In this chapter the method of work is quite unlike that in the preceding study. The typical and the dominant are not regarded. Attention is rather converged upon the significant exception. We are led into nooks and corners and byways. The most famous author is not necessarily the one on whom emphasis is placed. In searching for legitimate proof of a tendency we may safely turn to the work of men of unoriginal genius and moderate power. A study of this sort would certainly give a distorted view if it were for a moment thought to represent the period as a whole. But if it is held in mind that the attitude toward Nature was in general through the eighteenth century marked by indifference and artificiality, we may throw as high lights as we please on the exceptions. This study will serve its purpose if, in its following-out of the complexities and inconsistencies that make a transition period interesting, it shall succeed in showing that, along with the classical feeling toward Nature, there was also a real and vital love for the out-door world, and that this new attitude toward Nature is marked by first-hand observation, by artistic sensitiveness to beauty, by personal enthusiasm for Nature, by a recognition of the effect of Nature on man, and, occasionally, by an imaginative conception of Nature somewhat in the Wordsworthian sense.

The new attitude toward Nature, of which Thomson is the first adequate exponent, finds occasional and not ineffective expression during the two decades before the publication of “Winter” in 1726. In the works of John Philips (1676-1709), Ambrose Philips (1675–1749), Lady Winchilsea (1661–1720), John Gay (1685–1732), Thomas Parnell (1679–1718), William Pattison (1706–1727), Allan Ramsay (1686–1758), Robert Riccaltoun (1691–1769), and Dr. Armstrong (1709–1779), we become more or less definitely aware of a new outlook on the external world.

Dr. Johnson praised John Philips’ poem “Cyder”[199] because it had the “peculiar merit” of being “grounded in truth.” On the whole this poem is of the didactic classical order, but here and there among the minutely accurate horticultural precepts we come upon indications that the poet was not insensible to the charms of Nature in other than its utilitarian aspects. His delight in color may be seen from his specific descriptions of apples. The pippin is “burnish’d o’er with gold;” the red-streak “with gold irradiate and vermilion shines.” “Plumbs” are “sky-dyed.” He notes the “Ore, Azure, Gules,” and the blending of colors in the rainbow. He observes the contrast between fields yellow with grain, and green pasture land. And he sees the colored edges of clouds when the sun breaks through. There is also apparent a sensitiveness to odors. He speaks of cowslip-posies “faintly sweet,” of odorous herbs, of the fragrance of apples on a dewy autumn morning, and of “the perfuming flowery bean.” Mr. Shairp credits Thomson with being the first poet to mention the fragrance of the bean fields,[200] but Philips is at least twenty years ahead of Thomson in noting this fact.

We see further indication of Philips’ enjoyment of Nature in a few lines,

which were perhaps the earliest expression in the eighteenth century of that pleasure in high hills and wide prospects that was so marked a characteristic of later poetry. Philips’ explanation of the satisfaction he found in an early morning walk, namely, that the mind perplexed with irksome thought is calmed by the influence of Nature,[202] seems like a prophecy of the thought afterward dominant concerning man’s indebtedness to Nature.

In Ambrose Philips’ “Pastorals” we find a mingling of first-hand observation and classical imitation. His references to the ancients, his amoebean contests, the supposed effect of the death of Albino on the external world, the emphasis on dangers from heat and the nightly wolf, the frequent use of cumulative comparisons,[203] and, in general, the form of his “Pastorals,” show how closely he was held by conventional ideas. Furthermore, his facile use of Nature is always determined by his attitude toward some pastoral nymph or swain. He rejoices to paint an idyllic background for some Rosalind. He heaps up images from Nature to express the amorous praises of some Colinet. He has no conception of a relation between man and Nature more intimate than the highly artificial one of his “Pastorals.” What is of importance in his poetry is the fact that in the midst of his imitations and conventionalities are many true and charming observations drawn entirely from English country life and not found in earlier eighteenth-century poetry. His work is, to be sure, rendered weak and childish by two unpleasant mannerisms in diction: his use of adjectives ending in “y,” as “bloomy,” “dampy,” “bluey,” “steepy,” “purply,” and so on, and his use of diminutives such as “kidlings,” “lambkins,” “younglings,” “firstlings,” and “steerlings.” But on the whole we find in his poems a more full and accurate knowledge of Nature than is at all common in the poetry of the time. He notes the fleeting, dusky shadows cast by moving clouds, the glossiness of plums, the blue color of mists, the sweet odors of morning, the moaning of the night wind in the grove, the sportive chase of swallows, the loud note of the cuckoo, the speckled breast of the thrush, and the song of the blackbird “fluting through his yellow bill.” He usually calls flowers, trees, birds, and other animals by their specific names, and he seldom extends his list beyond his own probable observation. That Philips had a genuine love for Nature in her milder forms is further seen from the preface to his “Pastorals.” “As in Painting,” he says, “so in Poetry, the country affords not only the most delightful scenes and prospects, but likewise the most pleasing images of life.” He loved the songs of birds because the “sedate and quiet harmony” of their simple strains gives “a sweet and gentle composure to the mind.” And he was conscious of an “unspeakable sort of satisfaction” when he saw “a little country-dwelling, advantageously situated amidst a beautiful variety of hills, meadows, fields, woods and rivulets.”

Lady Winchilsea is, in the study of the poetry of Nature, the most significant of the minor poets before Thomson. She was a friend of Rowe and Pope, and was honored by complimentary verses from them.[204] She is known now chiefly because of Wordsworth’s reference to her,[205] and through the poems published in Ward’s “English Poets.”[206] Three of the poems there given, “The Nightingale,” “The Tree,” “A Nocturnal Revery,” have to do with Nature. With these exceptions the eighty-one poems in the collection of 1713[207] are thoroughly classical in their form and spirit, though unmarked by any preponderance of artificial fancies. But these three short poems are remarkable productions when thought of in connection with their author’s poetical environment. They are the earliest eighteenth-century poems in which Nature is frankly chosen as the theme, and they show a personal knowledge that must have been the accumulated result of many experiences.

The observation in “The Nightingale” is especially truthful and sympathetic. That there is no attempt to describe the bird is an omission justified by the fact that the nightingale is seldom seen.[208] The two characteristics noted in the bird’s song are its exceeding sweetness and its sadness, or rather, its sense of pain.[209] A comparison of the phrases in the note will show that Lady Winchilsea listened with the hearing ear of a true poet. But we cannot fail to notice as well that the song is not fully heard or reported. In the other poets we find represented a richness, a fulness, an ecstasy, a tumult, not even hinted at in Lady Winchilsea’s poem.[210] Nor does she mention the passion most poets have heard in the song.[211] But however incomplete the impression received may have been, the poetical record of what was perceived is both truthful and vivid. She seems to write as she listens and the reader follows the variations of the song through their effect on her own mind.

In the fifty-two lines of the poem on Night twenty-two natural facts are recorded. Some of these would not escape the most careless, but only close observation would discover such details as the sleepy cowslip, the grass standing upright, the unusual strength of odors, the clearer sound of falling waters, the horse’s audible cropping of the grass, the waving moon seen in the stream, and the distant call of the curlew. Lady Winchilsea’s love of Nature was of the most unambitious sort. To have seen the stately tree, to have heard the nightingale, to know all she did about night, would not have called her beyond the gates of her own park. But her joy in Nature needed no strong or novel stimulus. It is her distinction that she had fixed an “exquisite regard” on the commonest facts of the external world, and that she spoke quite clearly and simply from her own life. Hence her knowledge had the new quality of being specific and local and accurately defined.

Still more noteworthy is Lady Winchilsea’s spiritual sensitiveness to Nature. Such a phrase as “the mysterious face of heaven” marks a new conception of the sky. Night is no longer “the parent of fears” but a time whose solemn quiet suggests a strange and subtle sense of something too high for syllables to speak. Nature is to her no mere background for human life. Man is influenced by Nature. His rage is disarmed. His spirit is led to feel a sedate content. And sometimes in moments of especial insight there is revealed to him in the inferior world an existence “like his own.” Not often before Wordsworth is there so distinct a prevision of his way of looking at Nature.[212]

In the slow turning of English poetry from the artificial to the natural John Gay was distinctly helpful, yet the reader of “Trivia,” “The Fan,” “The Epistles,” the “Fables,” and even the “Eclogues” would hardly suspect their author of knowing, in any close way, any life outside the city. It is only in “Rural Sports,” written when he was twenty-eight, and “The Shepherd’s Week,” when he was twenty-nine, that we find any real study of Nature. In “Rural Sports” hunting and especially fishing are described with the enthusiasm and technical accuracy of an expert. There is no hint of the feeling toward animals that made Thomson and Cowper abhor hunting. There is simply a thoroughly sportsmanlike knowledge of details, a sense of pleasurable excitement in the chase, and joy in victory. This delight in open-air pursuits is often far enough removed from any real love of Nature, and is here of much less significance than casual passages showing Gay’s love of the world about him. He tells us that it was his habit to take morning walks through the fields,[213] that at sunset he often strayed out to the cliffs near Barnstaple, and lingered to watch the glowing colors of the sunset, and the later beauty of an “unclouded sky” bright with stars and a silver moon that marked a glittering path along the sea.[214] Gay’s love of Nature was largely confined to the milder aspects, but he seems not to have been entirely indifferent to hills. In speaking of Cotton Hill in North Devonshire he said,

In six or seven unimportant passages Gay speaks of hills or mountains, apparently using the words interchangeably, but not in a manner indicating much knowledge of them. Yet such little pictures as that of the dawn when the sun “strikes the distant eastern hills with light,” or that of “the evening star shining above the western hill,” show some recognition of hills as an attractive part of a landscape. Gay knows flowers and birds and trees with some definiteness. He speaks of many domestic animals. He notes colors and odors.[216] He observes the lengthened shadows stretched across the meadows in the late afternoon, the long flight of crows seeking the wood at sunset, the streams “wrinkled”[217] by a fresh breeze, the yellow showers of leaves in autumn. Abundant and varied as is this use of Nature, it is not marked by especial delicacy of feeling or accuracy of observation. But for all that “The Shepherd’s Week” is a notable piece of work, and it is in these pastorals that we find Gay’s real service. Whether meant as a friendly aid in Pope’s castigation of Ambrose Philips or not, these poems were unquestionably meant as a good-humored satire on pastorals that ventured to deal truthfully with English rustic life. The Latin form was counted the ideal one for pastoral. To this form Gay held, evidently with the conscious purpose of suggesting the Latin at every turn. Then he filled in this mold with the homeliest, most realistic details of English country life.[218] The plain, practical truth of these details is simply amazing as will be seen from the passages indicated in the note. See also the flowers brought in, the primrose, kingcup, clover, daisie, gilliflower, mary-gold, butter-flowers, cowslip, and others; and the animals, the witless lamb, frisking kid, udder’d cow, clucking hen, waddling goose, squeaking pigs, worrying cur, whining swine, paddling ducks, guzzling hogs, and others; and the country sports, as romping in the fields, blindman’s buff, hot cockles, swinging, and others.[219] In Pastoral IV is an assemblage of curious country superstitions; in Pastoral I are given signs of rain; in Pastoral V are funeral customs; and in Pastoral VI an account of the favorite country songs. These poems are a veritable treasure-house for the student of folklore. They might also serve as a diary of country occupations. Take for example Bumkinet’s reminiscences of Blouzelinda’s life in Pastoral V. In such a wood, he remembers, they gathered fagots. There he drew down hazel boughs and stuffed her apron with brown nuts. In another place he had helped her hunt for her strayed hogs, and as they drove the untoward creatures to the sty had seized the opportunity to tell his love. At the dairy he had often seen her making butter pats, or feeding with floods of whey the hogs that crowded to the door. In the barn as he plied the flail, he had watched her sift out food for the hens. In the field she had ranged the sheaves as he pitched them on the growing mow. The object of these pastorals was to show the absurd incongruity between the Latin form with its suggestions of Arcadian days, and the roughness of English country life. The result was unexpected. Readers in general, indifferent to scholarly congruities, were delighted with the novelty, the air of freshness and truth, in the pictures scattered through the “Pastorals.” Poetry had suddenly and without meaning to do it, gone from the city and the park to the very plainest and most matter-of-fact sort of country people and country occupations, and had somehow made them attractive. Blouzelinda and Buxoma are not in the same order of beings as the traditional Phyllis and Chloris, and they are equally far removed from the vulgar repulsive country wenches in Swift’s coarse satires. They are real beings with a charm of their own, and the love they inspire in Lobbin Clout and Cuddy is an everyday, quite comprehensible affair.

The dirge for Blouzelinda indicates well the covert laugh with which Gay wrote these descriptions of country life. The clergyman said

After the funeral the men trudged

This sense of fun is everywhere apparent, and shows how unwittingly Gay broke a lance in a new cause. Yet some parts of his Preface are startlingly modern in their plea for truth to Nature. Here is a passage which, so far as its spirit is concerned, might have been said by either Crabbe or Wordsworth.

Whatever Gay meant to do, he really did accomplish what his Preface states as his aim. He turned poetry away from the “insipid delicacy” of the conventional pastoral, and truthfully represented the “plain downright hearty cleanly folk” of rustic England. And external Nature, though nowhere dwelt upon for its own sake, is everywhere present and so vividly portrayed, that the reader had what was certainly a poetic novelty at that day, “a lively landscape of his own country, just as he might have seen it, if he had taken a walk in the fields at the proper season.”

The use of external Nature in Parnell’s poems has narrow limits. There is no mention of winter, autumn, or summer. Mountains are merely noted in passing as disagreeable features in the poet’s dreary surroundings in Ireland. There is but one line about the sea. Wild scenery of whatever sort is ignored. The only storm is described in some conventional lines in “The Hermit.” There is almost no record of specific knowledge of trees, or flowers, or birds. There are few indications of openness to sensuous impressions from specific forms, colors, odors, sounds. But in spite of these widely inclusive negations, Parnell is of distinct importance as a poet of Nature. He has, to begin with, some accurate first-hand observation. He speaks once of the “differing green” of trees in spring. He describes a fern with some minuteness. There are two charming descriptions of banks and skies reflected in clear water.[220] Other fresh observations are,

or this of the close of a storm,

Such lines are of value for they indicate, though they are few in number, some power of direct vision and of restrained, simple expression.

Parnell’s distinctive excellence is, however, along different lines. He records not facts but impressions. He is essentially a poet of the spring; he felt intensely all the glad, abundant life of the early year. But there is not a description of spring in his poems. He gives instead curiously happy descriptive touches that suggest far more than they say.

Note such lines as,

or

or

There is a lilt in such lines, a joyousness, an off-hand certainty of touch, not in keeping with the customary cold and labored descriptions of spring.

Of still greater significance is Parnell’s literary use of Nature. In the “Night Piece” the external scene serves as an appropriate background for the thought presented. The few natural facts are so well chosen and so delicately touched that all the moral reflections seem permeated with an appropriate out-of-doors atmosphere. The calm, perfect beauty of the picture of night with its closing suggestions of mystery and sadness, the fading of the pale moon, and the sounds that come over the long lake, fit exactly the course of the poet’s melancholy meditation and contribute to it. The gay, light pictures in the “Hymn to Contentment” are equally well suited to the spirit of joyous praise with which that poem concludes.

Bishop Jebb has pointed out for the enjoyment of the “classical and pious reader” the similarity between the moral reflections in this poem and those in Cardinal Bona’s “Divina Psalmodia.”[227] Parnell’s close adherence to the thought of the cardinal in the didactic part of the poem, and the fact that the last forty-two lines, the ones that deal with Nature, are entirely Parnell’s own, give striking proof of the originality of his thought concerning the external world and its power over the human heart. It is in these lines that we find his most subtly suggestive conception of Nature. He represents himself as sad at heart. He seeks contentment in earthly pomp, in the paths of knowledge, in solitary search after diverting scenes in Nature, but in vain. At last he goes to a wood, and as he yields himself to the influence of the place becomes suddenly aware that in this quiet spot the true spirit of contentment is speaking to him wise lessons of self-control and communion with God. In gratitude for the joy that has come to him through Nature he utters a song of praise to the “source of all Nature,” but as he looks about him on the glad world, he feels that his song is merely an expression in words of the great chorus of thanksgiving going always silently up from sun and moon and stars, from seas, woods, and streams.

Such work as this is indeed remarkable before 1713; and for spirituality and insight, for what has well been called “a sense of the thing behind the thing,” it was many years before it was paralleled.

“The Morning Contemplation” is the only one of Pattison’s poems that has much to do with Nature. It was written, his friend tells us, on the banks of a river where the young poet used to wander, endeavoring to attune his verses to the smoothness and harmony of the stream. He was especially sensitive to the “sadly pleasing melancholy” of moonlight nights and solitary walks, and he was one of the first poets to express a longing for solitude with Nature. Gilded rooms of state, the purple slavery of towns, rob him of the bliss he finds in the living forest. When alone in the spacious fields he thinks himself almost a god. Even little scrubby thorns are to him more pleasing objects than courts can show. Nature charms his senses and soothes his soul; she is his best teacher, and he trusts her plain instructions.

reads like a crude prevision of Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned.” The “excellent morality” of “The Morning Contemplation” is much in the vein of Dyer’s “Grongar Hill.” Every fact in Nature arouses some thought or some emotion. By contrast or analogy it suggests human life, as in the lines,

Pattison’s poem is of real importance, because its early date[228] ranks it as probably the first of the eighteenth-century poems that treat of Nature in the romantic, sentimental, fervid fashion afterward brought to its culmination by the Wartons.

Allan Ramsay’s education was of the most limited sort, so that, in early life at least, the development of his genius was unbiased by a knowledge of Latin and Greek or even English models. After he was fifteen he lived in Edinburgh and there began to be infected by the pseudo-classicism of his day. The poems in which country scenes and people were most fully represented were, however, pretty clear and unadulterated records of his early experiences in the secluded mountainous district of Lanarkshire where he was brought up. The best poems of this sort are the pastoral dialogues, “Patie and Roger,” 1721, and “Jenny and Meggy,” 1723, or rather, “The Gentle Shepherd,” 1725, which is a combination of the two pastorals thrown into completer dramatic form. A second edition of “The Gentle Shepherd” appeared in the same year as Thomson’s “Winter.”[229] It is worthy of note that the service rendered by Gay to English poetry is in many respects paralleled by Allan Ramsay’s contributions to Scottish song. There are in Ramsay’s pastorals similar closely studied scenes from peasant life, wherein are minutely described the superstitions,[230] the household customs,[231] the out-door occupations,[232] the trials,[233] and the pleasures[234] of the homely folk among the hills of Scotland. But there are important differences. What Gay did lightly and without serious intent was with Ramsay a service of love. He was not laughing in his sleeve at the very truth he so capitally portrayed. Throughout his work there is, in general, an air of sincerity. It is as if Gay wrote from the point of view of an outsider with an unfailingly keen eye, and a quick sense of humor. But Ramsay wrote from a life that he had known and loved, and that he thoroughly respected.[235] There are occasional false notes in his pastorals. He gives his shepherds flutes and reeds; his comparisons, especially his cumulative similes, are conventional; he makes rather stiff use of personification; and his desire to make his hero and heroine well born interferes with the pastoral simplicity of the drama. But these are extraneous and hardly affect the real texture of the work.

We find in Ramsay’s poems occasional hints that his presentation of homely Scottish scenes and people was not merely instinctive, but that it was in some measure a deliberate choice. In “Tartana,” written in 1721, he said that his chosen muses were those that wandered through the clover meadows and the groves along the smooth meandering Tweed or by the gentle Tay, or where the haughty Clyde roared over lofty cataracts.

And again, protesting against the narrowness of poetic rules and customs, he said,

and he called a wide, wild garden where all sorts of plants grew in wanton confusion, a paradise made by Nature herself. Even more emphatic is his Preface to “The Evergreen” in 1724. In commendation of the poems he had collected he said,

Ramsay’s use of external Nature is more charming than Gay’s. Scottish poetry had never, in its attitude toward the out-door world, passed through so barren and arid a period as that of the pseudo-classicism in England, nor had the Scottish people ever lost their sense of the beauty and especially of the mysterious power of glens and braes and burns. So Ramsay’s love of Nature was not without a considerable background in the way of national poetic spirit. He spoke out in fresh, true words what everybody knew, and described scenes familiar to every eye. There are, however, distinct limitations in Ramsay’s knowledge of Nature and his power of sympathetic representation. His recognition of colors is fresh and charming, but elementary, like that shown in ballads. “Caledonian hills are green,” “beneath a green shade,” “the simmer green,” “a green meadow,” “my native green plains,” are characteristic phrases.

and

are almost the only instances of any other color than green. Such phrases as “scented meadows,” “sweet scented rucks,” “new blown scents,” “sweetest briar,” “blooming fragrance,” show the same simple, undifferentiated recognition of odors. A few lines as,

are more specific representations of sounds, but we do not often find words so discriminating. His references to trees, flowers, and birds are of the same general, limited sort. There are “bonny haughs” and “bonny woods;” there are rising plants, primroses, daisies, and gowans; there are “quiristers on high,” the merle, the mavis, and the lark. But there is no subtle, detailed observation. It is the open, frank, spontaneous joy of a child happy in the glad world about him. Ramsay’s best lines are descriptive of shining days, clear heavens, dancing streams. “The sun shines sweetly, a’ the lift looks blue,”[240] “ae shining day,” “ae clear morn of May,” “the morning shines,” “the lift’s unclouded blue,” “fair simmer mornings” indicate the general atmosphere of the scenery introduced. Occasional closer touches are seen in such lines as,

and

Best of all are the lines about streams;

are descriptions almost perfect of their kind. In their beauty and freshness they show that the eye was on the object. Mr. Shairp says of Habbie’s How, “A pool in a burn among the Lowland Hills could hardly be more naturally described,” and one need not be a Scotchman to feel sure that the same is true of the minor descriptive touches.

Though Ramsay was brought up in a rugged part of Scotland, he seems to have had none of the modern feeling for mountains. But he speaks of “black, heathery mountains,” of “northern mountains clad with snow,” of “mountains clad with purple bloom,” and of hills that “smile with purple heather.” Once he exclaims,

and he notes that

Such passages, though they show no love for the mountains, are yet sufficiently picturesque and exact to save Ramsay from the imputation of never having seen the wild country around him. To the ocean he gives but a single line,

It is interesting to note that in Ramsay as in Gay, Nature is made subordinate to man, in the sense that the pictures from Nature are nowhere elaborated or dwelt upon ostensibly for their own sake. The main interest is in the study of the characters.

The chief contribution of Gay and Ramsay to the growing love of Nature in poetry had to do with the natural man in natural scenes, rather than with the natural scene itself. Gay’s service in the way of external Nature was largely the outcome of his fidelity to the fact. Ramsay did more. He not only gave separate pictures both beautiful and true, but he somehow fused them with the human elements of his pastoral in such a way that we cannot think of the racy love-scenes apart from their fresh and lovely surroundings.

In 1725, or shortly before, were written three poems on Winter.[250] They are important as marking the first real turning from the softer to the sterner aspects of Nature. Dr. Armstrong’s poem was inspired by a winter spent among the wild romantic scenes about the River Esk. His later poetry is not important so far as the use of Nature is concerned. He became a great admirer of Thomson whose style he imitated with some success, but he shows little of Thomson’s sensitiveness to natural beauty. His point of view is that of the physician and his hatred of the town is based on his objection to smoke and bad air,[251] while his summons to the mountains rests on the value of exercise and oxygen.[252] One of the most effective passages is his apostrophe to the Liddal, that stream “unknown to song, where he played when life was young.”[253] The only poem on which we need to dwell is the “Winter,” which, though often unintelligible from its inflated and periphrastic form of expression, has yet a rugged vigor and originality. It shows occasionally a homely realism suggestive of Crabbe, as in the description of the shivering clown. The observation is most of it first-hand. The description of the birds that, when the storm comes on,