He recalls how he explored every creek and bay, how he took long walks over the hilly heath and mossy moors. Most of the scenery in “The Borough” as well as that in “The Village” is a memory picture of the country he knew so well in boyhood. It seems strange that this genuine love and accurate knowledge of Nature should not have found fuller expression in his early poetry. The explanation is perhaps twofold. His interest was primarily in man. He said that the finest scenes in Nature were less attractive to him than faces on a crowded street. He meant to be the portrait painter of poor people as he had seen them in a seaside village. His bitter pictures of country vice and ignorance and folly had in them no touch of patronage or contempt. He simply gave a hard, truthful representation of sordid life, and Nature had no meaning for him except as it was brought into connection with that life. When in after years his own lot was a happier one, and when a wider experience had brought him into contact with thrifty country folk, the bitterness of his early thought of man was greatly modified. With new views of man came an openness of mind to the gentler aspects of Nature. The real love of his boyhood, no longer crushed down by an over-mastering sense of human misery, was allowed free play. Furthermore, his later work was doubtless influenced by the new spirit of poetry about him. His son says that while at first but a cool admirer of the Lake poets, he came soon to love them and took no books oftener in his hands. All of Crabbe’s work in which there is much use of Nature comes more than ten years after the “Lyrical Ballads,” hence his growingly full use of Nature might easily be due in part to the influence of the new school of poetry. His free life, the different class of peasants he saw, the new poetry he was reading, would all have their effect in turning his attention to Nature. But the Nature he chose to write about was that which he had known and loved as a boy.

William Cowper as a poet of Nature, is marked first by the narrowness of the limits within which he writes. Mountains[467] are merely mentioned. Night is nowhere described. Moonlight plays no part in his poetry.[468] The stars are occasionally spoken of, but only in a conventional manner as “shining hosts,” “fair ministers of light,” or “beamy fires.” Of wild scenery there is none. The nearest approach to it is in two brief descriptions of rocky bluffs on the seashore.[469] His references to the ocean are brief and not of much importance; nor are there any storms except in a few lines about “a driving, dashing rain” with thunder and lightning used as an “apt similitude.”[470] The one winter storm is merely a gentle fall of snow that comes after the evening curtains are tight drawn.[471] The similitudes, though often carefully elaborated, show little if any new use of Nature, and they are drawn from a small number of natural facts.[472]

The explanation of this narrowness of limit is twofold. Cowper described only what he had seen,[473] and he had seen no country but his own, and only a very small and comparatively uninteresting portion of that. The Downs about Bath, where he seems to have been for a short time when he was about eighteen, was the nearest approach to wild scenery that he had ever known. During the seventeen years before the writing of “The Task” (1785) he had seldom left Olney, and never for a fortnight together.[474] His knowledge was further limited by his continued ill-health. He was ignorant of certain phases of the out-door world simply because his physical infirmities kept him in the house.

This explanation of the narrow range of the Nature in Cowper’s poetry is not entirely satisfactory, for when we come to his letters we find suggestions of a wider experience and sympathy than the poems would indicate. In a letter to Joseph Hill he wrote:

To the Rev. William Unwin, September 26, 1781, he wrote:

He had also, during these years at Olney, made many an imaginary evening journey to remote lands by means of books of travel, of which he was especially fond. But when he came to write poems, only what he had known at first hand and with long familiarity occurred to him. Experiences merely casual, or remote in time, and facts gained from books slipped away. He remembered only what he habitually saw. The scenes about Olney he knew, literally, by heart, and of these he wrote.

A characteristic excellence of Cowper’s treatment of Nature is that, within his narrow circuit, his knowledge is of unusual fulness and accuracy. The charm of truthful description is everywhere apparent. In pictures of homely country occupations, such as feeding the hens,[475] foddering the cattle,[476] cutting wood,[477] plowing,[478] threshing,[479] there are no false touches, no hasty work. All is the result of first-hand, leisurely, sympathetic observation. His description of the garden is from memory, but it almost seems as if he were walking from flower to flower and taking notes, so minute is the characterization, so exact each epithet in the representation of the various colors, forms, odors, and ways of growth of the flowers in this garden that the poet sees under the snows of winter.[480]

The same love of precise detail is illustrated in his descriptions of trees. In noting their color he does not, like Thomson, enjoy general, broadly inclusive words, but he gives the exact shade and tells to what tree it belongs. When he takes a walk he sees that the trunks of the ash, the lime, and the beech shine distinctly under their shadowy foliage. The willow is a “wannish gray.” The poplar is likewise gray, but there is a touch of silver in the lining of the leaves. The elm is deeper green than the ash, and the oak of a deeper green still. The maple, the beech, and the lime have glossy leaves that shine in the sun. The sycamore changes from green to tawny, and then to scarlet, according to the season.[481]

This highly differentiated knowledge is evident also in various passages on the sounds of Nature. In a letter to Newton he wrote: “The notes of all our birds and fowls please me, without one exception; ... and as to insects ... in whatever key they sing, from the gnat’s fine treble to the bass of the humble bee, I admire them all.”

Equally specific is his record of the sounds from winds and waters, as in these lines:

Or these about forest sounds:

In wider descriptions, as of extended views, there is absolutely no blurring of edges. The picture is as clear, distinct, and exact as a photograph. There is no inartistic mixing of foreground and background. A good example is the view described in the first book of “The Task.”[484] The eye travels over the landscape with its river shining like molten glass; on its banks droop the elms, on either side are level plains sprinkled with cattle, beyond is the sloping land covered with hedgerows, groves, heaths, with here and there a square tower or tall spire, and in the distance smoking towns; and at last the scene is lost in the clouds on the horizon.

Many little pictures, complete in a few lines, serve even better to illustrate the exquisite truth of Cowper’s work. Note this description of the shifting lights in a forest pathway:

Or this of the squirrel just come from winter quarters in some lonely elm:

Equally felicitous are the descriptions of tall grass fledged with icy feathers on a frosty morning,[487] or of the redbreast in a sheltered woodland path in winter.[488] These pictures and other similar ones immediately take a permanent place in one’s mental picture gallery. It would be difficult indeed for a painting to make the light dance as it does in that forest path. The squirrel absolutely tingles with life. The right word comes easily and the lines show exquisite deftness of literary touch. It is rare in any poetry to find more excellent examples of pure description than these and other passages in “The Task.” Cowper had the mind that watches and receives. He looked about him and wrote down in simple, sincere words the loveliness he found. He took notes, but they were of the right sort, mental and unconscious, the inevitable imprint on a sensitive mind of scenes that had ministered to his deepest need.

The ministry of Nature to human needs is a cardinal principle in Cowper’s poetry. Nor was this conception merely theoretic. It was rather a transcript from his own experience. From childhood he had loved Nature,[489] and poems about Nature,[490] and he had always planned to live in the country.[491] After years of disappointment and terrifying fears, comparative peace came to him amid quiet country scenes. The instincts of his early days revived. Nature offered him a paradise of rich delights. She enchanted him. She gave him heart-consoling joys. She sweetened his bitter life, alluring him with smiles from gloom to happiness. The glory of each new morning was a lesson in hope. He found in Nature the nurse of wisdom, a power that could compose his passions and exalt his mind. He felt that in the country God spoke directly to his heart.[492]

The obverse of this genuine love of the country is an equally genuine detestation of the town and town standards. The crowds that swarm to city streets are the subjects of repeated invectives, and there is even more emphatic scorn of sham lovers of Nature, as cockneys in suburban villas; girls who but for the show and dress-parade of the country would hurry back to the city; men who love hunting and fishing, and call it a love of Nature; sentimentalists, who exclaim over Thomson’s poetry, but prefer to read it in the city.[493] His own relationship with Nature was too intimate and too sacred to admit of indifference or profanation on the part of others.

Cowper’s literary use of Nature was largely determined by his purpose in writing. His poetical thesis received its dogmatic summing-up in the famous dictum,

and to the establishment of this thesis nearly all his use of Nature is made more or less directly subservient.

This is clearly seen in his use of summaries. He has a habit of analyzing Nature into separate facts and then classifying these facts under topics. For instance, to make a list of his sounds one hardly needs to search through the poems. They will be found already grouped together. So, too, the garden flowers, the greenhouse flowers, the colors of trees, country occupations, and country pleasures, are arranged under heads instead of being scattered through various descriptions. Then there are many summaries of miscellaneous facts. Now the literary purpose of nearly every assemblage of details is the establishment or illustration of some point connected with the general conception of the superior attractions of the country. The catalogues of facts have a definite argumentative value, and the artistic selection of these facts out of the mass known is determined by the especial point under consideration. In “Retirement” there is a rapid enumeration of many phases of Nature in various seasons, the purpose being to show that all forms of Nature are pleasing to a poet’s mind. The following passage is a good example of a summary the purpose of which is to present a concrete, picturesque, amplified statement of the creed that Nature gives a wisdom higher than can come from books:

Frequent summaries are used to show that in the country God gives especial revelations of his power. The long flower catalogue is to show that the beauty of the flushing spring but speaks to man of the in-dwelling of God.[496] The ceaseless activity of Nature is attested by another summary.[497] Still further summaries illustrate the power of Nature over the man wearied with cares of state.[498] The beautiful summary of rural sounds is to show the exhilarating effect of Nature on the languid mind and heart.[499] It is this underlying purpose that gives unity to passages which would otherwise be hardly more than catalogues.

Another characteristic way in which Cowper presents Nature is in descriptive passages used as a background for his own meditative figure. The beautiful description of the sheltered path where he walked in winter[500] would lose much of its meaning if we were not throughout conscious of the poet’s presence and his delighted response to all the influences about him. Nearly all the passages that might otherwise be called pure description are given warmth and tone by the fact that we go with the poet, and, as it were, hear him talk about the scene as one he has long known and loved, until it takes an added interest from his personality, or we seem to see him in semi-identification with the scenes. It is the apparent equality, the comradeship, between the hare, the squirrel, and the poet in the solitary winter retreat that adds to the beauty of the spot the needed human touch. Nature is thus suffused with human experience and takes on a new interest. But it usually happens that these descriptions become, further, either the appropriate setting for a certain train of reflections on the part of the poet, or they directly suggest these suggestions. In the winter retreat just spoken of the fearless, innocent animal life becomes the occasion of a long disquisition on the lesson of benevolence taught by Nature to man. In the sheltered walk the poet finds his mind soothed and prepared for a Wordsworthian contemplation on Nature as the teacher of the wise, so that ultimately many of Cowper’s descriptions, as well as his summaries, become contributory to his main purpose.

Cowper’s knowledge of natural facts was not more remarkable than John Scott’s. His range was much narrower than Thomson’s. Other men had loved Nature with passionate intensity. To other minds Nature had suggested deep thoughts of God and man. Cowper came when many elements of the new attitude toward Nature had been clearly voiced. What marks him out as holding a unique position is not only that he gave body and emphasis to the new thought, but especially that he became its propagandist. He analyzed the effect of Nature on man, he translated his personal experiences into a theory which he set himself to interpret and promulgate. He wrote with the zeal of a convert. Joy such as had come to him late in life was man’s natural heritage. Men must be called back from the perverted and ruinous life of towns to the simplicity of Nature. His theme is stated abstractly, repeated in concrete form, illustrated and amplified with the patience and ardor of absolute conviction. He was the preacher of the new religion of Nature.

Robert Burns was deeply sensitive to the charms of Nature. In a letter to Mrs. Dunlop he said:

Again he says:

Note also what Mr. Walker, his companion on the border tour, says of him:

This susceptibility to Nature was one of the signs by which “Coila” knew that Burns would be the poet of Scotland. He represents her as saying to him:

In his “Commonplace Book,” Burns records his eager desire to write verse that shall make “the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands & sequestered scenes on Aire, and the healthy, mountainous source, & winding sweep of Doon emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, Tweed, &c.” And his love of Nature was limited in scope to just these scenes of which he speaks. He had no interest in mountains or the sea. Mr. Douglas calls attention to the fact that, “living in full face of the Arran hills he never names them.”[505] He was as narrow in his limits and as vividly local in the Nature he chose to represent as was Cowper, but what he loved he loved with intensity. In the beautiful and picturesque scenery about Ayr he found poetic inspiration. To William Simson he said,

and in “The Brigs of Ayr” he says the simple bard may learn his tuneful trade from every bough.

Burns’ knowledge of the Nature about him was abundant and exact, and he was keenly critical of any note of falsity in the poems of others. He objected to the “Banks of the Dee” because of the line,

“In the first place,” he said, “the nightingale sings in a low bush, but never from a tree; and in the second place, there never was a nightingale seen or heard on the banks of the Dee, nor the banks of any other river in Scotland. Exotic, rural imagery is always comparatively flat.”[506]

Again he said of another song, “It is a fine song, but for consistency’s sake, alter the name ‘Adonis.’ Was there ever such banns published, as a purpose of marriage between Adonis and Mary? These Greek and Roman pastoral appellations have a flat, insipid effect in a Scot song.”[507] He gives especial praise to Rev. Dr. Cririe, because “like Thomson,” the poet had “looked into Nature for himself,” and had nowhere been content with a “copied description.”[508]

When Burns wrote a descriptive poem of set purpose he was comparatively commonplace and uninteresting as in “The Fall of Foyers” or “Admiring Nature.” His best descriptions come in, by chance as it were, in the midst of some vivid human interests. One of the most beautiful is a stanza in “Halloween”:

Work so perfect as this is rare in any age. The beauty of the poem is simply the beauty of the stream itself.

Burns’ chief use of Nature, however, is in connection with man. External Nature is illustration, background, frame, for human emotions. “The Lass of Cressnock Banks” was written at twenty-two and is the first one of his poems in which there is any distinct use of Nature. It is merely an assemblage of twelve formally drawn-out similes to represent the beauty of the lassie. Some of these similes are conventional and unmeaning, as when her hair is likened to curling mist on a mountain side,[509] her forehead to a rainbow, her lips to ripe cherries, and her teeth to a flock of sheep. In later poems the similitudes are simpler and sweeter, but they are drawn from a small number of facts and those of the more obvious sort, as the “simmer morn,” “the flower in May,” “the opening rose.” A much more effective use of Nature is as dramatic background either by congruity or contrast. As fine examples of the use of Nature to give the keynote of the human emotion it accompanies we have the opening lines of the “Elegy,” “Farewell Song to the Banks of Ayr,” “Raving Winds around Her Blowing,” and “Farewell to Ballochmyle.” The more usual form is to represent a natural picture in contrast to the human emotion, as in “The Chevalier’s Lament,” “The Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots,” or best of all, “The Banks of Doon.”

It is characteristic of Burns that his knowledge was wider and his sympathy keener in the realm of animate than of inanimate Nature. He apparently thought of animals almost as if they had been human. The address to a mouse is as tenderly and genuinely sympathetic as if it had been to a hurt child. On winter nights he listens to the wind and cannot sleep for thinking of the “ourie cattle” and “silly sheep” and helpless birds that “cow’r” with “chittering wing.”[510] He scorned hunting and said there was no warm poetic heart that did not inly bleed at man’s savage cruelty.[511] He found it impossible to reconcile so-called “sport” with his ideas of virtue.[512] He knew animals, especially birds, in an intimate, friendly fashion. In the description of their manners and habits there is the most minute realism. The following phrases are illustrative: “Ye grouse that crap the heather bud;” “Ye curlews calling thro’ a clud;” “Ye whirring paitrick brood;” “Ye fisher herons watching eels;” “sooty coots;” “speckled teals;” “whistling plover;”

In accurate first-hand observation, in abundant knowledge, in the use of felicitous descriptive epithets, in great personal joy in Nature, in delight in winter, in love for animals, and in a critical estimate of the value of truthful portrayal, Burns represents the new spirit.

William Lisle Bowles is another of the reputed “fathers” of modern poetry. His slender title to the distinction thus conferred upon him by Rev. George Gilfillan,[514] rests on the admiration of Coleridge,[515] Southey,[516] and Lovel for his early poems.[517] From 1798 to the end of his life Bowles wrote constantly, so the list of his works is a long one; but in the present study we are concerned only with the poems before 1798, the ones that stirred Coleridge to abandon metaphysics for poetry.

From fourteen to nineteen years of age Bowles was in Winchester School under the tutelage of Dr. Joseph Warton, who won the boy’s confidence and inspired him with his own tastes. In the “Monody on the Death of Dr. Warton,” written eighteen years after these school days, Bowles says of Warton,

Warton also taught him to love literature. He learned to read Greek poets with “young-eyed sympathy,” and he went with “holier joy” to

Charmed, the lad bent his soul

“Unheeded midnight hours” were beguiled by the wild song of Ossian, and his fancy found a “magic spell” in the “Odes” of his master, Dr. Warton.

The influences of these early school days had awakened Bowles to love of Nature and of poetry, and when sorrow came it was to Nature and to poetry that he turned for relief. His “Sonnets” are the direct and genuine expression of a personal grief. They were composed, he says, during a tour in which he “sought forgetfulness of the first disappointment in early affections,”[518] and they are pervaded by a melancholy unmistakably real. But along with this deep sadness is a frequent recognition of the power of Nature to give at least temporary respite from grief. Not only does she “steep each sense in still delight,”[519] but she bestows “a soothing charm.”[520] The lovely sights and sounds of morning

The river Itchen brings “solace to his heart.”[522] After visiting the Cherwell he says:

In the midst of sorrow he is

What Bowles saw in Nature was largely determined by his state of mind. His own sadness led him to a quick perception of the pensive or melancholy suggestions in any scene. He loved sequestered streams, romantic vales, the hush of evening. The sounds he heard were soft and plaintive. The river Wainsbeck makes “a plaintive song among its “mossy-scattered rocks.”[525] He listens to the wind and seems to hear a plaint of sorrow.[526] Sea sounds are

Of the bells at Ostend he says:

Again, his own striving after self-control leads him to look with pleasure on such natural objects as have withstood the shock of tempests. Rugged Malvern Hill, on which the “parting sun sits smiling,” teaches him a lesson of victory over grief, and he exclaims,

Some of the brief descriptions in these sonnets are not without a certain beauty in themselves, as in this passage from “Dover Cliffs”:

But here, as elsewhere in the poems, the chief thought is human grief; and the most important characteristic of the poems, taken as a whole, is the intimate union between the spirit of a man and the spirit of Nature. It was always Bowles’ theory, says Clark,[531] that Nature is the true subject of poetry; but he does not, in his later work, strike so true and simple a note as in these early sonnets.

Such general statements as are to be drawn from this study of specific poets can be more advantageously made after the chapters on “Fiction,” “Travels,” “Gardening,” and “Painting,” for these chapters offer facts that modify or confirm the impressions gained from the poetry.

CHAPTER III
FICTION

The great achievement of the eighteenth century was in the development of fiction. The famous names here are, of course, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. After them, and also to a less degree contemporary with them, are many writers of fiction the quality of whose work has consigned them to the list of “The Neglected, the Disdained, the Forgotten,” and in most cases it would be a literary misfortune if by any chance they should fall into the fourth class, “The Resuscitated.” As literature they are almost unreadable. It is only from the historical point of view that they can arouse any real interest. For the present purpose I do not pretend to have read all the works of fiction written in the eighteenth century. The forty-three mentioned here were selected because by their dates they represent the century as a whole, and because they represent also the various kinds of fiction. I shall first speak of these briefly in chronological order, and then indicate such general statements as may seem the legitimate outcome of the facts presented. The one point to be considered is the use made of external Nature in the novel or romance.

The “Sir Roger de Coverley” papers (Addison and Steele, 1712) are continuous narratives marked by some at least of the characteristics of the coming English novel. Many of these papers purport to be written from the country and Will Wimble complains that they “begin to smell confoundedly of woods and meadows.” After a time the author finds himself growing short of subjects in the country, and returns to town as the true “field of game for sportsmen of his species.” Though written from the country the papers have nothing about country scenes except frequent phrases such as, “We then took a walk in the fields,” and one brief description of “a solemn walk of elms,” unless, indeed, we might add the pleasure the author took in his friend’s poultry yard. The stress is all on country people.

“Robinson Crusoe” (Defoe, 1719), the first great example of the voyage imaginaire, necessarily regards Nature from the point of view of immediate utility. The whole interest of the book rests on the mechanical ingenuity whereby man subdues Nature. There are few if any passages where Robinson Crusoe is represented as being in any way sensitive to the beauty or charm of Nature.

In “Pamela” (Richardson, 1740) there is much talk about the value of travel in Great Britain and on the continent, but there is not a word about the scenery of the places visited. Pamela sums up her impressions of travel in England in one sentence. “These excursions have given me infinite delight and pleasure, and enlarged my notions of the wealth and power of the kingdom” (Vol. III, p. 304). When Lord B. and Pamela are spending their honeymoon in their Kentish house they plan certain improvements such as cutting a vista through the coppice; they train the vines around the windows because they love the mingled odors of woodbines and jessamines; and they listen for two hours at a stretch to the “responsive songs of two warbling nightingales” (Vol. II, p. 163). Earlier in their career, during a walk in the garden, the fragrance from a bank of flowers inspires Lord B. to sing a typical eighteenth-century song of which this is one stanza: