ductility; exhibits everything that is glaring, that implies expense, or that effects a surprise because it is unnatural. The peasant is his admirer. . . Water should ever appear as an irregular lake or winding stream. . . Hedges, appearing as such, are universally bad. They discover art in nature's province."
There is surely a correspondence between this new taste for picturesque gardening which preferred freedom, variety, irregularity, and naturalness to rule, monotony, uniformity, and artifice, and that new taste in literature which discarded the couplet for blank verse, or for various stanza forms, which left the world of society for the solitudes of nature, and ultimately went, in search of fresh stimulus, to the remains of the Gothic ages and the rude fragments of Norse and Celtic antiquity.
Both Walpole and Mason speak of William Kent, the architect and landscape painter, as influential in introducing a purer taste in the gardener's art. Kent was a friend of Pope and a protégé of Lord Burlington to whom Pope inscribed his "Epistle on the Use of Riches," already quoted (see ante p. 121), and who gave Kent a home at his country house. Kent is said to have acknowledged that he caught his taste in gardening from the descriptive passages in Spenser, whose poems he illustrated. Walpole and Mason also unite in contrasting with the artificial gardening of Milton's time the picture of Eden in "Paradise Lost:"
"—where not nice art in curious knots,
But nature boon poured forth on hill and dale
Flowers worthy of Paradise; while all around
Umbrageous grots, and caves of cool recess,
And murmuring waters, down the slope dispersed,
Or held by fringëd banks in crystal lakes.
Compose a rural seat of various hue."
But it is worth noting that in "L'Allegro" "retired leisure," takes his pleasure in "trim gardens," while in Collins,
"Ease and health retire
To breezy lawn or forest deep."
Walpole says that Kent's "ruling principle was that nature abhors a straight line." Kent "leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley, changing imperceptibly into each other. . . and remarked how loose groves crowned an easy eminence with happy ornament. . . The great principles on which he worked were perspective and light and shade. . . But of all the beauties he added to the face of this beautiful country, none surpassed his management of water. Adieu to canals, circular basins, and cascades tumbling down marble steps. . . The gentle stream was taught to serpentine seemingly at its pleasure."[37] The treatment of the garden as a part of the landscape in general was commonly accomplished by the removal of walls, hedges, and other inclosures, and the substitution of the ha-ha or sunken fence. It is odd that Walpole, though he speaks of Capability Brown, makes no mention of the Leasowes, whose proprietor, William Shenstone, the author of "The School-mistress," is one of the most interesting of amateur gardeners. "England," says Hugh Miller, "has produced many greater poets than Shenstone, but she never produced a greater landscape gardener."
At Oxford, Shenstone had signalized his natural tastes by wearing his own hair instead of the wig then (1732) universally the fashion.[38] On coming of age, he inherited a Shropshire farm, called the Leasowes, in the parish of Hales Owen and an annuity of some three hundred pounds. He was of an indolent, retiring, and somewhat melancholy temperament; and, instead of pursuing a professional career, he settled down upon his property and, about the year 1745, began to turn it into a fermé ornée. There he wooed the rustic muse in elegy, ode, and pastoral ballad, sounding upon the vocal reed the beauties of simplicity and the vanity of ambition, and mingling with these strains complaints of Delia's cruelty and of the shortness of his own purse, which hampered him seriously in his gardening designs. Mr. Saintsbury has described Shenstone as a master of "the artificial-natural style of poetry."[39] His pastoral insipidities about pipes and crooks and kids, Damon and Delia, Strephon and Chloe, excited the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who was also at no pains to conceal his contempt for the poet's horticultural pursuits. "Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves and to place a bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view; to make water run where it will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden, demands any great powers of mind, I will not enquire." The doctor reports that Lyttelton was jealous of the fame which the Leasowes soon acquired, and that when visitors to Hagley asked to see Shenstone's place, their host would adroitly conduct them to inconvenient points of view—introducing them, e.g., at the wrong end of a walk, so as to detect a deception in perspective, "injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain."[40] Graves, however, denies that any rivalry was in question between the great domain of Hagley and the poet's little estate. "The truth of the case," he writes, "was that the Lyttelton family went so frequently with their company to the Leasowes, that they were unwilling to break in upon Mr. Shenstone's retirement on every occasion, and therefore often went to the principal points of view, without waiting for anyone to conduct them regularly through the whole walks. Of this Mr. Shenstone would sometimes peevishly complain."
Shenstone describes in his "Thoughts on Gardening," several artifices that he put in practice for increasing the apparent distance of objects, or for lengthening the perspective of an avenue by widening it in the foreground and planting it there with dark-foliaged trees, like yews and firs, "then with trees more and more fady, till they end in the almond-willow or silver osier." To have Lord Lyttelton bring in a party at the small, or willow end of such a walk, and thereby spoil the whole trick, must indeed have been provoking. Johnson asserts that Shenstone's house was ruinous and that "nothing raised his indignation more than to ask if there were any fishes in his water." "In time," continues the doctor, "his expenses brought clamors about him that overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fawns and fairies;" to wit, bailiffs; but Graves denies this.
The fame of the Leasowes attracted visitors from all parts of the country—literary men like Spence, Home, and Dodsley; picturesque tourists, who came out of curiosity; and titled persons, who came, or sent their gardeners, to obtain hints for laying out their grounds. Lyttelton brought William Pitt, who was so much interested that he offered to contribute two hundred pounds toward improvements, an offer that Shenstone, however, declined. Pitt had himself some skill in landscape gardening, which he exercised at Enfield Chase and afterward at Hayes.[41] Thomson, who was Lyttelton's guest at Hagley every summer during the last three or four years of his life, was naturally familiar with the Leasowes. There are many references to the "sweet descriptive bard," in Shenstone's poems[42] and a seat was inscribed to his memory in a part of the grounds known as Vergil's Grove. "This seat," says Dodsley, "is placed upon a steep bank on the edge of the valley, from which the eye is here drawn down into the flat below by the light that glimmers in front and by the sound of various cascades, by which the winding stream is agreeably broken. Opposite to this seat the ground rises again in an easy concave to a kind of dripping fountain, where a small rill trickles down a rude niche of rock work through fern, liverwort, and aquatic weeds. . . The whole scene is opaque and gloomy."[43]