many phases. No period has been without it, though the esteem in which
it is held has varied a good deal from age to age. English literature is
strong in romance; there is something in the English temper which makes
scepticism ungrateful to it, and disposes it to treat even dreams
seriously. Chaucer, who laughed at the romantic writers of his day, yet
gave a new lease of life to Romance in _Troilus and Cressida_ and _The
Knightes Tale_. Many of the poets of the seventeenth century chose
romantic themes for their most serious work; if Davenant and Chamberlayne
and others had been as successful as they were ambitious, they would have
anticipated the Revival of Romance. Even in the age of Pope, the old
romance subjects were still popular, though they were celebrated in books
which have long been forgotten. Everyone who has studied the Troy legend
of the Middle Ages knows how great a share in the popularization of the
legend belongs to the Sicilian lawyer, Guido delle Colonne, who
summarized, in the dull style of a Latin chronicle, and without
acknowledgment, the brilliant _Roman de Troie_ which the French poet,
Benoit de Sainte-More had written for Queen Eleanor of England. Guide's
matter-of-fact compilation had an enormous vogue; Chaucer, Lydgate, and
Shakespeare treated it as an authority; and Caxton translated it into
English prose. Through all the changes of fashion Caxton's version
continued in esteem; it was repeatedly revised and reissued; and, in the
very age of Pope, found what was doubtless a large public under the title
_The Destruction of Troy_, _In Three Books . . . With many Admirable Acts
of Chivalry and Martial Prowess_, _effected by Valiant Knights_, _in the
Defence and Love of distressed Ladies. The Thirteenth Edition_,
_Corrected and much Amended_. London, _Printed for Eben. Tracey_, _at
the Three Bibles on London-Bridge_. _1708_. In the underworld of
literature Romance never died out. The Revival of Romance took its
special character from a gradual and powerful reaction against Dryden and
Pope and all those masters of Classical method who, during half a
century, had legislated for English poetry. It began very early in the
eighteenth century, long before the death of Pope. No sooner did a
dynasty of moralists and satirists claim possession of the high places,
and speak in the name of English literature, than all the other interests
and kinds, which survived among the people, began to range themselves in
opposition, and to assert their right to be heard. The supremacy of
Dryden and Pope was the most despotic rule that English poetry has ever
known, and the revolt was strong in proportion. Satire and morality very
easily becomes tedious, especially when they are in close alliance.
Despotism may be tempered by epigrams, and so become tolerable, but it is
important that the epigrams should not be made by the despot. Outside
the charmed circle of his friendships, Pope was ready enough to use his
wit against any pretender.
The change began gradually, and in very innocent fashion. Poetry had
been taught to be scholarly, self-conscious, experimental; and it showed
its skill in half-playful imitations of the older English masters. Pope
himself imitated Chaucer and Spenser in burlesque fashion. John Philips,
in _The Splendid Shilling_, used Milton's heightened style to describe
the distresses of an impecunious poet. William Shenstone in _The School-
mistress_, parodied Spenser, yet the parody is in no way hostile, and
betrays an almost sentimental admiration. Spenser, like Milton, never
lost credit as a master, though his fame was obscured a little during the
reign of Dryden. His style, it must be remembered, was archaic in his
own time; it could not grow old, for it had never been young. Addison,
in _An Account of the Greatest English Poets_, says that Spenser's verse
Can charm an understanding age no more;
The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
While the dull moral lies too plain below.
But the _Account_ is a merely juvenile work; its dogma is not the sword
of judgment, but the shield of ignorance. "The character he gives of
Spenser," said Pope, "is false; and I have heard him say that he never
read Spenser till fifteen years after he wrote it." As for Pope himself,
among the English poets Waller, Spenser, and Dryden were his childhood's
favorites, in that order; and the year before his death he said to
Spence--"I don't know how it is; there is something in Spenser that
pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I
read the Faerie Queene, when I was about twelve, with infinite delight;
and I think it gave me as much when I read it over, about a year or two
ago."
The lyrical Milton and the romantic Spenser found disciples among poets
in the early half of the eighteenth century. Two of these disciples may
be mentioned, both born about the year 1700, only twelve years later than
Pope. John Dyer, the son of a solicitor in Wales, was bred to the law,
but gave it up to study painting under Jonathan Richardson. His earlier
and better poems were written while he wandered about South Wales in
pursuit of his art. _Grongar Hill_, the most notable of them, was
published in 1726. Love of the country is what inspires his verses,
which have a very winning simplicity, only touched here and there by the
conventions deemed proper for poetry:
Grass and flowers Quiet treads,
On the meads and mountain-heads,
Along with Pleasure, close ally'd,
Ever by each other's side;
And often, by the murmuring rill,
Hears the thrush, while all is still,
Within the groves of Grongar Hill.
The truth of his observation endeared him to Wordsworth; and his moral,
when he finds a moral, is without violence:
How close and small the hedges lie!
What streaks of meadows cross the eye!
A step methinks may pass the stream,
So little distant dangers seem;
So we mistake the Future's face,
Ey'd thro' Hope's deluding glass;
As yon summits soft and fair,
Clad in colours of the air,
Which, to those who journey near,
Barren, and brown, and rough appear,
Still we tread tir'd the same coarse way,
The present's still a cloudy day.
It takes a good poet to strike a clear note, with no indecision, in the
opening lines of his poem, as Dyer does in _The Country Walk_:
I am resolv'd, this charming day,
In the open fields to stray;
And have no roof above my head
But that whereon the Gods do tread.
His landscapes are delicately etched, and are loved for their own sake:
And there behold a bloomy mead,
A silver stream, a willow shade,
Beneath the shade a fisher stand,
Who, with the angle in his hand,
Swings the nibbling fry to land.
It would be absurd to speak solemnly of Dyer's debt to Milton; he is an
original poet; but the writer of the lines quoted above can never have
been blind to the beauties of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_. His two
arts brought him little material prosperity; in 1740 he took orders in
the Church of England, and in his later years did harm to his fame by a
long industrial poem called _The Fleece_, which has on it none of the dew
that glistens on his youthful verses.
James Thomson, who won a great reputation in his own age, was the son of
a parish minister in Scotland. He was educated in Edinburgh, and came to
London to seek his fortune. All Thomson's work shows the new tendencies
in poetry struggling with the accepted fashions. His language in _The
Seasons_ is habitually rhetorical and stilted, yet there is hardly a page
without its vignettes of truth and beauty. When he forgets what he has
learned in the Rhetoric class, and falls back on his own memories and
likings, the poet in him reappears. In _The Castle of Indolence_,
published just before his death in 1748, he imitates Spenser. One stanza
of this poem is more famous than all the rest; it is pure and high
romance:
As when a shepherd of the Hebrid-Isles,
Placed far amid the melancholy main,
(Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles,
Or that aerial beings sometimes deign
To stand embodied to our senses plain),
Sees on the naked hill, or valley low,
The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain,
A vast assembly moving to and fro;
Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show.
Many who are familiar with this simile have never been at the pains to
remember, or enquire, what it illustrates. Indeed its appearance in the
poem is almost startling, as if it were there for no purpose but to
prophesy of the coming glories of English poetry. The visitors to the
Castle of Indolence are met at the gate by the porter, who supplies them
with dressing-gowns and slippers, wherein to take their ease. They then
stroll off to various parts of the spacious grounds, and their
disappearance is the occasion for this wonderful verse. Thomson cared no
more than his readers for the application of the figure; what possessed
him was his memory of the magic twilight on the west coast of Scotland.
Pope and Prior were metropolitan poets; it is worth noting that Dyer
belonged to Wales, and Thomson to Scotland. It is even more significant
that Dyer was by profession a painter, and that Thomson's poems were
influenced by memories of the fashionable school of landscape painting.
The development of Romantic poetry in the eighteenth century is
inseparably associated with pictorial art, and especially with the rise
of landscape painting. Two great masters of the seventeenth century,
Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain, are more important than all the rest.
We have here to do not with the absolute merits of painting, nor with its
technical beauties and subtleties, but with its effect on the popular
imagination, which in this matter does not much differ from the poetic
imagination. The landscapes of Salvator Rosa and Claude were made
familiar to an enormous public by the process of engraving, and poetry
followed where painting led. There are exquisite landscapes in the
backgrounds of the great Italian masters; Leonardo, Titian, and others;
but now the background became the picture, and the groups of figures were
reduced to serve as incidents in a wider scheme. Exactly the same
change, the same shift of the centre of interest, may be seen in
Thomson's poetry compared with Spenser's. No doubt it would be difficult
to balance the creditor and debtor account as between poetry and
painting; the earlier pictorial landscapes borrowed some hints from the
older romances; but in England, at least, landscapes of wild rocks, and
calm lakes, and feudal castles lit up by the glow of the setting sun were
familiar before the reaction in poetry set in. Romance, in its modern
development, is largely a question of background. A romantic love-affair
might be defined as a love-affair in other than domestic surroundings.
Who can use the word "romantic" with more authority than Coleridge? In
_Kubla Khan_, a poem which some would choose as the high-water mark of
English romantic poetry, he gets his effect from the description of a
landscape combining the extremes of beauty and terror:
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
* * * * *
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
Romance demands scenery; and it should never be forgotten that the age of
Pope, the age of symmetry and correctness in poetry, was an age when the
taste for wild scenery in painting and in gardening was at its height. If
the house was set in order, the garden broke into a wilderness. Addison
in the _Spectator_ (No. 414) praises the new art of landscape gardening:
There is generally in nature something more grand and august, than
what we meet with in the curiosities of art. When, therefore, we see
this imitated in any measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted
kind of pleasure, than what we receive from the nicer and more
accurate productions of art. On this account our _English_ gardens
are not so entertaining to the fancy as those in _France_ and _Italy_,
where we see a larger extent of ground covered over with an agreeable
mixture of garden and forest, which represent everywhere an artificial
wildness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we
meet with in those of our own country.
Addison would have hesitated to apply this doctrine to poetry; indeed the
orthodoxy of that age favored the highest possible contrast between the
orderly works of man, and the garden, which it chose to treat as the
outpost of rebellious nature. Pope was a gardener as well as a poet, and
his gardening was extravagantly romantic. He describes his ideal garden
in the _Epistle to the Earl of Burlington_:
Let not each beauty everywhere be spy'd,
Where half the skill is decently to hide.
He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,
Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds.
Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades;
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.
Pope carried out these ideas as well as he could in his garden at
Twickenham, where he attempted to compress every variety of scenic effect
within the space of five acres, so that it became a kind of melodramatic
peep-show. The professional landscape-gardeners worked on a larger
scale; the two chief of them perhaps were Bridgeman, who invented the
haha for the purpose of concealing the bounds; and William Kent, Pope's
associate and contemporary, who disarranged old gardens, and designed
illustrations for Spenser's _Faerie Queene_. Kent was an architect and
bad painter, much favored by George I. Lord Chesterfield compares him to
Apelles, who alone was permitted to paint the portrait of Alexander:
Equal your varied wonders! save
This difference we see,
One would no other painter have--
No other would have thee.
From 1716 onward he was much employed by the Earl of Burlington. He
helped to lay out Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, with a fresh and surprising
view at every turn; the wandering visitor was introduced, among other
delights, to the Hermitage, the Temple of Venus, the Egyptian pyramid,
St. Augustine's cave (artfully constructed of roots and moss), the Saxon
Temple, the Temple of Bacchus, and Dido's cave. The craze for romantic
gardening, with its illusions of distance, and its ruins and groves,
persisted throughout the eighteenth century. Shenstone's garden at The
Leasowes enjoyed a higher reputation even than his poetry, and it is well
known how he strained his slender means in the effort to outshine his
neighbors. "In time," says Johnson, "his expenses brought clamours about
him that overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his
groves were haunted by beings very different from fauns and fairies."
The chief of Kent's successors was Launcelot Brown, commonly called
"Capability Brown" from his habit of murmuring to himself, as he gazed on
a tract of land submitted for his diagnosis--"It has capabilities; it has
capabilities." He laid out Kew and Blenheim. Gazing one day on one of
his own made rivers, he exclaimed, with an artist's rapture,--"Thames!
Thames! Thou wilt never forgive me." He certainly imposed himself upon
his own time, and, so far, was a great man. "Mr. Brown," said Richard
Owen Cambridge, "I very earnestly wish that I may die before you." "Why
so?" said Brown with some surprise. "Because," said he, "I should like
to see Heaven before you had improved it." Among the romantic writers
who were bitten by the mania for picturesque improvement were Horace
Walpole and even Sir Walter Scott. Everyone knows how Walpole bought
from Mrs. Chevenix, the toy-shop woman, a little house called "Chopp'd
Straw Hall" which he converted into the baronial splendors of Strawberry
Hill; and how Scott transmitted a mean Tweedside farm, called Clarty
Hole, into the less pretentious glories of Abbotsford.
After the practice came the theory. The painters and landscape-gardeners
were followed by a school of philosophers, who expounded Taste and the
laws of the Picturesque. Some extracts from the work of one of these,
Thomas Whately, whose _Observations on Modern Gardening_ appeared in
1770, will show to what excesses the whole nonsensical business had been
carried. "In wild and romantic scenes," says Whately, "may be introduced
a ruined stone bridge, of which some arches may be still standing, and
the loss of those which are fallen may be supplied by a few planks, with
a rail, thrown over the vacancy. It is a picturesque object: it suits
the situation; and the antiquity of the passage, the care taken to keep
it still open, though the original building is decayed, the apparent
necessity which thence results for a communication, give it an imposing
air of reality." The context of this passages shows that the bridge
leads nowhither. On the management of rocks Whately is a connoisseur.
"Their most distinguished characters," he says, "are _dignity_, _terror_,
and _fancy_: the expressions of all are constantly wild; and sometimes a
rocky scene is only wild, without pretensions to any particular
character." But ruins are what he likes best, and he recommends that
they shall be constructed on the model of Tintern Abbey. They must be
obvious ruins, much dilapidated, or the visitors will examine them too
closely. "An appendage evidently more modern than the principal
structure will sometimes corroborate the effect; the shed of a cottager
amidst the remains of a temple, is a contrast both to the former and the
present state of the building." It seems almost impossible that this
should have been offered as serious advice; but it was the admired usage
of the time. Whately's book was a recognized authority, and ran through
several editions. He is also known as a Shakespeare critic, of no
particular mark.
A more influential writer than Whately was William Gilpin, an industrious
clergyman and schoolmaster, who spent his holidays wandering and
sketching in the most approved parts of England, Wales and Scotland. His
books on the Picturesque were long held in esteem. The earliest of them
was entitled _Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South
Wales . . . relative chiefly to picturesque beauty_ (1782). Others,
which followed in steady succession, rendered a like service to the Lake
district, the Highlands of Scotland, the New Forest, and the Isle of
Wight. Those books taught the aesthetic appreciation of wild nature to a
whole generation. It is a testimony to their influence that for a time
they enslaved the youth of Wordsworth. In _The Prelude_ he tells how, in
early life, he misunderstood the teaching of Nature, not from
insensibility, but from the presumption which applied to the impassioned
life of Nature the "rules of mimic art." He calls this habit "a strong
infection of the age," and tells how he too, for a time, was wont to
compare scene with scene, and to pamper himself "with meagre novelties of
colour and proportion." In another passage he speaks of similar
melodramatic errors, from conformity to book-notions, in his early study
of poetry.
The dignities of plain occurrence then
Were tasteless, and truth's golden mean, a point,
Where no sufficient pleasure could be found.
But imaginative power, and the humility which had been his in childhood,
returned to him--
I shook the habit off
Entirely and for ever.
Yet in one curious respect Gilpin's amateur teaching did leave its mark
on the history of English poetry. When Wordsworth and Coleridge chose
the Wye and Tintern Abbey for their walking tour, they were probably
determined in that direction by the fame of the scenery; and when they
and Southey settled in the Lake district, it may be surmised that they
felt other and stronger attractions than those that came from
Wordsworth's early associations with the place. The Wye, Tintern Abbey,
the English Lakes, the Scottish Highlands--these were the favored places
of the apostles of the picturesque, and have now become memorial places
in our poetic history.
All these gardeners and aesthetic critics who busied themselves with wild
nature were aiming at an ideal which had been expressed in many painted
landscapes, and had been held up as the top of admiration by one of the
greatest English poets. The influence of Milton on the new landscape
interest must be held to be not less than the influence of his
contemporaries, Salvator Rosa and Claude. His descriptions of Paradise
did more than any painting to alter the whole practice of gardening. They
are often appealed to, even by the technical gardeners. In garden-lore
Milton was a convinced Romantic. He has two descriptions of the Garden
of Eden; the slighter of the two occurs on the occasion of Raphael's
entry, and merely resumes the earlier and fuller account:
Their glittering tents they passed, and now is come
Into the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrhe,
And flowering Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balme;
A Wilderness of Sweets; for Nature here
Wantoned as in her prime and plaid at will
Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet,
Wilde above rule or art; enormous bliss.
Coleridge has some remarks, in his _Table Talk_, on Milton's disregard of
painting. There are only two pictures, he says, in Milton; Adam bending
over the sleeping Eve, and the entrance of Dalilah, like a ship under
full sail. Certainly the above lines are no picture; but they are more
exciting than any clear delineation could be; they are full of scent, and
air, and the emotions of ease and bliss. The other passage has more of
architectural quality in it, and describes what first met Satan's gaze,
when he entered the Garden and sat, perched like a cormorant, upon the
Tree of Life.
The crisped Brooks
With mazie error under pendant shades
Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flours worthy of Paradise which not nice Art
In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon
Poured forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plaine
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierc't shade
Imbround the noontide Bowers: Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view:
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde
Hung amiable, _Hesperian_ Fables true,
If true, here onely, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt the Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks
Grasing the tender herb, were interpos'd,
Or palmie hilloc, or the flourie lap
Of some irriguous Valley spread her store,
Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose:
Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves
Of coole recess, o'er which the mantling Vine
Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake,
That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crown'd,
Her chrystall mirror holds, unite their streams.
The Birds their quire apply; aires, vernal aires,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves, while Universal _Pan_
Knit with the _Graces_ and the _Hours_ in dance
Led on th' Eternal Spring.