NATURE IN COLLINS, GRAY, GOLDSMITH, AND BURNS.
COLLINS.
When Thomson was laid in Richmond Church, another poet chanted over him a
dirge breathing the very pathos of Nature herself:—
“In yonder grave a Druid lies,
Where slowly winds the stealing wave,
The year’s best sweets shall duteous rise
To deck its poet’s sylvan grave.
“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.”
About that ode of the gentle and pensive Collins (born 1721, died 1759)
there is a sweet pathetic tone which the grander strains of later English
poetry have never surpassed. In the “Dirge over Fidele” the same strain
of pensive beauty is renewed. Collins was the first poet since Milton
wrote his early lyrics who brought to the description of rural things
that perfection of style, that combined simplicity and beauty, which
Milton had learned from the classic poets There is another poem of
Collins’s which, if not so perfect in expression as the two just named,
is interesting as almost the earliest inroad by an English poet into the
wild and romantic world which the Highlands of Scotland contain, unless
we except Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” This is Collins’s ode on the “Popular
Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland.” It seems that in the autumn
of 1749, Home, the author of the tragedy of “Douglas,” had, when on a
visit to London, during his brief stay made the acquaintance of Collins,
and kindled his imagination with tales of the Highlands and the Hebrides.
Collins seems to have deepened this interest by the perusal of Martin’s
curious book on the Western Isles, and on Home’s return to Scotland
Collins addressed to him the ode, in which the English poet entered with
a deeper, more imaginative insight into the weird and wild superstitions
of the Gael than any Scottish poet had as yet shown. After describing
with great force and truthfulness the second sight, the wraith, the
water-kelpie, and many such-like things, he closes with this apostrophe:—
“All hail! ye scenes that o’er my soul prevail!
Ye splendid friths and lakes, which, far away,
Are by smooth Annan filled, or pastoral Tay,
Or Don’s romantic springs, at distance hail!
The time shall come, when I, perhaps, may tread
Your lowly glens, o’erhung with spreading broom;
Or, o’er your stretching heaths, by fancy led;
Or, o’er your mountains creep, in awful gloom.”
Poor Collins: this hope was never fulfilled. A deeper gloom than any
that rests on the Highland mountains too soon gathered over him. The ode
itself does not seem to have received the notice it deserves, both for
its own excellence and as the first symptom of a new and enlarged feeling
about Nature entering into English poetry. In the above extract the word
“glen” occurs. Is there any earlier instance of its use in English poetry
or prose? The Scottish poets, except the ballad-writers, were afraid to
use it till the time of Scott. Macpherson in his translations of Ossian,
twelve years later than this ode, uniformly renders the Gaelic “gleann”
by the insipid “vale.”
But the most perfect and original poem of Collins, as well as the most
finely appreciative of Nature, is his Ode to Evening. No doubt evening is
personified in his address as “maid composed,” and “calm votaress,” but
the personification is so delicately handled, and in so subdued a tone,
that it does not jar on the feelings, as such personifications too often
do:—
“If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,
May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,
Like thy own solemn springs,
Thy springs and dying gales,
“O nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun
Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts,
With brede ethereal wove,
O’erhang his wavy bed:
“Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat
With short, shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing;
Or where the beetle winds
His small but sullen horn,
“As oft he rises ’midst the twilight path,
Against the pilgrim borne in needless hum
Now teach me, maid composed,
To breathe some softened strain.
...
“Then lead, calm votaress, where some sheety lake
Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallowed pile,
Or upland fallows gray
Reflect its last cool gleam.
“But when chill, blustering winds, or driving rain,
Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut,
That from the mountain’s side,
Views wilds, and swelling floods,
“And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires,
And hears the simple bell, and marks o’er all,
Thy dewy finger draw
The gradual dusky veil.”
There is about the whole ode a subdued twilight tone, a remoteness
from men and human things, and a pensive evening musing, all the more
expressive, because it does not shape itself into definite thoughts,
but reposes in appropriate images. And, as the Aldine biographer
observes,—“The absence of rhyme leaves the even flow of the verse
unbroken, and the change at the end of each stanza into shorter lines, as
if the voice of the reader dropped into a lower key, contributes to the
effect.”
In Thomson there was probably an observation of the facts of Nature
wider and more varied, but in Collins there is an intermingling of human
feeling with Nature’s aspects which is at once more delicate and deep.
The increased sensibility to Nature which in English poetry appeared in
Thomson, was carried on through the eighteenth century to its close by
Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, and manifested itself in each of
these poets in a way characteristic of himself.
GRAY.
In Collins we have seen Nature described with a perfect grace of language
and a penetrating of the forms and colors of things with human sentiment,
that far outwent the minute and faithful descriptions of Thomson. This
same movement was maintained, I cannot say advanced, by Gray. That he
had a fine feeling for Nature is apparent in his letters, which show
more minute observation and greater descriptive power than his poetry.
In these the beautiful scenery around the Westmoreland Lakes finds the
earliest notice.
In dealing with scenery, as with other things, Nature without Art, and
Art without Nature, are alike inadequate. To hit the balance is no easy
task. To let in Nature fully upon the heart, by means of an art which is
colorless and unperceived—this English poetry was struggling toward, and
Gray helped it forward, though he himself only attained partial success.
Often the art is too apparent; a false classicism is sometimes thrust in
between the reader and the fresh outer world. Wordsworth has laid hold
of a sonnet of Gray’s as a text to preach against false poetic diction.
And yet Gray, notwithstanding his often too elaborate diction, deserves
better of lovers of English poetry than to have his single sonnet thus
gibbeted, merely because, instead of saying the sun rises, it makes
“Reddening Phœbus lift his golden fire.”
In the ode on Spring, it is “the rosy-bosomed hours, fair Venus’ train,”
which bring spring in. Venus is thrust between you and the advent of
spring, much as Adversity is made “the daughter of Jove.” For the
nightingale we have “the Attic warbler,” as in another ode, for the
yellow corn-fields we have “Ceres’ golden reign.” It is needless to say
how abhorrent this sort of stuff is to the modern feeling about Nature.
And yet, notwithstanding these blemishes, Gray did help forward the
movement to a more perfect and adequate style, in which Nature should
come direct to the heart, through a perfectly transparent medium of art.
When he is at his best, as in the Elegy, Nature and human feeling so
perfectly combine that the mind finds in all the images satisfaction and
relief. There is in the Elegy no image from Greece or Rome, no intrusive
heathen deity, to jar upon the feeling. From the common English landscape
alone is drawn all that is needed to minister to the quiet but deep
pathos of the whole.
The line of poets who carried on the description of Nature during the
last century, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, much as they differ,
have this in common. Their style, though each had his own, was in all
formed by a more or less intimate study of the classic poets. And they
regarded Nature, all more or less, in a meditative moralizing way. They
were all thoughtful, cultivated men, with convictions and sentiments of
their own—sentiments mainly of a grave cast,—they saw Nature through the
light of these sentiments, and sought out those scenes and images in
Nature which suited their habitual mood. None of them are born children
of Nature, knowing her face before they could read or write. They were
lovers of books before they became lovers of the country. Hence there is
in them no rapture in the presence of Nature. For that we shall have to
look elsewhere than to those scholarly gentlemen.
GOLDSMITH.
The amiable and versatile Goldsmith looks at Nature, as he passes along,
with a less moralizing eye than the sombre-minded Gray. In his earliest
long poem, “The Traveller,” published in 1765, though he surveys many
lands, his eye dwells on man and society rather than on the outward
world. In remarkable contrast to more recent English poets, though
he passes beneath the shadow of the Alps, he looks up to them with
shuddering horror rather than with any kindling of soul. The mountain
glory had not yet burst on the souls of men. The one thought that strikes
him is the hard lot of the mountaineers. Such conventional lines as these
are all that he has for the mountains themselves:—
“No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array,
But winter lingers in the lap of May;
No zephyr fondly sues the mountain’s breast,
But meteors glare, and stormy glooms invest.”
It is only when he thinks of the Switzer’s love for them that they become
interesting:—
“Dear is the shed to which his soul conforms,
And dear that hill which lifts him to the storms;
And as a child, when scaring sounds molest,
Clings close and closer to his mother’s breast,
So the loud torrent, and the whirlwind’s roar,
But bind him to his native mountains more.”
This poem, however, is remarkable as the first expression in English
verse of that personal interest in foreign scenes and people which has
kindled so many a splendid strain of our more recent poetry. But it is
in “The Deserted Village,” his best known poem, that he has most fully
shown the grace and truthfulness with which he could touch natural
scenes. Lissoy, an Irish village where the poet’s brother had a living,
is said to have been the original from which he drew. In the poem, the
church which crowns the neighboring hill, the mill, the brook, the
hawthorn-tree, are all taken straight from the outer world. The features
of Nature and the works of man, the parsonage, the school-house, the
ale-house, all harmonize in one picture, and though the feeling of
desolation must needs be a melancholy one, yet it is wonderfully varied
and relieved by the uncolored faithfulness of the pictures from Nature
and the kindly humor of those of man. It is needless to quote from a poem
which every one knows so well. The verse of Pope is not the best vehicle
for rural description, but it never was employed with greater grace and
transparency than in “The Deserted Village.” In that poem there is fine
feeling for Nature, in her homely forms, and truthful description of
these, but beyond this Goldsmith does not venture. The pathos of the
outward world in its connection with man is there, but no reference to
the meaning of Nature in itself, much less any question of its relation
to the Divine Being and a supersensible world.
COWPER.
Though Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, each in his own way, turned their
eye on rural scenery, and took beautiful pictures and images from it into
their poetry, yet it was none of these, but a later poet, Cowper, who, as
the true successor of Thomson, carried on the descriptive work which he
began. It was in 1730 that the first complete edition of the “Seasons”
appeared. “The Task” was published in 1785. This is the poem in which
Cowper most fully put forth his power as a rural poet. In the first
book, “The Sofa,” he thus quaintly makes the first plunge from indoor to
outdoor life, to which many a time ere the long poem is ended he returns:—
“The Sofa suits
The gouty limb, ’tis true; but gouty limb,
Though on a sofa, may I never feel:
For I have loved the rural walk through lanes
Of grassy swarth, close cropped by nibbling sheep,
And skirted thick with intertexture firm
Of thorny boughs; have loved the rural walk
O’er hills, through valleys, and by river’s brink,
E’er since, a truant boy, I passed my bounds,
To enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames;
And still remember, nor without regret,
Of hours that sorrow since has much endeared,
How oft, my slice of pocket-store consumed,
Still hungering, penniless, and far from home,
I fed on scarlet hips and stony haws,
Or blushing crabs, and berries that emboss
The bramble, black as jet, or sloes austere.”
This, the first rural passage in the “Task,” strikes the note of
difference between Cowper’s way of describing Nature and Thomson’s;
Cowper unhesitatingly introduces the personal element, describes actual
and individual scenes as he himself saw them in his morning or evening
walk. Or when rural scenes are not thus personally introduced, they
everywhere come in as interludes in the midst of the poet’s keen interest
in human affairs, his quiet and delicate humor, his tender sympathy
with the poor and the suffering, his indignation against human wrong,
his earnest brooding over human destiny, and his forward glances to a
time when visible things will give place to a higher and brighter order.
Thomson, on the other hand, describes Nature as seen by itself, separate
and apart from human passion, or relieved only by some vapid episodes of
a false Arcadianism. Hence, great as is Thomson’s merit for having, first
of his age, gone back to Nature, the interest he awakes in it is feeble,
because with him Nature is so divorced from individuality and from man.
It is Nature in the general rather than the individual scene which he
describes—Nature aloof from rather than combined with man. But her full
depth and tenderness she never reveals except to the heart that throbs
with human interest.
But though Cowper sees the outer world as set off against his own
personal moods and the interests of man, yet he does not allow these to
discolor his scenes or to blur the exactness of their outlines. Fidelity,
absolute veracity, characterize his descriptions. He himself says that he
took nothing at second-hand, and all his pictures bear witness to this.
Homely, of course, flat, tame, was the country he dwelt in and described.
But to this day that Huntingdonshire landscape, and the flats by the
sluggish Ouse, in themselves so unbeautiful, acquire a charm to the eye
of the traveler from the remembered poetry of the “Task” and for the sake
of him who wrote it. By that poetry it may be said that he
“For scenes not beautiful did more
Than beauty for the fairest scenes can do.”
As one out of many landscapes described, take this:—
“How oft upon yon eminence our pace
Has slackened to a pause, and we have borne
The ruffling wind, scarce conscious that it blew,
While admiration, feeding at the eye,
And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene.
Thence with what pleasure have we just discerned,
The distant plow slow-moving, and beside
His laboring team, that swerved not from the track,
The sturdy swain diminished to a boy!
Here Ouse, slow-winding through a level plain
Of spacious meads with cattle sprinkled o’er,
Conducts the eye along his sinuous course
Delighted. There, fast rooted in their bank,
Stand, never overlooked, our favorite elms,
That screen the herdsman’s solitary hut;
While far beyond, and overthwart the stream,
That, as with molten glass, inlays the vale,
The sloping land recedes into the clouds;
Displaying, on its varied side, the grace
Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tower,
Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells
Just undulates upon the listening ear,
Groves, heaths, and smoking villages, remote.
Scenes must be beautiful which, daily viewed,
Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years.
Praise justly due to those that I describe.”
An ordinary prospect, you say, described in very ordinary poetry. Yes,
but the scene is a real scene, one of England’s veritable landscapes,
and the lines which describe it are genuine poetry,—exact, transparent,
lingering lovingly over the scene which the eye rests on. And for its
being ordinary description, no doubt it flows easily and naturally
along, but let any one try to describe as common a prospect in verse,
and he will find that this is not ordinary verse, but instinct with that
unobtrusive grace which only true poets attain.
Then how frequently the commonest country sights awaken Cowper’s touch of
native humor. Here is what he says of the mole and his work: we—
“Feel at every step
Our foot half sunk in hillocks green and soft,
Raised by the mole, the miner of the soil.
He, not unlike the great ones of mankind,
Disfigures earth, and, plotting in the dark,
Toils much to earn a monumental pile
That may record the mischiefs he has done.”
In Keble’s “Essay on Sacred Poetry” I lately read the following
comparison between Cowper and Burns as descriptive poets. “Compare,”
he says, “the landscapes of Cowper with those of Burns. There is, if
we mistake not, the same sort of difference between them, as in the
conversation of two persons on scenery, the one originally an enthusiast
in his love of the works of Nature, the other, driven by disappointment
or weariness to solace himself with them as he might.... The one
all-overflowing with the love of Nature, and indicating at every turn,
that whatever his lot in life, he could not have been happy without
her; the other visibly and wisely soothing himself, but not without
effort, by attending to rural objects in default of some more congenial
happiness, of which he had almost come to despair. The latter, in
consequence, laboriously sketching every object that came in his way;
the other, in one or two rapid lines which operate, as it were, like a
magician’s spell, presenting to the fancy just that picture which was
wanted to put the reader’s mind in unison with the writer’s.” And then
Keble quotes, in illustration of the difference, the description of
Evening in the fourth book of the “Task,” set over against the truly
pastoral chant of “Dainty Davie.” I cannot regard this estimate of
the two poets as altogether true. The passage which Keble quotes from
Cowper is not one of his happiest. “Evening” is there personified in
conventional fashion, as “with matron-step slow moving,” with night
treading “on her sweeping train.” If the two poets are to be compared at
all, let it be when both are at their best. Again, is it quite fair to
contrast poetry of description with the poetry of lyric passion, and to
reject the former because it does not possess the vivid glow that belongs
to the latter? Moreover, the country which Cowper had before him suited
better a sober and meditative than an impassioned strain. There can be no
doubt that Cowper turned to Nature as a relief and solace from too sad
thoughts rather than with the rapture of a fresh heart and a youthful
love. But Keble surely would have been the last to deny that this is a
legitimate use to make of Nature. He, before most men, would have felt
that that is one of the finest ministries of Nature which Cowper thus
expresses:—
“Our groves were planted to console at noon
The pensive wanderer in their shades, at eve
The moonbeam, sliding softly in between
The sleeping leaves is all the light they wish,
Birds warbling all the music.”
If it be one of Nature’s offices to make the young and the happy happier,
it is her no less genuine and beneficent work to lighten, by her glad or
reposeful looks, aged hearts that may be world-weary or desponding.
How exact, faithful, and literally true in his record of the appearances
of Nature Cowper is, we have seen. It remains to ask whether he had any
philosophy of Nature, and if so, what it was. It could not be that one so
devout could look habitually on the face of Nature without asking himself
how all this visible vastness stands related to the Invisible One whom
his heart held commune with. All remember his well-known line,—
“God made the country, but man made the town,”
and this thought echoes through all his praises of the country, and
enhances his pleasure in it. But it is not only by incidental allusion
that Cowper lets us know his thoughts on these things. The “Task”
contains two long passages, one in the “Winter Morning Walk,” from line
733 to 906, and another in “The Winter Walk at Noon,” from line 181 to
254, in which his feelings on this subject find full utterance, opening
with the noble words,—
“He is the freeman whom the Truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside.”
In the former passage, of the man whose heart is set free with this
heavenly freedom he says, in words well known,
“He looks abroad into the varied field
Of Nature, and ...
Calls the delightful scenery all his own.
His are the mountains, and the valleys his,
And the resplendent rivers. His to enjoy
With a propriety that none can feel,
But who, with filial confidence inspired,
Can lift to Heaven an unpresumptuous eye,
And smiling say, ‘My Father made them all.’”
And so throughout this whole passage he continues in a strain akin to
that of Thomson’s Hymn, but more intimate and devout, his acknowledgment
of Him whom he calls “The only just Proprietor” of Nature. It is He who
alike
“Gives its lustre to an insect’s wing,
And wheels his throne upon the rolling worlds.”
When He has enlightened the eye and touched the mortal ear—
“In that blest moment, Nature throwing wide
Her veil opaque, discloses with a smile
The Author of her beauties, who, retired
Behind his own creation, works unseen
By the impure, and hears his word denied.
...
“But, O thou bounteous Giver of all good,
Thou art of all thy gifts thyself the crown!
Give what thou canst, without thee we are poor,
And with thee rich, take what thou wilt away.”
A finer strain of rapturous piety could not be, but yet in it all there
is no advance beyond the old conception of a dead mechanical world,
which God, himself removed aloof, moves entirely from without. There is
no hint that Nature is alive with a life received from God himself, and
mysteriously connected with Him.
But in the second passage alluded to his thought about Nature takes a
higher reach. Speaking of the revival of the earth under the touch of
spring, he teaches that
“There lives and moves
A soul in all things, and that soul is God.”
Then, alluding to the view, entertained by many, then as now, that what
we call Nature’s operations are upheld and carried forward by fixed laws,
which spare the Maker all further trouble, he asserts that all things are
impelled
“To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force,
And under pressure of some conscious cause.
The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused,
Sustains, and is the life of all that lives.
Nature is but a name for an effect
Whose cause is God.”
Nor does he step at this merely theistic view. He goes on to the
distinctly Christian teaching of St. John and St. Paul, so easy to
assert, so hard to take home to the feelings and imagination, that it is
the Eternal and Incarnate Word who is the Creator and Sustainer of this
visible universe.
“All are under One. One Spirit—his
Who wore the platted thorns with bleeding brows—
Rules universal Nature. Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain,
Of his unrivaled pencil.”
No doubt Cowper held and believed this firmly, and it may be at times
had keen intuition of its truth. But it cannot be said that he attained
to make it felt in his ordinary descriptions of the every-day landscape.
He does not describe Nature as if he habitually saw it as a living being
plastic to an overruling and informing spirit. Rather he beheld her more
as common eyes behold her, as a mechanism, with fixed features and a
definite outline, which do not spontaneously, and without an exertion
of thought, lend themselves as vehicles of spiritual reality. If he had
been more possessed with the mystical vision he might have been a higher
poet for the few. He would not have been what he has been called, the
best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear, the familiar companion
of every quiet English household. But though Cowper’s “Task” is full of
scenery, it is not purely, or even mainly, descriptive poetry. More than
its rural character is its deep, tender, universal human-heartedness.
Man and his interests are paramount, as paramount as in Pope or any other
city poet. Only it is not the conventional, not the surface part of man,
but that which is permanent in him and universal. In his indignation
against injustice and oppression, his hatred of slavery, his large sense
of universal brotherhood, and his revolt against all that hinders it, we
already hear in his poetry the not far-off murmur of the Revolution, and
of the new era it was bringing in. His denunciation of the Bastile but
four years before it fell—
“Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts,
Ye dungeons, and ye cages of despair,
There’s not an English heart that would not leap
To hear that ye were fallen at last,”—
is a fitting prelude to that prayer of thanksgiving which Wordsworth
raised a few years afterward from Morecombe Sands when he first heard of
the fall of Robespierre. It is because Cowper’s poetry throbs with this
deep and universal human sympathy that its background of landscape, plain
as it is, and untransfigured by passion, comes in with such graceful and
refreshing relief. Of Cowper’s descriptions may be said what Wordsworth
says of his own, there is always
“Some happy tone
Of meditation slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone.”
And this it is that gives them their peculiar charm.
BURNS.
The rural descriptions and the reflections on the outer world contained
in the poetry of Cowper, mark the highest limit which the feeling for
Nature had reached in England at the close of last century. But the
stream of natural poetry in England, which up to that time had been fed
from purely native sources, and which had flowed on through all last
century with ever increasing volume, received toward the close of the
century affluents from other regions, which tinged the color and modified
the direction of its future current. Of these affluents the first and
most powerful was the poetry of Burns. It is strange to think that Cowper
and he were singing their songs at the same time, each in his own way
describing the scenery that surrounded him, and yet that they hardly knew
of each other’s existence.
Burns not only lived in a world of nature, of society, and of feeling,
wholly alien to that of Cowper, but he took for his models far different
poets. These models were the Scottish rhymers, Allan Ramsay, Ferguson,
and the unknown singers of the native ballads, and especially of the
popular songs, of his country. Proud and self-reliant as Burns was, he
everywhere speaks of Ramsay and Ferguson as his models and superiors.
From these he took the forms of his poems, though into these forms he
poured a new and stronger inspiration. Burns’s “Halloween” is framed
on a model of Ferguson’s poem called “Leith Races,” and “The Cottar’s
Saturday Night” is evidently suggested by Ferguson’s “Farmer’s Ingle;”
but poor Ferguson’s very mundane view of happiness is, at least in the
“Cottar’s Saturday Night,” by Burns, transfigured by a purer and nobler
sentiment. Besides these Burns knew the English poets, such as Pope and
Shenstone, but well for the world that he did not come too early under
their influence, else we had probably lost much of what is most native
and original in him. Somewhere in his later years he marvels at his own
audacity in having ventured to use his native Scotch as the vehicle for
poetry, and speaks as if, had he earlier known more English literature,
he would not have dared to do so. Yet when he does essay to write pure
English his poetry becomes only of third or fourth-rate excellence, just
as nothing can be more mawkish and vapid than Ferguson, when he makes
Damon and Alexis discourse in his purely English pastorals. Only in one
poem, written in pure English, does Burns attain high excellence, and
that one is the “Lines to Mary in Heaven.” Perhaps in nothing, except
it may be in humorous or pathetic feeling, is the Scottish dialect
more in place than in describing the native scenery. For, in truth,
the features of every county, if possible of each district, ought to
be rendered in the very words by which they are known to the natives.
When instead of this they are transferred into the literary language,
they have lost I know not how much of their life and individuality. If
in Scottish scenery, for instance, you speak of a brook and a grove,
instead of a burn or a shaw or wood, you have really robbed the locality
described of all that belongs to it. The same thing holds still more of
mountain scenery, in which, unless you adopt the words which the country
people apply to their own hills, you had better leave them undescribed.
This feeling has at last forced both poets, and all who attempt to
render Highland scenery, to use the Celtic words by which the mountain
lineaments are described. We must, if we would name these features
at all, speak of the “corrie,” the “lochan,” the “balloch,” and the
“screetan” or “sclidder,” for the book-English has no words for these
things. Hence it is that Scottish Lowland scenery is never so truly and
vividly described, as when Burns uses his own vernacular. And yet Burns
was no merely descriptive poet. It would be difficult to name one of
his poems in which description of Nature is the main object. Everywhere
with him, man, his feelings and his fate, stand out in the front of his
pictures, and Nature comes in as the delightful background—yet Nature
loved with a love, beheld with a rapture, all the more genuine, because
his pulses throbbed in such intense sympathy with man. Every one can
recall many a wonderful line, sometimes whole verse, in his love-songs,
in which the surrounding landscape is flashed on the mind’s eye. In that
longer poem, so full of sagacious observation on life and character, “The
Twa Dogs,” how graphically rendered is the evening with which the poem
closes!—
“By this, the sun was out o’ sight,
An’ darker gloamin brought the night:
The bum-clock humm’d wi’ lazy drone,
The kye stood rowtin i’ the loan;
When up they gat, an’ shook their lugs,
Rejoiced they were na men but dogs;
An’ each took aff his several way,
Resolved to meet some ither day.”
“The kye stood rowting in the loan,” what a picture is that of an
old-fashioned Lowland farm, with the loane or lane, between two dikes,
leading up to the out-field or moor! All who have known the reality will
at once recognize the truth of the picture, in which the kye, as they
come home at gloamin’, stop and low, ere they enter the byre: to others
it is uncommunicable.
Or take that description in “Halloween” of the burn and the adventure
there:—
“Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays,
As thro’ the glen it wimpl’t;
Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays
Whyles in a wiel it dimpl’t;
Whyles glitter’d to the nightly rays,
Wi’ bickering, dancing dazzle;
Whyles cookit underneath the braes
Below the spreading hazel,
Unseen that night.
“Amang the brachens on the brae,
Between her an’ the moon,
The Deil, or else an outler Quey,
Gat up an’ gae a croon:
Poor Leezie’s heart maist lap the hool;
Near lav’rock-height she jumpit,
But mist a fit, an’ in the pool
Out-owre the lugs she plumpit,
Wi’ a plunge that night.”
Would any one who can feel the force of that description allow that it
could be expressed in literary English without losing much of its charm?
I have said that Burns’s glances at Nature are almost all incidental,
and, by the way, and this enhances their value. There is, however, a
passage in an Epistle to William Simpson, in which he addresses Nature
directly, and speaks out more consciously the feeling with which she
inspired him:—
“O, sweet are Coila’s haughs an’ woods,
When lintwhites chant amang the buds,
And jinkin hares, in amorous whids,
Their loves enjoy,
While thro’ the braes the cushat croods
Wi’ wailfu’ cry!
“Ev’n winter bleak has charms to me
When winds rave thro’ the naked tree;
Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree
Are hoary gray;
Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee,
Dark’ning the day!
“O Nature a’ thy shews and forms
To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms!
Whether the summer kindly warms
Wi’ life an’ light,
Or winter howls, in gusty storms,
The lang, dark night!
“The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her,
Till by himsel he learn’d to wander,
Adown some trottin burn’s meander,
An’ no think lang;
O sweet, to stray an’ pensive ponder
A heart-felt sang!”
Three things may be noted as to the influence of Burns on men’s feeling
for Nature.
First, he was a more entirely open-air poet than any first-rate singer
who had yet lived, and as such he dealt with Nature in a more free,
close, intimate way than any English poet since the old ballad-singers.
He did more to bring the hearts of men close to the outer world, and
the outer world to the heart, than any former poet. His keen eye looked
directly, with no intervening medium, on the face alike of Nature and
of man, and embraced all creation in one large sympathy. With familiar
tenderness he dwelt on the lower creatures, felt for their sufferings,
as if they had been his own, and opened men’s hearts to feel how much
the groans of creation are needlessly increased by the indifference or
cruelty of man. In Burns, as in Cowper, and in him perhaps more than
in Cowper, there was a large going forth of tenderness to the lower
creatures, and in their poetry this first found utterance, and in no poet
since their time, so fully as in these two.
Secondly, his feeling in Nature’s presence was not, as in the English
poets of his time, a quiet contemplative pleasure. It was nothing short
of rapture. Other more modern poets may have been thrilled with the same
delight, he alone of all in last century expressed the thrill. In this,
as in other things, he is the truest herald of that strain of rejoicing
in Nature, even to ecstasy, which has formed one of the finest tones in
the poetry of this century.
Thirdly, he does not philosophize on Nature or her relation to man; he
feels it, alike in his joyful moods and in his sorrowful. It is to him
part of what he calls “the universal plan,” but he nowhere reasons about
the life of Nature as he often does so trenchantly about that of man.
THE BALLADS.
But another affluent to the growing sentiment, besides Burns, was
the ballad-poetry rediscovered, we may say, towards the end of last
century. The most decisive mark of this change in literary taste was the
collection by Bishop Percy of the “Reliques of Ancient Poetry” in 1765;
and this production did much to deepen and expand the taste out of which
itself arose. The impulse which began with Bishop Percy may be said to
have culminated when Scott gave to the world his “Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border,” in the opening years of the present century.
The ballads of course are mainly engaged with human incidents, heroic
and legendary. Yet they contain many side-glances at Nature, as it
interwove itself with the actions or the sufferings of men, which are
very affecting. This is the way that the sight of Ettrick Forest struck
the king and his men as they marched against the outlaw who “won” there—
“The king was cuming thro’ Caddon Ford,
And full five thousand men was he;
They saw the derke Foreste them before,
They thought it awsome for to see.”
Or take again the impression made on the traveling knight as he comes on
Clyde in full flood:—
“As he gaed owre yon high high hill
And doun yon dowie den,
There was a roar in Clyde water,
Had fear’d a hundred men.”
Or that other gentler pathetic touch, where the maiden says—
“Yestreen I dreamed a dolefu’ dream
I fear there will be sorrow,
I dreamed I pu’d the heather green
Wi’ my true love, on Yarrow.
“O gentle wind, that bloweth south,
From where my love repaireth,
Convey a kiss from his dear mouth,
And tell me how he fareth!”
In verses such as these, which abound throughout the popular ballads and
songs, we see the outer world, not as it appeared to the highly educated
poet, seeking to express it in artistic phrase, but as it showed itself
to the eyes and hearts of country-people, living quite familiarly among
its sights and sounds. Much more might be said of the natural imagery
of the ballads, and of the feeling toward the outer world indicated by
it. Suffice it to note that the simplicity and pathos, both of sentiment
and of expression, which the ballads contained, entering, with other
influences, into the minds of the young generation which first welcomed
them, called up another view of Nature than that which the literary poets
had expressed, and affected most deeply both the feeling and the form of
the new poetry of Nature which this century brought in.
OSSIAN.
One more poetic influence, born of last century, must be noticed before
we close. I mean the Celtic or Ossianic feeling about Nature.
I am not going now to discuss whether Macpherson composed the Gaelic
poems which still pass for Ossian’s, or whether he only collected songs
which had been floated down by tradition from a remote antiquity.
Whichever view we take, it cannot be questioned that the appearance of
this poetry gave to the English-speaking mind the thrill of a new and
strange emotion about mountain scenery. Whether the poetry was old,
or the product of last century, it describes, as none other does, the
desolation of dusky moors, the solemn brooding of the mists on the
mountains, the occasional looking through them of sun by day, of moon and
stars by night, the gloom of dark cloudy Bens or cairns, with flashing
cataracts, the ocean with its storms as it breaks on the West Highland
shores or on the headlands of the Hebrides. Wordsworth, though an
unbeliever in Ossian, felt that the fit dwelling for his spirit was
“Where rocks are rudely heaped and rent
As by a spirit turbulent,
Where sights are rough and sounds are wild
And everything unreconciled,
In some complaining dim retreat,
For fear and melancholy meet.”
And such are the scenes which the Ossianic poetry mainly dwells on. Here
is a description of a battle—
“As hundred winds ’mid oaks of great mountains,
As hundred torrents from lofty hills,
As clouds in darkness rushing on,
As the great ocean tumbling on the shore,
So vast, so sounding, dark and stern,
Met the fierce warriors on Lena.
The shout of the host on the mountain height
Was like thunder on a night of storms,
When bursts the cloud on Cona of the glens,
And thousand spirits wildly shriek
On the waste whirlwind of the hills.”
And yet, though this is the prevailing tone, it is broken at times by
gleams of tender light—
“Pleasing to me are the words of songs,
Pleasing the tale of the time that is gone;
Soothing as noiseless dew of morning mild
On the brake and knoll of roes,
When slowly rises the sun
On the silent flank of hoary Bens—
The loch, unruffled, far away,
Lies calm and blue on the floor of the glens.”[16]
Whatever men may now think of them, there cannot be a doubt but these
mountain monotones took the heart of Europe with a new emotion, and
prepared it for that passion for mountains which has since possessed it.
Cowper, Burns, the Ballads, Ossian, all these had entered into the
minds that were still young when this century opened, and added each a
fresh element of feeling, and opened a new avenue of vision into the
life of Nature. When the great earthquake of the Revolution had shaken
men’s souls to their centre, and brought up to the surface thoughts and
aspirations for humanity never known till then, the deepened and expanded
hearts of men opened themselves to receive Nature into them in a way they
had never done before, and to love her with a new passion. But original
as this impulse in the present century has been, we must not forget how
much it owed, both in itself and in its manifold forms of expression, to
the poetry of Nature which the eighteenth century bequeathed. Of that
poetry there were two main streams, a literary and a popular. Of these
the popular one was probably the most powerful in moulding the Poetry
that was about to be.