Sweet interchange
Of river, valley, mountain, woods, and plains,
How gladsome once he ranged your native turf,
Your simple scenes how raptured! ere EXPENSE
Had lavish'd thousand ornaments, and taught
Convenience to perplex him, Art to pall,
Pomp to deject, and Beauty to displease.
_Economy._
While Shenstone was rearing hazels and hawthorns, opening vistas, and
winding waters;
And having shown them where to stray,
Threw little pebbles in their way;
while he was pulling down hovels and cowhouses, to compose mottos and
inscriptions for garden-seats and urns; while he had so finely obscured
with a tender gloom the grove of Virgil, and thrown over, "in the midst
of a plantation of yew, a bridge of one arch, built of a dusty-coloured
stone, and simple even to rudeness,"[58] and invoked Oberon in some
Arcadian scene,
Where in cool grot and mossy cell
The tripping fauns and fairies dwell;
the solitary magician, who had raised all these wonders, was, in
reality, an unfortunate poet, the tenant of a dilapidated farm-house,
where the winds passed through, and the rains lodged, often taking
refuge in his own kitchen--
Far from all resort of mirth,
Save the cricket on the hearth!
In a letter[59] of the disconsolate founder of landscape gardening, our
author paints his situation with all its misery--lamenting that his
house is not fit to receive "polite friends, were they so disposed;" and
resolved to banish all others, he proceeds:
"But I make it a certain rule, 'arcere profanum vulgus.' Persons who
will despise you for the want of a good set of chairs, or an uncouth
fire-shovel, at the same time that they can't taste any excellence in a
mind that overlooks those things; with whom it is in vain that your mind
is furnished, if the walls are naked; indeed one loses much of one's
acquisitions in virtue by an hour's converse with such as judge of merit
by money--yet I am now and then impelled by the social passion to sit
half an hour in my kitchen."
But the solicitude of friends and the fate of Somerville, a neighbour
and a poet, often compelled Shenstone to start amidst his reveries; and
thus he has preserved his feelings and his irresolutions. Reflecting on
the death of Somerville, he writes--
"To be forced to drink himself into pains of the body, in order to get
rid of the pains of the mind, is a misery which I can well conceive,
because I may, without vanity, esteem myself his equal in point of
economy, and consequently ought to have an eye on his misfortunes--(as
you kindly hinted to me about twelve o'clock, at the Feathers.)--I
should retrench--I will--but you shall not see me--I will not let you
know that I took it in good part--I will do it at solitary times as I
may."
Such were the calamities of "great taste" with "little fortune;" but in
the case of Shenstone, these were combined with the other calamity of
"mediocrity of genius."
Here, then, at the Leasowes, with occasional trips to town in pursuit of
fame, which perpetually eluded his grasp; in the correspondence of a few
delicate minds, whose admiration was substituted for more genuine
celebrity; composing diatribes against economy and taste, while his
income was diminishing every year; our neglected author grew daily more
indolent and sedentary, and withdrawing himself entirely into his own
hermitage, moaned and despaired in an Arcadian solitude.[60] The cries
and the "secret sorrows" of Shenstone have come down to us--those of his
brothers have not always! And shall dull men, because they have minds
cold and obscure, like a Lapland year which has no summer, be permitted
to exult over this class of men of sensibility and taste, but of
moderate genius and without fortune? The passions and emotions of the
heart are facts and dates only to those who possess them.
To what a melancholy state was our author reduced, when he thus
addressed his friend:--
"I suppose you have been informed that my fever was in a great measure
hypochondriacal, and left my nerves so extremely sensible, that even on
no very interesting subjects, I could readily _think myself into a
vertigo_; I had almost said an _epilepsy_; for surely I was oftentimes
near it."
The features of this sad portrait are more particularly made out in
another place.
"Now I am come home from a visit, every little uneasiness is sufficient
to introduce my whole train of melancholy considerations, and to make me
utterly dissatisfied with the life I now lead, and the life which I
foresee I shall lead. I am angry and envious, and dejected and frantic,
and disregard all present things, just as becomes a madman to do. I am
infinitely pleased (though it is a gloomy joy) with the application of
Dr. Swift's complaint, 'that he is forced to die in a rage, like a
poisoned rat in a hole.' My soul is no more fitted to the figure I make,
than a cable rope to a cambric needle; I cannot bear to see the
advantages alienated, which I think I could deserve and relish so much
more than those that have them."
There are other testimonies in his entire correspondence. Whenever
forsaken by his company he describes the horrors around him, delivered
up "to winter, silence, and reflection;" ever foreseeing himself
"returning to the same series of melancholy hours." His frame shattered
by the whole train of hypochondriacal symptoms, there was nothing to
cheer the querulous author, who with half the consciousness of genius,
lived neglected and unpatronised. His elegant mind had not the force, by
his productions, to draw the celebrity he sighed after, to his
hermitage.
Shenstone was so anxious for his literary character, that he
contemplated on the posthumous fame which he might derive from the
publication of his letters: see Letter lxxix., _On hearing his letters
to Mr. Whistler were destroyed_; the act of a merchant, his brother, who
being a _very sensible_ man, as Graves describes, yet with the
_stupidity_ of a Goth, destroyed _the whole correspondence of Shenstone,
for "its sentimental intercourse_."--Shenstone bitterly regrets the
loss, and says, "I would have given more money for the letters than it
is allowable for me to mention with decency. I look upon my letters as
some of my _chefs-d'oeuvre_--they are the history of my mind for these
twenty years past." This, with the loss of Cowley's correspondence,
should have been preserved in the article, "of Suppressors and
Dilapidators of Manuscripts."
Towards the close of life, when his spirits were exhausted, and "the
silly clue of hopes and expectations," as he termed them, was undone,
the notice of some persons of rank began to reach him. Shenstone,
however, deeply colours the variable state of his own mind--"Recovering
from a nervous fever, as I have since discovered by many concurrent
symptoms, I seem to anticipate a little of that 'vernal delight' which
Milton mentions and thinks
----able to chase
All sadness but despair--
at least I begin to resume my silly clue of hopes and expectations."
In a former letter he had, however, given them up: "I begin to wean
myself from all hopes and expectations whatever. I feed my wild-ducks,
and I water my carnations. Happy enough if I could extinguish my
ambition quite, to indulge the desire of being something more beneficial
in my sphere.--Perhaps some few other circumstances would want also to
be adjusted."
What were these "hopes and expectations," from which sometimes he weans
himself, and which are perpetually revived, and are attributed to "an
ambition he cannot extinguish"? This article has been written in vain,
if the reader has not already perceived, that they had haunted him in
early life; sickening his spirit after the possession of a poetical
celebrity, unattainable by his genius; some expectations too he might
have cherished from the talent he possessed for political studies, in
which Graves confidently says, that "he would have made no
inconsiderable figure, if he had had a sufficient motive for applying
his mind to them." Shenstone has left several proofs of this talent.[61]
But his master-passion for literary fame had produced little more than
anxieties and disappointments; and when he indulged his pastoral fancy
in a beautiful creation on his grounds, it consumed the estate which it
adorned. Johnson forcibly expressed his situation: "His death was
probably hastened by his anxieties. He was a lamp that spent its oil in
blazing. It is said, that if he had lived a little longer, he would have
been assisted by a pension."