RETURN TO NATURE BEGUN BY ALLAN RAMSAY AND THOMSON.
The divorce from Nature and country life which marked the Poetry of the
closing seventeenth and opening eighteenth centuries, has often been
subject of comment, and need not detain us now. Whatever the causes of
this divorce may have been, it is beside our present purpose to inquire
into them. Enough to note the fact that during the latter part of Charles
II.’s reign, and during the succeeding reigns of William, Queen Anne, and
the first George, poetry retired from the fields, and confined herself
to the streets of London. If she ever ventured into the country at all,
she did not wander beyond the Twickenham villa or Richmond Hill. While
first Dryden and then Pope were in the ascendant, the subjects of poetry
were those to be found in city life and in social man. Nature, Passion,
Imagination, as has been said, were dismissed; politics, party spirit and
argument, wit and satire, criticism and scientific inquiry, took their
place.
When after this long absence Poetry once more left the suburbs and
wandered back to the fields, she took with her this great gain,—the
power to describe the things of nature in a correcter diction and more
beautiful style than England had before known, save only in Milton’s
descriptive lyrics. It was in the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay that the
sense of natural beauty first reappeared. Since his day Nature, which,
even when felt and described in earlier English poetry, had held a place
altogether subordinate to man, has more and more claimed to be regarded
in poetry as almost coequal with man. Ramsay, whose “Gentle Shepherd” was
first published in 1725, drew his inspiration in large measure from the
songs and ballads of his native country, which, while full of the pathos
of human incident and affection, are hardly less sensitive to the looks
of earth and sky, whether stern or lovely. It was from his knowledge
of rustic life and his love of the popular song that his inspiration
was drawn. But his genuine and natural instincts were overlaid by some
knowledge and relish of the artificial literature of his age. The result
is a kind of composite poetry, in which Scotch manners, feeling, and
language are strangely intermingled with a sort of Arcadian veneer,
brought from the Eclogues of Virgil, or from English imitations of these.
This is most seen in Ramsay’s songs, where, instead of preserving the
precious old melodies, he has replaced them by insipid counterfeits
of his own, in which Jock and Jenny are displaced by Damon and Chloe.
Though some traces of false taste do crop out here and there, even in
the dialogue of the “The Gentle Shepherd,” yet these are far fewer than
in the songs. The feelings of our age may be now and then offended by a
freedom of speech that borders on coarseness, but that the texture of the
poem is stirring and human-hearted is proved by the hold it still retains
on the Scottish peasantry. If here and there a false note mars the truth
of the human manners, as when Scotch Lowland shepherds talk of playing on
reeds and flutes, the scenery of “The Gentle Shepherd” is true to Nature
as it is among the Pentland Hills:—
“Gae farder up the burn to Habbie’s How,
Where a’ the sweets o’ spring and summer grow:
Between twa birks, out o’er a little linn
The water fa’s an’ mak’s a singin’ din;
A pool breast-deep, beneath as clear as glass,
Kisses, wi’ easy whirls, the bordering grass.
We’ll end our washing while the morning’s cool.
And when the day grows het we’ll to the pool,
There wash oursels—it’s healthfu’ now in May,
And sweetly cauler on so warm a day.”
A pool in a burn among the Lowland hills could hardly be more naturally
described.
Again, one of the shepherds thus invites his love—
“To where the saugh-tree shades the mennin-pool,
I’ll frae the hill come doun, when day grows cool.
—Keep tryst, and meet me there.”
The alder-tree shading the minnow pool—there is a real piece of Lowland
scenery brought from the outer world for the first time into poetry.
These are but a few samples of the scenery of Scottish rural life with
which “The Gentle Shepherd” abounds. Burns, who lived in the generation
that followed Ramsay, and always looks back to him as one of his chief
forerunners and masters in the poetic art, fixes on Ramsay’s delineations
of Nature as one of his chief characteristics. Burns asks, Is there none
of the moderns who will rival the Greeks in pastoral poetry?—
“Yes! there is ane; a Scottish callan—
There’s ane; come forrit, honest Allan!
Thou need na jouk behint the hallan,
A chiel sae clever;
The teeth o’ Time may gnaw Tantallan,
But thou’s forever!
“Thou paints auld Nature to the nines,
In thy sweet Caledonian lines;
Nae gowden stream thro’ myrtles twines,
Where Philomel,
While nightly breezes sweep the vines,
Her griefs will tell!
“In gowany glens thy burnie strays,
Where bonnie lasses bleach their claes;
Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes
Wi’ hawthorns gray,
Where blackbirds join the shepherd’s lays
At close o’ day.”
It may well be that when we turn to Scottish poetry the burns and braes
should sing and shine through almost every song. For there is no feature
in which Scottish scenery more differs from English than in the clear and
living northern burns, compared with the dead drumlie ditches called
brooks in the Midland Counties.
THOMSON.
The return to Nature, begun by Ramsay in his “Gentle Shepherd,” was
carried on by another Scot, though hardly a Scottish poet—Thomson, who a
few years later (1728-30) published his poem of “The Seasons.” In this
work, descriptive of scenery and country life through the four seasons,
Thomson, it is alleged, was but working in a vein which was native to
Scottish poets from the earliest time. Two centuries before, Gawain
Douglas, in the prologues to his translation of the Æneid, abounds in
description of rural things. I should hardly venture to say it myself, in
case it might seem national prejudice, but a writer who is not a Scot,
Mr. S. Brooke, has remarked that there is “a passionate, close, poetical
observation and description of natural scenery in Scotland, from the
earliest times, such as we do not possess in English poetry till the time
of Wordsworth.” In choosing his subject, therefore, and in the minute
loving way in which he dwells upon it, Thomson would seem to have been
working in the spirit of his country. But there the Scottish element in
him begins and ends. Neither in the kind of landscape he pictures, in
the rural customs he selects, nor in the language or versification of
his poem, is there much savor of Scottish habits or scenery. His blank
verse cannot be said to be a garment that fits well to its subject.
It is heavy, cumbrous, oratorical, over-loaded with epithets, full
of artificial invocations, “personified abstractions,” and insipid
classicalities. It is a composite style of language formed from the
recollection partly of Milton, partly of Virgil’s Georgics.
Yet in spite of all these obstructions which repel pure taste and natural
feeling, no one can read the four books of the “Seasons” through, without
seeing that Thomson, for all his false style, wrote with his eye upon
Nature, and laid his finger on many a fact and image never before touched
in poetry. In the first few lines of “Spring” he notes how, at its
approach, the plover and other birds which have wintered by the sea leave
the shores and set far inland to their summer haunts in moors and hills.
Whilst the season is still hanging uncertain between winter and spring,
he notes how
“Scarce
The bittern knows his time, with bill ingulfed
To shake the sounding marsh; or, from the shore,
The plovers when to scatter o’er the heath,
And sing their wild notes to the listening waste.”
How true to nature this picture! how happily rendered! Then you have the
plowman and his oxen beginning their work—
“Cheered by the simple song and soaring lark.”
Again,—
“From the moist meadow to the withered hill,
Led by the breeze, the vivid verdure runs.”
That “withered hill!” Who that has ever looked on the mountains in
March, just before the first finger of Spring has touched them, but will
recognize the appropriateness of that epithet for their wan, bleached,
decayed aspect!
Then you have the whole process of trout-fishing, in the “mossy-tinctured
stream,” where “the dark brown water aids the grilse,” showing that, as
Thomson wrote, his thoughts reverted from Richmond to the streams of the
Merse; you have also the song-birds piping each from its proper haunt,
the linnet from “the flowering furze,”—the various places where each bird
builds his nest, given with an accuracy that every bird-nesting boy will
recognize; and the scent of the bean-fields, noticed for the first time,
as far as I know, in poetry.
As one longer example of Thomson’s close observation and peculiar manner,
take the description of a spring shower:—
“At last
The clouds consign their treasures to the fields,
And, softly shaking on the dimpled pool
Prelusive drops, let all their moisture flow
In large effusion o’er the freshened world;
The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard
By such as wander through the forest walks,
Beneath the umbrageous multitude of leaves.
...
“Thus all day long the full-distended clouds
Indulge their genial stores, and well-showered earth
Is deep enriched with vegetable life;
Till in the western sky the downward sun
Looks out, effulgent, from amid the flush
Of broken clouds, gay shifting to his beam,
The rapid radiance instantaneous strikes
The illumined mountain; through the forest streams;
Shakes on the floods, and in a yellow mist,
Far smoking o’er the interminable plain,
In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems.
Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around.
Full swell the woods, their every music wakes,
Mixed in wild concert, with the warbling brooks
Increased, the distant bleatings of the hills,
And hollow lows responsive from the vales,
Whence, blending all, the sweetened zephyr springs.”
These are but a few samples from “Spring” showing the minute faithfulness
with which Thomson had observed
“The negligence of Nature, wide and wild.”
Here are appearances of Nature, each accurately observed, and their
succession truthfully rendered, but the whole is so overlaid with tawdry
diction that it is hard to pierce below the enamel and feel the true
pulse of Nature beating under it. And yet it does beat there, and in many
another description in the “Seasons” now little heeded, because of their
old-fashioned garb. And yet he who will read the “Seasons” through will
find many a phrase true to Nature, many a felicitous expression cropping
out from the even roll of his solemn pompous monotone. Thomson has been
called the Claude of poets. And his way of handling Nature stands to
that of Wordsworth or Tennyson much as Claude’s landscapes do to those
of Turner or some of the other modern painters. It may be added that
Thomson’s somewhat vapid digressions about Amelia and Lavinia have not
more meaning than the conventional lay figures and the classic temples
which Claude introduces into the foreground of his landscapes.
As to the sentiment which animates the “Seasons,” it is a revolt from
the life of town and court to the simplicity and truth of rural life and
feeling. It is almost the first time this revolt finds expression in
English poetry, if we except some of the sylvan scenes in Shakespeare.
As the French critic well says, “Thirty years before Rousseau, Thomson
had expressed all Rousseau’s sentiments, almost in the same style. Like
him, he painted the country with sympathy and enthusiasm. Like him he
contrasted the golden age of primitive simplicity with modern miseries
and corruption. Like him he exalted deep love, conjugal tenderness, the
union of souls, paternal affection, and all domestic joys. Like him, he
combated contemporary frivolity and compared the ancient republics with
modern states. Like Rousseau, he praised gravity, patriotism, liberty,
virtue; rose from the spectacle of Nature to the contemplation of God....
Like him, too, he marred the sincerity of his emotion and the truth of
his poetry by sentimental vapidities, by pastoral billing and cooing,
and by an abundance of epithets, personified abstractions, pompous
invocations, and oratorical tirades.” This passage gives truly, if with
some exaggeration, the spirit with which the “Seasons” and all their
outward imagery are informed. But while Thomson watched the ever-changing
appearances and recorded them, what, it may be asked, was his thought
about the Power which originates and upholds them? what did he conceive
to be the relation of the things we see to the things we do not see?
Everywhere his poem breathes a spirit of naturalistic piety. But if there
is nothing in the “Seasons” inconsistent with Christian truth, there is
little or nothing that directly affirms it. In “Winter” he breathes this
prayer—
“Father of light and life! thou Good Supreme!
Oh teach me what is good! teach me thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit! and feed my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure,
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!”
There is nothing in his amiable and placid life to throw doubt on the
sincerity of that prayer. And yet Thomson’s piety seems to us now of that
kind which is easily satisfied and thoughtlessly thankful!
There are many at the present day, and those the most thoughtful, who
“not only see through but (as has been said) feel a strong revulsion
against the well-meant but superficial attempt to describe the world as
happy, and to see in God, as the Governor of it, only a sort of easy and
shallow goodness.” They cannot be satisfied with such a view. “They have
a complaining within—a sense of imperfection in and around them which
rebels against so easy-going a view and demands another solution. It is
not merely a benevolent God that they long for, but a God who sympathizes
with man, and who in some way, of which only revelation can fully inform
us, makes out of man’s misery and imperfection the way to something
better for him.”
Thomson’s religion, no doubt, could hardly have escaped the infection
of the Deism that was all around him in the literary and philosophic
atmosphere of his time. In his beautiful “Hymn,” which may be regarded
as the climax of the “Seasons,” and as summing up the devoutest thoughts
which these suggested to him, there is nothing that goes beyond such a
view:—
“These, as they change, Almighty Father, these
Are but the varied God. The rolling year
Is full of thee”—
unless perhaps in that more Christian strain where, hearing the bleating
on the hills and the lowings in the vale, he breaks forth—
“For the Great Shepherd reigns,
And his unsuffering Kingdom yet will come.”
The prevailing spirit of the Hymn, as of most of his other addresses to
the Deity, is that of optimism and the reign of universal benevolence:—
“I cannot go
Where Universal Love smiles not around,
Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns,
From seeming evil still educing good.”
There is much benevolence in his poetry, much feeling for the miseries
and wrongs of mankind, but no perception of that deeper mystery—that
the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, waiting for a
deliverance. Neither is there any sense of the relation of the creation
to the Creator other than that which the somewhat mechanical conception
of a maker and a machine supply. Perhaps it is not to be wondered at that
Thomson does not seem to feel the inadequacy of this conception, for we
in our own day, who have got to feel so profoundly its inadequacy, have
not as yet gone far to supply its place with a worthier. Yet whatever
may be his shortcomings, all honor to the poet of the “Seasons”! Genuine
lover of the country as he was, he was the first English poet who led
poetry back into the fields, and made her once more free of her own
native region.