CHAPTER I

THE TREATMENT

OF NATURE IN

ENGLISH POETRY

BETWEEN POPE AND WORDSWORTH

_By_

MYRA REYNOLDS

CHICAGO

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

1909

COPYRIGHT 1909 BY

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Composed and Printed By

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The eighteenth century is a period of transition and as such its

literature holds two elements, a vital impulse past its prime but still

dominant, and a new conception gradually emerging into dominance. It

is the interweaving of these elements, the slow fading of the old, the

slow gain of the new in fulness, definiteness, and ardor of statement,

that make this period peculiarly interesting for detailed study. The

interest persists even when the transition to be studied is limited to

so narrow a section of human experience as the attitude toward Nature.

The investigation, the results of which are embodied in this book, was

primarily undertaken to determine the place of Nature in the poetry

before Wordsworth. Every genius is, to be sure, more or less of a

miracle, and certainly not to be accounted for by any conditions of

literary heredity or even environment. But he cannot, on the other

hand, be justly thought of as an isolated phenomenon. Though not the

direct heir of any particular predecessors, he is, nevertheless, in a

vital and inescapable way, the heir of the general tone and temper of

his own and preceding times. In that fact lies the justification of a

study along historical lines of any recognized tendency in thought.

The pleasure of the biologist in the lower forms of life is paralleled

by the delight of the student of literature in tracing out the first

vague, ineffective attempts to express ideas that are afterward

regnant. In the present study the final effect is one of surprise to

discover not only how early the new thought of Nature finds expression,

but how completely the ideas of the period of Wordsworth were

represented in the germ in the eighteenth century. The whole impression

is that before the work of such men as Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge,

Shelley, Keats, and Byron, there was a great stir of getting ready. It

may fairly be said that before Wordsworth most of his characteristic

thoughts on Nature had received explicit statement.

In the pursuance of this study it soon became apparent that to confine

it to poetry was to limit the investigation unwarrantably. The interest

of the work was many times increased, and the deductions were rendered

much more certain, when the same transitions, the same periods of

change, the same tastes, the same emotions, revealed themselves side by

side in poetry, painting, fiction, travels, and gardens. Furthermore,

the vitality of the new impulse toward Nature is shown by the number

of directions in which it insistently demanded expression. Almost

independently of each other the various arts seem to have been pushed

forward from within to some sort of recognition of the growing interest

in the external world. In each art there seemed to be an unconscious

preparation for the master that was to come. Notably does this appear

from the chapter on painting. Constable and Turner were foreshadowed

and prepared for as evidently as was Wordsworth. When at the end of

such a period of preparation the great poet or artist comes, he is

great by virtue of his power to penetrate beneath literary conventions

and to give final literary form to the half-articulate thoughts and

feelings out of which the thoughts and feelings of his own epoch grow.

He has his natural place in the development. The significance of his

work rests in the fact that while it directs the future it also sums up

the past.

The first edition of this book has long been out of print. The natural

impulse, after an interval of ten years, is to subject a new edition

to a complete revision, with the rewriting of many portions. Revision

as drastic as might be desirable has not, however, proved practicable.

Various studies of special authors have been brought up to date in the

light of new material concerning them, as, notably, in the sketch of

Lady Winchilsea. Two chapters, the one on “Painting” and the one on

“Gardening,” are entirely new, and it has, fortunately, proved possible

to add a number of interesting illustrations of these chapters, mainly

from old prints. With these exceptions the book remains substantially

as it was ten years ago. In no case has further study made it

necessary to modify any of the general conclusions on the basis of the

earlier work. More intensive work in the different realms has happily

but reinforced these conclusions.

MYRA REYNOLDS

August, 1909

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi

INTRODUCTION xv

CHAPTER

I THE TREATMENT OF NATURE IN ENGLISH CLASSICAL POETRY 1

II INDICATIONS OF A NEW ATTITUDE TOWARD NATURE IN THE

POETRY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 58

III FICTION 203

IV TRAVELS 223

V GARDENING 246

VI LANDSCAPE PAINTING 273

VII GENERAL SUMMARY 327

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX 369

GENERAL INDEX 378

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

LONG LEATE 249

“The House and gardens of the Rt. Hon. Thomas Lord

Viscount Weymouth, Baron Warminster, L. Knyff, Del. I.

Kip, Sculp.”

HAGLEY PARK 261

“A View in Hagley Park, belonging to Sir Thos.

Lyttleton Bart., to whom this Plate is inscrib’d by

his most obed’t. Serv’t. T. Smith. G. Vivares Sculp.”

Published Oct. 1749.

JOHN MAITLAND, DUKE OF LAUDERDALE 275

“From the original of Sir Peter Lely in the Collection

of the Right Hon. the Earl of Lauderdale. Drawn by Wm.

Hilton, R.A. and Engraved with Permission by I. S.

Agar.” The print here reproduced was published March 1,

1820.

MRS. CARNAC 280

By Sir Joshua Reynolds. In the Wallace Collection,

London. From a photograph by the Muchmore Art Company,

London.

SQUIRE HALLET AND HIS WIFE 283

By Thomas Gainsborough. Now in the possession of Lord

Rothschild. From a photograph by Braun, Clement & Cie.

A CALM 286

By Willem van de Velde. In the Gallery at Dulwich,

London. “Drawn, engraved and published by R. Cockburn,

Dulwich, 1818.”

DUNNINGTON CLIFF 288

“A View of Dunnington Cliff. On the River Trent (Five

Miles South East of Derby) belonging to the Right

Honourable the Earl of Huntington, to whom this Plate

is inscrib’d by his Lordships most Dutiful and most

humble Serv’t. T. Smith. G. Vivares Sculp. Act of

Parliam’t. Augt. 25, 1745.”

DERWENTWATER 291

“A View of Derwent-Water, Towards Borrodale. A Lake

near Keswick in Cumberland. To Edward Stephenson Esq’r.

of Cumberland. This Plate is inscrib’d by his most

Obliged humble Servant Will’m. Bellers. Painted after

Nature by William Bellers. Engraved by Messrs. Chatelin

& Ravenet. Published according to Act of Parliament

October the 10th 1752.”

MOUNT SNOWDON 293

“A View of Snowden, in the Vale of Llan Beriis, in

Caernarvon Shire. I. Boydell. Del. & Sculp. Published

according to Act of Parliament by J. Boydell at the

Globe near Durham Yard in the Strand 1750.”

CADER-IDRIS 297

“The Summit of Cader-Idris Mountain in North Wales.

Richard Wilson pinx’t. E. & M. Rooker sculpser’t.

Published July 17, 1775 by John Boydell, Engraver in

Cheapside London.”

KILGARREN CASTLE 300

“Kilgarren Castle in South Wales, Richard Wilson

pinx’t. Will’m. Elliott sculp’t. Published July 17th

1775 by John Boydell Engraver in Cheapside London.”

SNOWDON 304

By Richard Wilson. In the Manchester City Art Gallery.

From a photograph by Sherratt and Hughes, Manchester.

THE MARKET CART 307

Painted by Thomas Gainsborough. In the National Gallery.

PEMBROKE 311

“Engraved by I. Walker from an Original Picture by Paul

Sandby Esq. R. A. Published May 1st 1797.”

LODORE WATERFALL 315

“Drawn by Jos’h. Farington. Engraved by W. Byrne and T.

Medland. London. Published as the Act directs, April,

1785.”

THE WOOD CUTTERS 318

Painted by G. Morland. Engraved by W. Ward. Published

by T. Simpson, St. Paul’s Church Yard, London, 1792.

The general theme of the treatment of Nature in literature is not a

new one. Schiller’s essay entitled “Ueber die naive und sentimentale

Dichtung” (1794), was the first attempt to state and explain the

difference between the classical way of looking at Nature and the

modern way. The externality in the classical attitude toward Nature,

he attributed to the fact that the Greeks were in their thoughts and

habits of life so a part of Nature that they felt no impulse to seek

her with the passionate longing of the modern poet, whose ardent and

heartfelt love of Nature is but the result of a mode of thought and

life out of harmony with her. This essay, however inadequate as a

presentation of the Greek attitude toward Nature,[1] determined the

lines of much succeeding study.

Alexander von Humboldt in his “Kosmos” (1845–58), in the midst of

his scientific generalization and his encyclopedic accumulation of

natural facts, takes occasion to discuss the treatment of Nature in

poetry and landscape painting. The chapter on landscape painting is

chiefly confined to such topographical, botanical, and other pictorial

representations as serve to add to our knowledge of distant lands. The

boundaries of the whole question are enlarged by a representation of

the profound feeling for Nature in Semitic and IndoEuropean races.

There is a brief study of the mediaeval feeling for Nature as it

appears in Dante, and finally of the treatment of Nature in some prose

writers of the eighteenth century. The only English poets mentioned

are Shakspere, Thomson, and Byron, the subject of English poetry being

disposed of in less than a page.

In Ruskin’s “Modern Painters” (1843–60) are several most interesting

chapters on landscape in classical, mediaeval, and modern times. “Of

the Pathetic Fallacy” and “The Moral of Landscape” are also suggestive

though misleading studies.

Victor de Laprade’s “La sentiment de la nature” (1866, 1868) contains

in full the theories already suggested in the preface to his “Les

symphones.” In the introductory chapters he outlines his conception

of the development of art. He regards architecture as essentially the

expression of man’s interest in religion; sculpture of his interest

in the demi-god or hero; painting of his interest in the complex and

varied life of man as man; while the characteristic art of the present

age is music with which the love of Nature is closely allied, since

both affect the mind indirectly through indeterminate and vaguely

suggestive harmonies, and both tend by their complexity and subtlety to

rouse sweet reveries, luxurious emotion, nameless longings, ineffectual

aspirations, but leave the conscience and the will untouched. No one

can read these critical studies by Laprade or his earlier poems without

feeling his enthusiastic joy in the presence of Nature. But he feared

this joy and counted it a part of the concupiscence of the flesh

except as it became an avenue to communion with the divine spirit. His

indictment against the passion for Nature in modern music, painting,

poetry, fiction, science is that the material is everywhere exalted at

the expense of the spiritual. To be of value the presentation of the

external world in whatever realm of art should subordinate its appeal

to the senses, and emphasize its appeal to man’s inner life. Laprade’s

work is a plea for idealism as against realism. In all his brilliant

presentation of the attitude toward external Nature of different races

in different epochs, this point of view must be taken into account.

In his rapid survey of English poetry the poets to receive closest

attention are Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton. In later times the most

significant of the poets who “gravitent autour de Lord Byron” are

Wordsworth and Shelley, who, in their attitude toward Nature, are

respectively moralist and metaphysician. Byron’s distinction is that

he alone found “le juste équilibre entre l’exubérance de la nature et

celle du pur esprit.” Thomson’s “Seasons” are of value because of good

_genre_ pictures and vivid descriptions of English sports, but the

initial force in the return to Nature is Burns.

Unquestionably the most important of the books that treat of Nature

in the realm of art is Biese’s “Die Entwickelung des Naturgefühls im

Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit” (1888).[2] The book is written with

enthusiasm and is stimulating and suggestive. The subject-matter is

well in hand, and so thoroughly organized that the great movements in

the historical development of the love of Nature are easily grasped.

The plan is comprehensive, including not only poetry, but, in briefer

outline, landscape painting and gardening, and, incidentally, even

fiction and philosophy. The least satisfactory portion of the book is

the treatment of the love of Nature in English life and thought. There

is some stress on the development of the English garden, but English

landscape painting is not mentioned. In the casual mention of English

fiction the emphasis is on Defoe. In poetry two epochs are recognized,

that of Shakspere and that of Byron. The chapter on Shakspere is

a close and valuable study. The work of Byron is estimated with

justness and sympathy, as is also that of Shelley. But the study of

Wordsworth as a poet of Nature is singularly inadequate. His genius is

considered as essentially of the pastoral-idyllic order, with now and

then glimpses of an “echte Liebe für die Natur,” and an unmistakable

pantheism. He is chiefly important as having done for England what

Scott did for Scotland and Moore for Ireland, and as sounding certain

notes which rang again in Byron “in verstärkter Tonart.” Thomson is

the only eighteenth-century poet studied. Here again is a failure to

recognize the real importance of the poet’s work. Biese acknowledges

the truth of Thomson’s separate pictures of Nature, and his genuine

love of the country, but denies his importance as a “pathfinder,”

saying that he but followed where Pope’s “Pastorals” and “Windsor

Forest” had marked out the way.

In 1887 appeared John Veitch’s “The Feeling for Nature in Scottish

Poetry.” The first volume begins with the early romances and national

epics, and takes up the chief poets down to James VI. The second

volume is devoted to the modern period from Ramsay to David Gray. Most

of the authors treated belong to the nineteenth century, but there

are admirable brief studies of Ramsay, Thomson, Hamilton of Bangour,

Bruce, Fergusson, and Burns. There is also a short but interesting

chapter on the rise of landscape painting, with especial attention to

its development in Scotland. Veitch’s book is written out of a full

knowledge and warm appreciation of Scottish poetry and of Scottish

Nature, and his critical dicta are usually trustworthy, though he

shows, perhaps, a tendency to overemphasize the influence of Scottish

poetry on the love of Nature in succeeding English poetry.

In John Campbell Shairp’s “Poetic Interpretation of Nature” (1889)

are to be found studies of Homer, Lucretius, and Virgil; of Chaucer,

Shakspere, and Milton; and of Wordsworth. Two chapters are devoted to

the eighteenth century. Ramsay is the poet to whom the reappearance

of the feeling for natural beauty is traced. Thomson is praised for

his minute faithfulness in description, and his genuine love of the

country, but his tawdry diction and superficial conception of Nature

are heavy indictments against him. The chapter on Collins, Gray,

Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Ossian, and the Ballads is interesting,

but from its brevity is necessarily inadequate. The most suggestive

chapter in the book is the one in which there is a classification of

the ways in which poets deal with Nature.[3] The whole subject of the

treatment of Nature in poetry is an attractive one to Mr. Shairp, and

he frequently recurs to it in his “Studies in Poetry and Philosophy”

and “Aspects of Poetry.”

In many books, also, not devoted exclusively to the treatment of Nature

in literature there are special studies and much running comment

of a valuable sort. This is true of almost all essays on the early

nineteenth-century poets, and especially so of the various essays

on Wordsworth. There is something to be found in manuals of English

literature, as in Gosse’s “Eighteenth Century” in the chapter, “The

Dawn of Naturalism,” in various notes in Perry’s “English Literature

of the Eighteenth Century,” Phelps’ “The English Romantic Movement,”

and others; also, in some histories, as in Lecky’s “History of England

in the Eighteenth Century;” in some philosophical studies, as in

Leslie Stephen’s “English Thought in the Eighteenth Century” (“The

Literary Reaction”), and in Stopford Brooke’s “Theology in the English

Poets” (_passim_); in various literary studies, as in McLaughlin’s

“Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature” (“The Mediaeval Feeling for

Nature”), Vernon Lee’s “Euphorion” (“The Outdoor Poetry”), Symonds’

“Essays Speculative and Suggestive” (“Landscape,” “Nature Myths and

Allegories”), Burroughs’ “Fresh Fields” (“Birds and Poets”), and

Fischer’s “Drei Studien zur Englischen Litteraturgeschichte” “Ueber den

Einfluss der See auf die Englische Litteratur”).[4]

The books indicated show that there is much interest in the general

theme of Nature as an element of art. The literary periods that have

been most studied are, however, the Greek and Roman, the mediaeval,

and the modern. The treatment of Nature in so barren a time as the

eighteenth century in England has naturally received little close

attention. In my own work on this period I have endeavored to discover

what indications there are that the attitude toward Nature of the early

nineteenth century is but the legitimate outcome of influences actively

at work during the eighteenth century. This study is therefore one of

origins.

I have divided my work into three parts. I have endeavored to give

first a general statement of the chief characteristics that marked the

treatment of Nature under the dominance of the English classical poets.

Then follows a detailed study of such eighteenth-century poets as show

some new conception of Nature. The third division is made up of briefer

studies of the fiction, the books of travel, the landscape gardening,

and the painting of the eighteenth century, the purpose being to

determine in how far the spirit found in the poetry reveals itself in

other realms in which the love of Nature might be expected to find

expression.

CHAPTER I

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE IN ENGLISH CLASSICAL POETRY

The poetry of the English classical period falls naturally into four

subdivisions:

1. The period of inception may be reckoned as beginning with Waller’s

first couplets in 1621 and including the work of his followers, Denham,

Davenant, and Cowley.[5]

2. The period of establishment includes the work between the

Restoration and about 1700. Dryden is the central figure.

3. The period of culmination is a brief period covering less than the

first quarter of the eighteenth century. Pope is the central figure.

4. The period of decadence extends from about 1725 to the end of the

century.

Any generalizations concerning the attitude of this classical period

toward Nature must be based on a large number of specific instances,

but in collecting and using these specific instances certain cautions

must be observed. Chief among these is the necessity of keeping in

mind the point of view from which the study should be made. It is not

the purpose to discover all that has been said about Nature by the

classical poets between 1623 and 1798. It is the purpose, rather, to

eliminate exceptions, and to dwell on the general, obvious qualities,

the typical features, of the classical poet’s conception of Nature.

This principle determines the relative importance of the periods noted

above. Illustrations drawn from a large number of poems in the second

and third periods would serve as the basis for a general statement.

Illustrations from periods one and four would need to be scrutinized,

for they might be purely classical, or they might be survivals of the

Elizabethan romantic age or prophecies of the modern romantic age.

Cowley, for instance, belongs to the first classical period because he

wrote in couplets, but his diction, his conceits, and in some respects

his attitude toward Nature are post-Elizabethan rather than classical.

Illustrations from his poems are of value, therefore, for the present

purpose, only when they are in accord with the spirit afterward found

in the time of Dryden and Pope. So, too, Milton and Marvell, though

coming chronologically within the first and second periods, stand in

the main quite aloof from any tendencies that can be called classical,

and their poetry is referred to only when it seems to illustrate the

dominant classical conception. Abundant and valuable illustration of

the classical conception may be drawn from the fourth period because

tendencies are nowhere more clearly shown than in the inevitable

exaggerations of a time of decadence, but the legitimacy of any

illustration is determined by its likeness to the dominating traits of

the preceding periods. While this study is confined in the main to the

poets of the period, journals, letters, travels, essays, and plays have

been quoted where they serve as proof that the poetry represents the

spirit of the age in which it was written.

Pope called Wycherley an “obstinate lover of the town,”[6] and the

phrase may well be taken to mark one characteristic of the orthodox

classicists. Poems, letters, journals, biographies, and essays bear

witness to the reluctance with which the men and women of this age bade

farewell to the “dear, damned, distracting town.”[7] Charles Lamb’s

lifelong devotion to Fleet Street and the Strand, and the sentiment of

the cockneys who, as Hazlitt said, preferred hanging in London to a

natural death out of it,[8] have their true prototypes in the classical

age. “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life,” is Dr.

Johnson’s dictum. Gibbon said that when he visited the country it was

to see his friends and not the trees. Boswell’s only justification of a

hastily expressed liking for the country was that he had “appropriated

the finest descriptions in the ancient Classicks to certain scenes

there.”[9] But not even the classics could reconcile most people to

a country life. It was dreary, monotonous, difficult. There was no

society, no news. The days went yawningly by with no vivid interests,

no stirring occurrences. “No person of sense,” exclaimed Mr. Mallet’s

sister, “would live six miles out of London.”[10] To live in the

country was to be buried. Lord Bathurst looked upon his sojourn in his

country home as a “sound nap”[11] preparatory to Parliament. “If you

wish to know how I live, or rather lose, a life in the country,” wrote

Pope, “Martial will inform you in one line:

Prandeo, poto, cano, ludo, lego, caeno, quiesco.”[12]

Pope found pure air and regular hours a physical necessity, but he

often rebelled at his banishment from town delights, as did his “fond

virgin” when compelled to seek wholesome country air.

She went to plain-work, and to purling brooks,

Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks,

She went from Opera, Park, Assembly, Play,

To morning walks, and prayers three hours a day;

To part the time ’twixt reading and bohea,

To muse, and spill her solitary tea,

Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon,

Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon.[13]

Isabella in Dryden’s “The Wild Gallant” speaks the general sentiment:

“He I marry must promise me to live at London. I cannot abide to be

in the country, like a wild beast in the wilderness.”[14] So, too,

Harriet, in “The Man of Mode,” counted all beyond Hyde Park a desert,

and said that her love of the town was so intense as to make her hate

the country even in pictures and hangings.[15] In “Epsom Wells” the

apostle of “a pretty innocent country life” is the boor, Clodpate, but

Lucia assures him that people really live nowhere but in London, for

the “insipid dull being” of country folk cannot be called life.[16] It

was in much the same spirit that Lady Mary Pierrepont responded to Lord

Montagu’s proposition that they should live at Wharnecliffe. “Very few

people,” she said, “that have settled entirely in the country but have

grown at length weary of one another.”[17] Her preference for town life

recurs in her poem, “The Bride in the Country.”

By the side of a half rotten wood

Melantha sat silently down,

Convinced that her scheme was not good,

And vexed to be absent from Town.

How simple was I to believe

Delusive, poetical dreams!

Or the flattering landscapes they give

Of meadows and murmuring streams.

Bleak mountains, and cold starving rocks,

Are the wretched result of my pains;

The swains greater brutes than their flocks,

The nymphs as polite as the swains.[18]

When Shenstone’s young squire went forth to London in search of a wife

the desired lady declared that she “could breathe nowhere else but in

town.”[19] Lyttleton’s fair maiden finds country life “supinely calm,

and dully innocent,” and affirms that

The town, the Court, is Beauty’s proper sphere.[20]

Young’s Fulvia had a similar passion for the town.

Green fields, and shady groves, and crystal springs,

And larks, and nightingales, are odious things;

And smoke, and dust, and noise, and crowds, delight,

And to be pressed to death, transports her quite.[21]

In Aaron Hill’s poems we find a characteristic contest over the

respective merits of city and country. Philemon exclaims,

Let rustic sports engage the lab’ring hind,

And cultivated acres plough his mind;

Let him to unfrequented woods repair,

And snuff, unenvy’d, his lean mountain air.

Damon endeavors to defend

Th’ unglorious preference of a country life

by calling in evidence Cowley’s retirement to the shades, but Philemon

triumphantly shows that Cowley’s dislike of the town was a clear case

of sour grapes. In the end Damon recognizes that it is weak and unmanly

to prefer the country.[22] Browne’s Celia explains to Chloe that

country life may become endurable if one does not give herself up to

“dull landscape,” but learns to think of the country as “the town in

miniature.”[23]

Such expressions as these are typical. They indicate the general

dislike for any life away from the city. And even those who loved the

country, or thought they did, were far enough from caring for any but

the tamest of its possible delights. Pope’s list of country pleasures,

though half humorous, is nevertheless suggestive. In contrast to Mrs.

M.’s devotion to “play-houses, parks, assemblies, London,” he depicts

his own “rapture” in the presence of “gardens, rookeries, fishponds,

arbours.”[24] When Bolingbroke “retired from the Court and glory to

his country-seat and wife”[25] he bravely insisted that he liked the

change. “Here,” he wrote from Dawley, “I shoot strong and tenacious

roots. I have caught hold of the earth and neither my enemies nor my

friends will find it an easy matter to transplant me again.”[26] But we

must join Pope in the laugh against such a catching hold of the earth

when we learn that Bolingbroke paid £200 to have his country halls

painted with rakes, prongs, spades, and other insignia of husbandry

in order to make it perfectly evident that he really did live on

a farm.[27] The genuine lover of the country in the classical age

expended his enthusiasm on the mild and easy pleasures of a well-kept

country house easily accessible from the city. That a sane man could

choose to live as Wordsworth did in the Lake District would have passed

belief. In general, the country was thought of but as a good place to

recruit one’s jaded energies, or as a refuge where disappointments

might be hidden and disgrace forgotten.

According to Gay,

Whene’er a Courtier’s out of place,

The country shelters his disgrace,[28]

and his deserted, lovelorn Araminta felt that only the melancholy

shades and croaking ravens of the country could suit her unhappy

fate.[29] Watts thought that none but “useless souls” should “to woods

retreat.”[30] On the whole, the words of the city mouse to his country

cousin expressed the prevailing sentiment:

Let savage beasts lodge in a country den;

You should see towns, and manners know, and men.[31]

The poet might sing the charms of the country if he chose, but he was,

after all, as Denham said of Virgil and Cowley, only “gilding dirt.”

[32]

The attitude toward Nature in the literature of any age may be tested

in two ways: by what is said, and by what is left unsaid, and of these

the second is perhaps the more significant. Certainly in the poetry

of the classical period the persistent ignoring of the grand and

terrible in Nature comes home to the mind as a convincing proof of the

prevailing distaste for wild scenery. And when we apply the other test

and find that the conspiracy of silence is broken only by expressions

indicative of positive dislike of such scenes, the case becomes a

strong one. This point may be clearly illustrated by a somewhat

detailed study of the poetical treatment of the mountains and the sea.

Rarely in the long period between Waller and Wordsworth do we find

any trace of the modern feeling toward mountains. If they are spoken

of at all it is to indicate the difficulty in surmounting them or to

express the general distaste for anything so savagely and untamably

wild. It is interesting to note that passages expressing the most

active dislike of mountains show really some close observation and a

good deal of picturesque energy of phrase. They were evidently the

outcome of a personal experience, the unpleasantness of which demanded

forcible epithets. They show that when men were compelled by the

exigencies of travel to go into a mountainous region there was not

wanting a perception of certain characteristic mountain qualities, but

that these qualities were only those exciting repulsion and terror.

In no case does a sense of the sublimity and beauty of mountains

find, or even apparently seek, expression. This is true in travels,

fiction, biography, and letters, as well as in poetry. A few typical

illustrations may be given. Howell, who went abroad twice before 1622,

strikes the keynote of the travelers who came later. He distinctly

objected to the “monstrous abruptness” of the “Pyereny Hills” and he

found the Alps even more “high and hideous.” He was obliged to admit

that the Welsh mountains were but mole-hills compared to the Alps, but

he thought the scale more than turned by the fact that those “huge,

monstrous excrescences of nature” were entirely useless, while “Eppint

and Penminmaur” at least furnished grass for the cattle.[33] John

Evelyn regarded the Alps chiefly as an unpleasant barrier between the

“sweete and delicious” gardens of France and the corresponding topiary

paradises of Italy, and his final conception of them is as the place

where Nature swept up the rubbish of the earth to clear the Plains

of Lombardy.[34] Addison was another of these early travelers, and

he, too, found the journey over the Alps most trying. The “irregular,

misshapen scenes” of a mountainous region gave him little pleasure.[35]

He preferred the safe monotony of plains. Both Evelyn and Addison

expended all the descriptive energy they had to spare for mountains

on Vesuvius, but it was, of course, its character as a striking and

curious natural phenomenon that attracted them.[36] Burnet of the

Charter House, the tutor of Lady Mary Pierrepont, in his “Theory of

the Earth” gives a theological reason for the existence of mountains.

He conceives the present world as a gigantic ruin, the result of

sin. Originally the earth was perfectly smooth. “It had the beauty

of youth and blooming nature, fresh and fruitful, and not a wrinkle,

scar, or fracture in all its body; no rocks nor mountains, no hollow

caves, nor gaping channels, but even and uniform all over. And the

smoothness of the earth made the face of the heavens so too; the air

was calm and serene; none of those tumultuary motions and conflicts

of vapours, which the winds cause in ours. ’Twas suited to a golden

age, and to the first innocency of nature.” But as a punishment for

sin the interior fluid of the earth was allowed to break through the

beautiful smooth crust, and in the ensuing chaos were piled up those

“wild, vast, and indigested heaps of stone and earth,” those “great

ruins” that we call mountains.[37] In 1715 Pennecuik said that the

swelling hills of Tweeddale were, for the most part, green, grassy, and

pleasant, but he objected to the bordering mountains as being “black,

craigie, and of a melancholy aspect, with deep and horrid precipices,

a wearisome and comfortless piece of way for travellers.”[38] In

1756 Thomas Amory commented on the “dreadful northern fells,” and

called Westmoreland a “frightful country,” and spoke of “the ranges

and groups of mountains horrible to behold.”[39] So late as 1773

Dr. Johnson said of the Highlands of Scotland: “An eye accustomed to

flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by

this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of

matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by Nature from her

care.”[40] In the same year Hutchinson deprecates the “dreary vicinage

of mountains and inclement skies” in the Lake District. He describes

Stainmore thus: “As we proceeded Spittle presented its solitary edifice

to view; behind which Stainmore arises, whose heights feel the fury

of both eastern and western storms; ... a dreary prospect extended

to the eye; the hills were clothed in heath, and all around a scene

of barrenness and deformity.... All was wilderness and horrid waste

over which the wearied eye travelled with anxiety.... The wearied mind

of the traveller endeavours to evade such objects, and please itself

with the fancied images of verdant plains, purling streams, and happy

groves.”[41]

The attitude toward mountains in the passages already referred to

appears in the poetry of the period with the same general tone, though

with less insistence. Throughout Waller’s poetry the only epithets

applied to mountains are “savage”[42] and “craggy.”[43] Marvell, the

most genuine lover of Nature in this age, was yet of the age in his

feeling toward mountains, for he characterizes them as ill-designed

excrescences that deform the earth and frighten heaven, and he calls

upon them to learn beauty from the soft access and easy slopes of a

well-rounded hill.[44] The unpleasant phrase, “high, huge-bellied

mountains”[45] in one of Milton’s youthful poems is hardly atoned for

by the lines in “L’Allegro,”

Mountains on whose barren breast

The labouring clouds do often rest,[46]

and his poetry is, in general, marked by the absence of mountain

scenery. Dryden’s most famous mountains are “drowsy” and “seem to

nod.”[47] In Blackmore’s summary of the charges made by Lucretius

concerning the “unartful contrivance of the world,” mountains are

styled “the earth’s dishonor and encumbering load.” The only defense

made by the poet is that these incumbrances do nevertheless restrain

the tides, yield veins of ore, and bear forests of useful wood.[48] So

John Philips defends his comfortable hypothesis that nothing is made in

vain by the fact that even “that cloud-piercing hill Plinlimmon” is of

some value since it furnishes “shrubby browze” for the goats.[49] And

Yalden explains how erring Nature supplies her own defects by filling

with mines the “vast excrescences of hills” that distort the surface

of the earth.[50] Prior’s only mountain is Lebanon with “craggy

brow.”[51] Pope has some “bright mountains” that serve to prop the

incumbent sky,[52] and he occasionally mentions mountains with such

epithets as “hanging,”[53] “hollow,”[53] and “headlong.”[54] Tickell

showed his attitude toward mountains in his address to Lord Lonsdale

whom he proposed to visit at Lowther Castle near Penrith, declaring

that he did not dread the harsh climate and rude country, for the

Earl’s presence would be sufficient to “hush every wind and every

mountain smooth.”[55] Parnell instances in his catalogue of the horrors

of Ireland her hills that with naked heads meet the tempests.[56] Dr.

Akenside speaks of a “horrid pile of hills.”[57] Along with this frank

disapproval of mountains is a similar dislike for their concomitants

such as precipices, wildernesses, and even dense thickets.[58]

One cause of this antipathetic attitude toward mountains and wild

scenery is, doubtless, as has been often suggested, the hardships and

perils of travel before good roads were built. Biese quotes several

eighteenth-century letters from German travelers to show how much “die

schlechten Strassen” had to do with the failure to appreciate the

romantic beauty of the Alps.[59] He finds another partial explanation

of the small interest in mountain travel in the fact that scientific

study of natural phenomena such as glaciers, geological formations,

mountain flora and fauna, was as yet in its infancy and that thus one

whole class of motives for enduring fatigue and braving difficulties

was wanting.[60] But these two reasons do not sufficiently account for

the lack of mountain fervor. It is not merely good roads and scientific

enthusiasm that bid men seek mountain solitudes today. Preoccupation

with terror and fatigue were not the only nor the chief reason for this

general dislike of wild scenery. The two charges even more persistently

and definitely brought against mountains are that they are useless, and

that they are a deformity on the surface of the earth. Now the first of

these is but another expression of the dominant utilitarian standards

of value, and the second is an outcome of the prevailing desire for

orderly and systematic arrangement. Pronounced irregularity of outline

was as irritating to the artistic consciousness as was exceptional

license in verse forms. Mountains entered an inevitable protest

against the spirit that found its highest pleasure in the symmetrical

complexities of a typical eighteenth-century garden. That this protest

was on a great scale with accompanying suggestions of mystery and of

a remote irresistible power, gives an added reason why the age turned

thus decisively from forms of nature to which a romantic age yields

fullest homage. Thus the attitude toward mountains finds its real

explanation not so much in external conditions as in the spirit of the

times.

The place of the ocean in the classical poetry is likewise significant.

It awakened no sense of elation as in Byron, no sense of mysterious

kinship as in Shelley. It was simply a waste of waters, dangerous at

times, and always wearisome. Though more often mentioned than the

mountains, it received an even more narrow and conventional treatment.

Except in some elaborate similes there are few descriptions of more

than a line in length. We find merely casual mention by means of stock

epithets, or very short and unmeaning descriptive phrases. To Waller

the sea is “the world’s great waste,” “a watery field,” a “watery

wilderness,” or a “main,” liquid, or troubled, or angry, as the case

may be.[61] Dryden’s epithets are hardly more felicitous. He uses

“watery”[62] with an insistence that finally becomes ludicrous. He

has one or two little ocean pictures written apparently for their

own sake, but his best use of the ocean is in similitudes.[62] In

succeeding poets the treatment of the ocean is exceedingly commonplace

and unimaginative. Such small interest as the sea aroused was of a

prosaic, utilitarian sort. Young’s “Sea Pieces” and “Ocean” may serve

as examples, and they are little more than eulogies of England’s

commercial and naval prowess. It is for Britain that “the servant

Ocean” “both sinks and swells.” It is solely with reference to her

prosperity that soft Zephyr, keen Eurus, Notus, and rough Boreas ”urge

their toil.”

The main! The main!

Is Britain’s reign;

* * * * *

The main! the main!

Be Britain’s strain,[63]

is the unvaried theme. The few descriptive passages are of periods

when “storms deface the fluid glass,” and seem to have been composed

in accordance with Pope’s famous recipe for poetical tempests.[64]

The most popular sea poem of the eighteenth century was Falconer’s

“Shipwreck” written in 1762. It is a sufficiently remarkable production

when thought of as the work of a common sailor but it is difficult

for the modern reader to understand the extravagant praise bestowed

upon it in its own day.[65] Its tame and conventional love story,

its descriptions of the sylvan scenes where Palemon and Anna gave

pledges of undying affection, its moralizings on the beneficial effect

of poetry, the evils of war, the corrupting lust of gold, its long

digression on cities and heroes “renowned in antiquity,” its invocation

to the Muses, its mythology, its reverence for “sacred Maro’s art,”

are all of the commonplace, classical order. There is in the actual

shipwreck scene some vigorous writing, but it deals almost entirely

with the emotions of the sailors, and the management of the ship. It

would be difficult to find any really effective lines descriptive

of the storm itself. The following quotations may stand as fairly

representative of the best passages:

It comes resistless, and with foaming sweep

Upturns the whitening surface of the deep.

* * * * *

But with redoubling force the tempests blow,

And watery hills in dread succession flow.

* * * * *

A sea, upsurging with stupendous roll.[66]

One of the most striking characteristics of the descriptive parts of

the poem is the daring and novel use of technical sea terms. Such lines

as,

Reef top-sails, reef! the master calls again.

The halyards and top-bow-lines soon are gone,

To clue-lines and reef-tackles next they run.

* * * * *

Deep on her side, the reeling vessel lies:

Brail up the mizzen quick! the master cries,

Man the clue-garnets! let the main-sheet fly,[67]

are praised as minutely accurate but it certainly needs a specialist’s

training to understand them.[68] There is nothing new in Falconer’s

poem except his use of realism in describing the ship’s maneuvers. The

sea is, to be sure, more prominent than we have found it in preceding

poems, but it is the same “desert waste,” the same “faithless deep,”

the same “watery plain,” and is deformed by the typical classical

storm. Strange as it may seem, it is yet true that the poets of

sea-girt England were very slow in making the discovery of the

ocean.[69] The main points in the eighteenth-century conception of the

sea were its usefulness as a commercial highway and its destructive

power in storms. This impression of irresistible force is sometimes

vivid enough to result in strong phrasing, but the changing beauty, the

majesty, the mysterious suggestiveness of the sea found no expression

in English classical poetry. Even in the poems that mark the transition

spirit the adequate word for the sea is surprisingly slow to come.

In connection with the failure to understand or love the mountains

or the sea we may note the avoidance of winter[70] or the conception

of it as the “deformed wrong side of the year.” Lyttleton thoroughly

disliked “gloomy winter’s unauspicious reign,”[71] and Pope said that

its bleak prospects set his very imagination a-shivering.[72] Lady

Montagu called the glistening snows a painful sight, and said that the

whole country was in winter “deform’d by rains and rough with blasting

winds.” The “icy, cold, depressing hand” of winter, brought in a season

of privations, discomfort, and dangers. Throughout the classical

period the typical phrases are “shuddering winter,” “winter’s dreary

gloom,” “the sad, inverted year.” Storm and blasts “deface the year.”

Hailstorms “deform the flowery spring.” Clouds “sadden the inverted

year.” Winter’s “joyless reign” is a season marked by “dusky horrors.”

Fierce winter desolates the year,

Deserts of snow fatigue the eye,

Successive tempests bloat the sky

And gloomy damps oppress the soul,

is a typical description.[73] Another indication of the dislike of this

season is found in a curious “Pastoral” by Washbourne in which hell is

represented as a place where it is “alwaies winter.”[74] It will be

observed later that a sense of joy in winter scenes is one of the very

early indications of a reviving interest in the out-door world.

Correspondent with the dislike and neglect of the grand and the

terrible in Nature is a similar feeling toward such aspects of the

external world as especially suggest mystery, remoteness, unseen

forces. That this is true may be seen by a study of the sky phenomena

that appear, or fail to appear, in this classical poetry. The day-time

sky is but briefly and vaguely mentioned or it passes unobserved.

A phrase so imaginative as Blackmore’s “blue gulph of interposing

sky”[75] is rare. In general it is only the more striking aspects of

the sky that are noticed, such aspects as would catch the attention of

a child or of a mere casual observer. Fleeting, delicate effects are

unheeded. Clouds receive little attention except as they portend or

accompany a storm, and even then their chief use is in similitudes.

Apparently the best-known appearance of the day-time sky is the

rainbow. But though it is often mentioned there is singularly little

variety in the phrases used to describe it. A brief summary of those

phrases most frequently used is interesting: “Painted clouds;” “the

clouds’ gaudy bow;” “the gaudy heavenly bow;” “the watery bow;” “the

painted bow;” “painted tears;” “the gaudy drapery of heaven’s fair

bow;” “the showery arch;” the bow “painted by Iris;” the bow “deck’d

like a gaudy bride;” “the painted arch of summer skies,”[76] and so

on through a wearisome list of kaleidoscopic combinations of the same

words. The constant repetition of adjectives so unmeaning as “watery”

and “showery,” or so external and artificial as “gaudy” and “painted”

is as characteristic of the general attitude toward Nature as is the

fact that the attention of poets should have been concentrated on the

obvious beauties of the rainbow rather than on the finer, more subtle

charms of the sky. In the same way sunrise, and especially sunset, are

often mentioned and occasionally described. But there is practically

no discriminating and appreciative study of what was actually to be

seen in the heavens. It was more natural to sit at home and read the

classics, and then announce that the golden god of day “drives down

his flaming chariot to the sea.”[77]

Twilight had, as might be expected, little charm or suggestiveness.

Moonlight also plays a most subordinate part in this poetry.[78]

We seldom find anything more direct or vivid than the time-honored

statement that “fair” or “pale” Cynthia “mounts the vaulted sky,” and

“adorns the night” with her silver beams.[79]

The night sky was counted beautiful because of its stars. The recurrent

conception is that the azure heavens are adorned with these orbs of

gold. The favorite words are “spangled” and “gilded.”[80] In Young’s

“Night Thoughts” we might expect to find some faithful and sympathetic

study of the nocturnal heavens, but in the first eight books not

seventy-five lines refer even remotely to external Nature, and in the

ninth book the stress is laid on “the moral emanations of the skies.”

In his efforts to find a sufficiently varied star vocabulary, Young was

driven to the invention of some new phrases, but in no case do they

show imaginative power. They are perfunctory and stiff and indicate

that his mind was on the “system of divinity” he meant his stars to

teach rather than on the stars themselves.[81] In Burnet’s “Theory of

the Earth,” a work already quoted from, we find a striking, because an

exaggerated, example of the way an undue love of order could modify

one’s aesthetic perception. Burnet enjoyed the night sky but he felt

that the stars might have been more artistically arranged:

They lie carelessly scattered as if they had been sown in

the heaven like seed, by handfuls, and not by a skilful hand

neither. What a beautiful hemisphere they would have made if

they had been placed in rank and order; if they had all been

disposed into regular figures, and the little ones set with

due regard to the greater, and then all finished and made up

into one fair piece or great composition according to the rules

of art and symmetry! What a surprising beauty this would have

been to the inhabitants of the earth! What a lovely roof to our

little world! This indeed might have given us some temptation

to have thought that they had been all made for us; but lest

any such vain imagination should now enter into our thoughts

Providence (besides more important reasons) seems on purpose

to have left them under the negligence or disorder which they

appear unto us.[82]

The final impression from the study of these passages that refer to

stars or moonlight is that the poets of this period were not unlike

Peter Bell into whose heart “nature ne’er could find the way.”

Nor for the moon cared he a tittle,

And for the stars he cared as little.[83]

Night itself, aside from its starry glories, was thought of but to be

feared for its brown horrors and melancholy shades. The conception

of daylight as useful and safe was a part of classical good sense.

The earliest poem in which we find the beauty and something of the

spiritual power of night represented is by Lady Winchilsea. Later we

find the characteristic sentimental melancholy of the poets involved in

a tissue of moonlight and mystery, while the faint colors and pearly

dews of the dawn, and the gentle sadness of evening shades, or in

extreme cases, even midnight glooms, seem to be the only fit setting

for struggling emotions and vague aspirations. There are also, as we

shall see, throughout the romantic revival, not infrequent studies of

the sky, especially of sunrise and sunset, from what we may call the

artist’s point of view. But all this belongs to the new spirit and is

a very evident break from classical traditions. Poetry in which the

classical note is dominant shows the utmost coldness and barrenness in

all that has to do with the beauty and significance of the sky whether

by night or by day.[84]

In contrast to the general turning away from the grand or the

mysterious in Nature we find a certain friendly feeling toward the

gentler forms of out-door life. Spring and summer, blue skies, gently

sloping hills, flowery valleys, cool springs, and shady groves appear

in the poetry with a frequency indicative of some real delight in

them.[85] But real affection for Nature even in her idyllic forms,

an affection the evident outgrowth of personal experience, is the

exception rather than the rule. When such regard for Nature is

apparent, however narrow in scope, it is rightly to be regarded as an

indication of a new feeling toward the external world, for in general

these so-called idyllic descriptions are to the last degree artificial

and unreal. They show that what the poet really enjoyed was not so

much Nature itself, as the creation of fanciful pictures of Nature,

the flowing combination of attractive details into such scenes as he

would like to find in the country in case he should go there. Garth’s

description of the Fortunate Islands is typical. There

No blasts e’er discompose the peaceful sky,

The springs but murmur, and the winds but sigh.

The tuneful swans on gliding rivers float

And warbling dirges die on every note.

Where Flora treads, her Zephyr garlands flings,

And scatters odors from his purple wings;

Whilst birds from woodbine bowers and jasmine groves

Chant their glad nuptials and unenvy’d loves.

Mild seasons, rising hills, and silent dales,

Cool grottoes, silver brooks, and flowery vales,

Groves filled with palmy shrubs, in pomp appear,

And scent with gales of sweet the circling year.[86]

The details of this listless, luxurious description are such as are

combined and recombined in many a picture of supposedly English

scenes. The poet found his pleasure in the vague, highly generalized

representation of such scenery as might exist in some imagined Elysium

or Garden of Eden. The final effect on the mind of the reader is never

one of reality. All is traditional and bookish. Perhaps there is no

more effective way of showing the general characteristics of these

poetical descriptions than by an accumulation of examples. Since

there is no danger of spoiling the poetry, it may be permissible for

purposes of emphasis, to print in italics such phrases as belong to the

common poetical stock. The first passage is Rosamond’s description of

Woodstock Park:

_Flowery mountains,

Mossy fountains,

Shady woods,

Crystal floods._[87]

Here the union of phrases, all conventional in their character, is

entirely fortuitous and undiscriminating. It is impossible not to feel

that Addison picked up his items at random, according to the scheme of

his verse. Take next this invocation by Broome:

Hail ye soft seats! ye _limpid springs_ and _floods_!

Ye _flowery meads_, ye _vales_ and _woods_.

Ye _limpid floods_ that ever murmuring flow!

Ye _verdant meads_, where flowers eternal blow!

Ye _shady vales_, where _zephyrs_ ever play!

Ye woods where little _warblers_ tune their lay.[88]

Or Shenstone’s description of the place of his birth:

Romantic scenes of _pendent hills_

And _verdant vales_, and _falling rills_

And _mossy banks_, the fields _adorn_,

Where Damon, _simple swain_, was born.[89]

Or Lyttleton’s lines:

Here _limpid fountains_ roll through _flowery meads_,

Here _rising forests_ lift their _verdant heads_.[90]

Or Congreve’s description of the scenery along the Thames:

And soft and still the _silver surface glides_,

The _zephyrs fan the field_, the _whispering breeze_

With fragrant _breath remurmurs through the trees_.[91]

Or Parnell’s

High sunny summits, _deeply shaded dales_,

Thick _mossy banks_, and _flowery winding vales_.[92]

Or Prior’s

The _verdant rising_ of the _flowery hill_,

The _vale enamelled_ and the _crystal rill_.[93]

Or Pope’s

Her fate is _whispered_ by the _gentle breeze_,

And told in _sighs_ to all the _trembling trees_;

The _trembling trees_ in every plain and wood,

Her fate _remurmur_ to the _silver flood_.[94]

Or Marriott’s

The mimic voice repeats the _gales_,

That _sigh along_ the _flowery vales_;

The _flowery vales_, the _falling floods_,

The _rising rocks_, and _waving woods_,

To the _sighing gales_ reply

Redoubling all the harmony.[95]

Further quotation is useless. It is easy to see that these passages

have no individuality. They might be transposed from poet to poet

without injustice either to poem or poet. They are like ready-made

clothing, cut out by the quantity to fit the average figure, and never

having any niceness or perfection of fit for any individual form. They

are not specific. They have no local color. They are, furthermore,

absolutely superficial. There is no hint of anything deeper than the

conventional external details mentioned.

Throughout the classical age the most genuine interest in Nature had

to do with parks and gardens. The formal garden, however, which held

its own in England till early in the eighteenth century, makes but a

small figure in the poetry of the period. Its affinities were rather

with prose. In later poetry we find many references to the classical

garden, but they are of the nature of a scornful retrospect, and they

belong to the new spirit. The subject of gardening will be presented in

a separate section.

In the study of the evolution of the love of Nature from Waller to

Wordsworth we may perhaps mark out three stages in the attitude toward

the external world. The last of these stages is the one based on the

cosmic sense, or the recognition of the essential unity between man and

Nature. Of this Wordsworth stands as the first adequate representative.

The second stage is marked by the recognition of the world about us as

beautiful and worthy of close study, but this study is detailed and

external rather than penetrating and suggestive. Very much of the work

of the transition period is of this sort. In the first stage Nature is

counted of value chiefly as a storehouse of similitudes illustrative

of human actions and passions. This first stage represents the use of

Nature most characteristic of the classical poetry.

A study of the abundant similitudes of this period indicates that they

were drawn from a very narrow range of natural facts. The lily, the

rose, the lark, the nightingale, the wren, bees, stars, drops of dew,

the sea in a storm, the oak and the ivy, leaves, the Milky Way--these

are the most important sources of similitudes. The poet chose his

similes from facts already canonized by long literary service, or

from the obvious facts of the park or the town garden. There is,

in the second place, little apparent effort to secure accuracy or

picturesque effect in the statement of the illustrative side of the

simile. The entire emphasis is on the human fact to be illustrated.

There is, therefore, in the third place, a failure to perceive subtle

or delicately true analogies. In most comparisons the likeness is

superficial or it is far fetched. The similes from Nature were not the

literary expression of inner congruities. They were consciously sought

for as a part of the necessary adornment of poetry. Sheridan says:

I often try’d in vain to find,

A _simile_ for womankind,

A _simile_ I mean to fit ’em,

In every circumstance to hit ’em.

Through every beast and bird I went,

I ransack’d every element;

And after peeping through all nature,

To find so whimsical a creature,

A _cloud_ presented to my view,

And strait this parable I drew.[96]

It is this elaborate desire for similitudes, together with the small

knowledge of nature that led not only to wearisome iteration of the

same similes but also to the still more wearisome iteration of the same

points of comparison. A rose, for instance, is a perennially beautiful

source of comparisons,[97] but in the eighteenth-century poetry it

is used almost exclusively either with the lily in matters of the

complexion, or by itself as representative of a young maiden. If she is

overtaken by misfortune the rose is easily blasted by northern winds.

If she is neglected the rose withers on its stalk. If she weeps the

rose bends its head surcharged with dew. If she dies young, the rosebud

is blasted before it is blown. The words of the “Angry Rose” to the

poet gently satirize this prevalence of rose similes.

Of all mankind you should not flout us;

What can the Poet do without us?

In every love-song Roses bloom;

We lend you color and perfume.[98]

The nightingale also has a conventional use. He generally represents

the poet and is either singing with a thorn against his breast, or

is engaged in a musical contest with other birds, in which contest

he quickly silences all competitors, or is himself driven away by

the clamorous noise of a crowd of common birds. The lark has his own

established set of applications. Dryden, Waller, and Savage represent

the poet as a lark singing when the sun shines, and Waller suits the

figure to the times by making the Queen the Sun.[99] Tickell called

himself an artless lark.[100] Cowley professed himself emulous of

the lark.[101] Somerville is a morning lark.[102] Wycherley compares

both Virgil and Pope to larks.[103] Any Fair One has a voice like a

lark, and to Dyer’s delighted ear the maidens who spun English yarn

sang like a whole choir of larks.[104] Not infrequently comparisons

are drawn from the old custom of daring larks by mirrors or objects

that would excite terror.[105] The wren carried aloft on the eagle’s

back serves a variety of poetical purposes, but is especially apt when

representing a needy poet and some powerful patron.[106] Bees are

by far the most prolific source of similitude. Their number, their

activity, their stings, their honey-making are all recognized means of

illustration.[107]

To express great numbers the most useful similes are drawn from stars,

pearly drops of dew, and, most frequently, leaves in autumn.[108] An

exceedingly popular simile is that of the oak and ivy, or the elm

and the vine.[109] Its use is obvious. The rising and the setting sun

represent various forms of prosperity and adversity.[110] From Waller

on, the Milky Way typifies virtues so numerous that they shine in one

undistinguished blaze.[111] A large class of similitudes is drawn from

water in some form. In this respect Dryden is typical. It is surprising

to observe how many of his metaphors and similes are based on seas,

streams, and storms,[112] and his most excellent use of Nature is in

these similitudes, though after going over many of them one comes to

feel that they are all made upon much the same pattern. After Dryden

conventional comparisons based on floods and angry seas are frequent.

The customary form of the river simile of this period is the comparison

of some man’s character, or actions, or literary style to some historic

rivers with marked features. Prior uses the rapid Volga to represent

the impetuous “young Muscovite,” while he compares his own king to

the gentle Thames;[113] and he compares the Romans to the Tyber.[114]

Pope scornfully likens Curll to the Uridanus.[115] Cowley compares

Jonathan to the fair Jordan.[116] Halifax compares the reign of Charles

II to the Thames.[117] Armstrong wishes his own style to combine the

qualities of the Tweed and the Severn.[118] Hughes likened his Muse

to the wanton Thames.[119] Roscommon thought a dull style was like

the passive Soane.[120] Somerville compared Allan Ramsay’s poetry to

Avona’s silver tide.[121] Thomson said that De La Cour’s numbers went

gliding along in “trickling cadence” and were like the flow of the

Euphrates.[122] Chief among similes of this sort is Denham’s well-known

apostrophe to the Thames.[123] There is also frequent use of rivers

in a more general way, as when Parnell compares the strains of the

Psalmist to a rolling river,[124] and Stanhope compares Pope’s style

to a gliding river,[125] and Addison compares Milton’s poems to a

clean current showing an odious bottom,[126] and Dryden compares Sir

Robert Howard’s style to a mighty river.[127] The use of a river as a

simile for life is not infrequent. For various purposes the Nile was

often used. Its annual overflow and its unknown fountain-head are the

chief characteristics drawn upon. The river similes seem as a whole to

be more effectively worked out and more gracefully managed than most

of the other similes of the period, although they have in no case the

beauty and profound symbolism characteristic of the river similes of

Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, and Lowell.

Another common form of comparison is that in which the seasons or the

various aspects of the day are used to describe some person. One of the

happiest examples is from Marvell.

She summ’d her life up ev’ry day,

Modest as morn, as midday bright,

Gentle as ev’ning, calm as night.[128]

Later similes are less graceful, but they usually have the antithetical

form of expression.[129]

Fairly numerous similes are drawn from trees. Dryden gives typical

examples, as,

And lofty cedars as far upward shoot

As to the nether heavens they drive their root.[130]

This equal spread of roots and branches, the heavy fall of a great

tree, and the superior height of some tall pine or cedar, are the chief

sources of similitudes.

The abundant commonplaces, the fluent ineptitudes, of these

eighteenth-century similes did not escape satire in their own day.

Now and then a critic looked with scorn upon the ingenious and

exhausting attempts of the poet lovers to devise comparisons adequately

expressive of the beauty, the fascination, the cruelty, the coldness,

the inconstancy, of their Cynthias of the minute. Butler thus notes

the tendency of poor and unmeaning metaphors to advance in a mob when

female charms were to be depicted:

In praising Chloris, moons, and stars, and skies,

Are quickly made to match her face and eyes--

And gold and rubies, with as little care,

To fit the colour of her lips and hair;

And, mixing suns, and flowers, and pearl, and stones,

Make them serve all complexions at once.[131]

This easy method of praising a mistress is also humorously described by

Ambrose Philips:

To blooming Phyllis I a song compose,

And, for a rhyme, compare her to the Rose;

Then, while my Fancy works, I write down Morn,

To paint the blush that does her cheek adorn,

And, when the whiteness of her skin I show,

With extasy bethink myself of Snow.

Thus, without pains, I tinkle in the close,

And sweeten into Verse insipid Prose.[132]

And Swift in his “Apollo’s Edict,” 1720, specifically prohibits the use

of some of the more wearisomely frequent similitudes. Some of the laws

he imposes on the poets of his realm are:

No simile shall be begun

With _rising_ or with _setting_ sun,

No son of mine shall e’er dare say,

_Aurora ushered-in the day_,

Or even name the _Milky-Way_.

The bird of Jove shall toil no more

To teach that humble wren to soar.

Nor let my votaries show their skill

By aping lines from Cooper’s Hill;

For know, I can not bear to hear

The mimicry of “deep, yet clear.”

In general we may say of the similitudes of this period that in

no other literary form was Nature so widely used, and in no other

form with so little beauty and spirit; that they were based on an

insufficient and inexact knowledge of Nature; and that they were used

without any sympathetic sense of inner fitness.

A further characteristic of the use of Nature in the classical period

is a personification of natural objects with the ulterior purpose

of making them conscious of the charms or emotions of some person.

When such personification arises out of an intimate identification

of man with Nature, a subjective recognition of the unity of all

existence, or when it is the outgrowth of a supreme passion compelling

the phenomena of Nature into apparent sympathy with its own joy or

grief, the expression is sure to bear the mark of inner conviction or

strong emotion. But when the personification is manifestly a laborious

artistic device, when it is based on neither belief nor passion, it

must be considered the mark of an age slightly touched by real feeling

for nature. And such, in general, were the personifications so freely

used in the English classical poetry. There is an artificiality, even

a grotesqueness, about some of them that forbids even temporary poetic

credence on the part of the reader. A good example is in Waller’s “At

Pens-hurst,” where the susceptible deer and beeches and clouds mourn

with Waller over the cruelty of his stony-hearted Sacharissa.[133] At

the death of any illustrious man or fair lady all Nature was convulsed

with grief. When Caelestia died the rivulets were flooded by the tears

of the water-gods, the brows of the hills were furrowed by new streams,

the heavens wept, sudden damps overspread the plains, the lily hung its

head, and birds drooped their wings. When Amaryllis had informed Nature

of the death of Amyntas all creation “began to roar and howl with

horrid yell.”[134] When Thomas Gunston died just before he had finished

his seat at Newington, Watts declared that the curling vines would in

grief untwine their amorous arms, the stately elms would drop leaves

for tears, and that even the unfinished gates and buildings would

weep.[135] In love poetry Nature is frequently represented as abashed

and discomfited before the superior charms of some fair nymph. Aurora

blushes when she sees cheeks more beauteous than her own. Lilies wax

pale with envy at a maiden’s fairness.[136] When bright Ophelia comes

lilies droop and roses die before their lofty rival.[137] So the sun,

when he sees the beautiful ladies in Hyde Park,

Sets in blushes and conveys his fires

To distant lands.[138]

And when that modest luminary is aware of the presence of the fair

Maria he

Seems to descend with greater care;

And, lest she see him go to bed,

In blushing clouds conceales his head.[139]

Nature is thus constantly compelled into admiring submission to some

Delia or Phyllis or Chloris. Even further than this do the poets go;

they make all the beauty of Nature a direct outcome of the lady’s

charms. In the gardens at Penshurst the peace and glory of the alleys

was given by Dorothea’s more than human grace.[140] No spot could

resist the civilizing effect of her beauty. The most charming example

of this sort of fanciful exaggeration is in Marvell’s verses on Maria

and the Nunappleton gardens.

’Tis she, that to these gardens gave

That wondrous beauty which they have;

She straightness on the woods bestows;

To her the meadow sweetness owes;

Nothing could make the river be

So crystal pure, but only she,

She yet more pure, and straight, and fair

Than gardens, woods, meads, rivers, are.[141]

If later examples of the subordination of Nature to man were so

graceful and quaintly tender as this poem of Marvell’s we might simply

regard them as permissible instances of pathetic fallacy. But even

taken at its best we cannot fail to see that this conception of Nature

in its relation to man is quite unlike the dominant conception in the

romantic school. In the one case we have the subordination of Nature;

in the other the ministry of Nature. A significant comparison might

be made between Marvell’s Maria, and Wordsworth’s Lucy.[142] The one

is the typical fair maiden ruling over her flower world and inspiring

to beautiful life all the gentle Nature forms about her. The other is

“Nature’s lady.” Her whole being is molded by her susceptibility to

the deeper influences of Nature untouched by art. Maria gives to the

external world the charm that it has. Lucy is graced by the spirit

of nature with all lovely qualities. But Marvell’s poem is really no

fair criterion of the use of Nature in the classical love and elegiac

poetry, for in most of that poetry the emotion, the passion, that would

justify extravagant or even impossible conceptions is conspicuously

absent. The extravagance of speech stood as the sign of an intensity of

feeling that did not exist. The poet was not swept away by overwhelming

passion. He worked out his verses with conscious deliberation. A

lady-love was one of the necessary poetical stage properties, so the

poet cast about him for a Phyllis or an Amoret, and then cast about him

for something to say to her. Such lines as Waller’s on Dorothea, who is

so much admired by the plants that

If she sit down, with tops all tow’rds her bow’d,

They round about her into arbours crowd:

Or if she walks, in even ranks they stand,

Like some well-marshal’d and obsequious band,[143]

are at once felt to be merely cold, tasteless hyperbole. The lines

do not win a second’s suspension of disbelief. Modes of speech, a

conception of Nature, such that high-wrought emotion might justify it,

or that might be natural and inevitable when the poet’s thought was

ruled by a living mythology, became mere frigid conventionalities when

there was no passion, and when the spirits of stream and wood no longer

won even poetic faith.

To speak of the poetic diction of the classical poetry has become

a commonplace of criticism. By universal consent certain words and

phrases seem to have been stamped as reputable, national, and present,

and to have formed the authorized storehouse of poetical supplies. If

one writer hit out a good word or phrase, it became common property

like air or sunshine, and other writers did not waste their time

beating the bush for a different form of words. Frequently words in

the accepted diction may be traced to some Latin author, but the

point to be noted here is that, whatever the origin of the word,

its use is incessant. The fatal grip with which certain words clung

to the poetical mind in the classical period receives interesting

exemplification from a comparison of Chapman’s and Pope’s translations

of Homer. It will be observed that in frequent passages Pope uses the

words “purple,” “deck,” “adorn,” and “paint,” chief words in the

classical poetic diction. But in the corresponding passages in Chapman

some other form of words is used. And in most cases Pope’s use of these

terms has no warrant in the original. Likewise, in Dryden’s translation

of Virgil the stock diction is used when there is no idea or picture

in the Latin to call for it and when the use of the stock phraseology

results in distinct loss of force or beauty. Compare, for instance,

Virgil’s vivid “flavescet” and Dryden’s tame “the fields adorned”[144]

used with reference to harvests of ripened grain. Or compare “novis

rubeant quam prata coloribus” and “painted meads;”[145] “noctem

ducentibus astris,” and “stars adorn the skies.”[146] We find the same

spirit illustrated in Dryden’s modernization of Chaucer. The fresh,

spontaneous simplicity of a poet like Chaucer serves exceptionally well

to show the comparatively insipid and feeble treatment of Nature on

the part of those poets who were content to take their expressions, as

well as their facts, at second hand. “The briddes” becomes “the painted

birds;” “a goldfinch” is amplified into a “goldfinch with gaudy pride

of painted plumes.” “At the sun upriste” becomes

Aurora had but newly chased the night

And purpled o’er the sky with blushing light.[147]

The same point is well exemplified in some of the changes made by Percy

in the Ballads. For instance,

As itt befell in Midsummer time

When burds singe sweetlye on every tree

was modernized to,

When Flora with her fragrant flowers

Bedeckt the earth so trim and gaye,

And Neptune with his daintye showers

Came to present the monthe of Maye.[148]

Full illustration would require much more space than is here at

command, but the point to be made is clear, namely, that even when the

poet had his natural facts furnished for him, he instinctively put them

into the molds of an accepted poetic diction.

By all odds the most frequent and significant words in this stock

poetic diction, so far as it has to do with the presentation of nature,

are indicative of dress or adornment in some form. The word “paint”

is everywhere. Snakes and lizards and birds; morning and evening;

gardens, meadows, and fields; prospects, scenes, and landscapes; hills

and valleys; clouds and skies; sunbeams and rainbows; rivers and

waves; and flowers from tulips to white lilies--nothing escapes. It is

little wonder that Somerville called God “the Almighty Painter.”[149]

The word “paint” is really an Elizabethan survival, and as such came

into the possession of Cowley, whose use of it is absolutely vicious.

A rainbow is “painted tears.” The wings of birds are “painted oars.”

David after the fight with the giant is “painted gay with blood,” and

the blood of the Egyptians lost in the Red Sea “new paints the waters’

name.”[150] “Gaudy” is another word of frequent occurrence. In general

the meaning was as now, “ostentatiously fine” as we see in Shakspere’s

phrase, “rich but not gaudy,” and in Dryden’s “gaudy pride of painted

plumes.” In that sense it was fitly applied to peacocks, and perhaps

even to rainbows, but such phrases as “a gaudy fly,”[151] the “gaudy

plumage”[152] of falcons; the “gaudy axles of the fixed stars,”[153]

the “gaudy month” of May,[154] the “gaudy opening dawn,”[155] the

“gaudy milky soil”[156] and the “gaudy Tagus”[157] seem to have no

exact meaning. “Bright” might often serve as a synonym, but not in

the application of the word to flies and falcons. The word “adorn” is

likewise eminently serviceable. Fruit adorns the trees, fleecy flocks

adorn the hills, flowers adorn the green, rainbows adorn clouds, blades

of grass adorn fields, vegetables adorn gardens, Phoebus adorns the

west and is himself adorned with all his light, and Emma’s eyes adorn

the fields she looks on. “Deck” is another favorite. Flora’s rich

gifts deck the field, herbs deck the spring, and corals deck the deep.

Vales, meadows, fields, mountains, rivers, shores, plains, paths, turf,

gardens--all are profusely “damasked” or “enamell’d” or “embroidered.”

The wings of butterflies and linnets are “gilded.” The rising sun

gilds the morn; the gaudy bow gilds the sky; gaudy light gilds the

heavens; lightning gilds the storm; meteors and stars gild the night;

and a duchess gilds the rural sphere when she condescends to visit the

country.

These milliner-like words were not, however, the only ones that the

poet could claim as lawful heritage. He knew, for instance, that he

could always call honey “a dewy harvest,” or “balmy dew,” or “ambrosial

spoils,” and have his hearers know what he meant. His birds, though

almost necessarily a “choir,” could be “feathered” or “tuneful” or

“plumy” or “warbling” according to his taste. His fish were easily

labeled as “finny,” “scaly,” or “watery.”

Breezes were “whispering,” “balmy,” “ambrosial;” zephyrs were “gentle,”

“soft,” and “bland;” gales were “odoriferous,” “wanton,” “Elysian;”

and no other kinds of winds blew except in storm similes. “Vernal” and

“verdant” come in at every turn. From Waller on, the epithet “watery”

seems eminently satisfactory to the poetic mind. Dryden may be taken

as illustrative. To him the ocean is a “watery desert,” a “watery

deep,” a “watery plain,” a “watery way,” a “watery reign.” The shore

is a “watery brink,” or a “watery strand.” Fish are a “watery line” or

a “watery race.” Sea-birds are “watery fowl.” The launching of ships

is a “watery war.” Streams are “watery floods.” Waves are “watery

ranks.”[158] The word occurs with wearisome iteration in succeeding

poets. It is applied not only to the sea but to rivers, clouds, and

rain, to glades, meads, and flowers, to landscapes, to mists, to the

sky, to the sun, and to the rainbow. The set phrases for the sky

are such as “azure sky,” “heaven’s azure,” “concave azure,” “azure

vault,” “azure waste,” “blue sky,” “blue arch,” “blue expanse,” “blue

vault,” “blue vacant,” “blue serene,” “aërial concave,” “aetherial

vault,” “aërial vault,” “vaulted sky,” “vaulted azure,” with such

other changes as may be rung on these words. The chief words applied

to stars, “spangle” and “twinkle,” have been already noted. The usual

adjectives for streams and brooks are pleasant, easy words like

“liquid,” “lucid,” “limpid,” “purling,” “murmuring,” and “bubbling.”

“Rural,” “rustic,” and “sylvan” are epithets applied to anything

belonging to the country, whether to the hours spent there, the songs

of the birds, or the charming country-maidens and their loves, their

bowers, their bliss, their toil. “Flowery” is so constantly used as

descriptive of brooks, borders, banks, vales, hills, paths, plains,

and meads, that it really has not much more meaning than the definite

article prefixed to a noun. “Vocal” is applied to vales, shades, hills,

shores, mountains, grots, and woodlands. “Pendent” and “hanging” belong

to cliffs, precipices, mountains, shades, and woods. “Headlong” and

“umbrageous” are favorite adjectives for groves or shades of any sort.

“Mossy” applies to grottos, fountains, streams, caves, turf, banks, and

so on. “Gray” is the usual descriptive word for twilight, and “brown”

for night. “Lawns” are usually “dewy.”

Some words in this poetic diction are no longer much used. “Breathing,”

is an example. It usually referred to the air in gentle motion, as

“breathing gales,” but we also find “breathing earth,” referring to

mists, and “breathing sweets,” and “breathing flowers” or “breathing

roses,” where the reference is to perfume. “Maze” and “mazy” are also

much used. The Thames and other streams lead along “mazy trains.” The

track of the hare is an “airy maze.” Paths meet in narrow mazes and

stars unite in a mazy, complicated dance. Milton’s stream flows with

“mazy error.” This word “error” is frequently used in its exact derived

meaning. In another place Milton speaks of streams that wander with

“serpent error.”[159] Blair has a stream that slides along in “grateful

errors.”[160] In Falconer the light strays through the forest with

“gay romantic error.”[161] In Gay the fly floats about with “wanton

errors.”[162] Dyer winds along a mazy path with “error sweet.”[163]

Armstrong’s “error” leads him through endless labyrinths.[164]

Addison’s waves roll in “restless errors,”[165] and Thomson treads the

“maze of autumn with cheerful error.”[166] “Amusive” is a word applied

by Pitt to the ocean, and by Mallet to clouds; Shenstone says that

country joys “amuse securely.”[167] It seems to be half apologetic

in tone in some cases; in others it merely means pleasing. Thomson

used the word as verb or adjective several times.[168] We also find

it in Parnell.[169] “Lawn” is used in the sense of an open glade in

the woods. Even so late as Wordsworth this meaning persists.[170] One

unpleasant but not uncommon word is “sweat.” It may be a survival from

the metaphysical conceits, for we find in Dr. Donne a reference to the

“sweet sweat of roses,” and Cowley has flowery Hermon “sweat” beneath

the dews of night. Dryden has flowers sweat at night.[171] Fenton’s

flowers

all pale and blighted lie,

And in cold sweats of sickly mildew die.[172]

Even Gray talks about the “sickly dews”[173] of night, and Thomson has

caverns “sweat.”[174] Garth, as a physician, may possibly be excused

for having the “sickening flowers” drink up the silver dew, and the

grass tainted with “sickly sweats of dew,” but when he has the fair

oak adorned with “luscious sweats,”[175] he has gone into the realm of

aesthetics, and no excuse can prevail.

The power of fashion in words in a conventional age is further shown

by the prevalence of adjectives ending in “y.” They are favorites with

Dryden, and hold their own steadily through the century that followed.

Beamy, bloomy, forky, branchy, flamy, purply, steepy, spumy, surgy,

foamy, blady, dampy, chinky, sweepy, sheltry, moony, paly, tusky,

heapy, miny, saggy, and many more, occur where at present there would

be no ending or the ending “-ing.”

The stock poetic diction may serve also to illustrate the indebtedness

of the English classical poets to their Latin masters in the matter of

phraseology. Compare, for instance, the use of the word “cavus” in its

application to “montes,” “cavernae,” “trunci,” “saxa,” “umbra,” and

“flumina,” and the English word, “hollow,” as applied to caves, rocks,

mountains, shores, valleys, and even to the dark. Or compare the Latin

use of “horridus,” meaning rough, rugged, wild, with “horrid,” in its

application to mountains, rocks, and thickets. “Savage mountains” and

“shaggy mountains” sound like an echo from Virgil’s “montes feri” and

“intonsi montes.” The fundamental conception is certainly the same.

Milton’s “hairy thickets” and bushes with “frizzled hair” and Dryden’s

“hairy honours of the vine” are suggestive of the Latin use of “comae”

as a trope for foliage. The word “honours,” as applied to foliage

or fruits, is also of Latin origin. The “tristis” or “dura hiems”

of Virgil finds its echo in the general epithets applied to winter

in English poetry. “Deform’d” and “inverted” seem to be mere Latin

transcripts. Dryden was fond of the word “nodding.” He used it twice

in translations in places where some other word would more accurately

represent the original.[176] In its application to mountains the word

may, perhaps, be traced to Virgil’s “nutantem mundum.” Its further use

by Dryden, Pope, Akenside, Shenstone, and others, with reference to

forests, rocks, and precipices, is apparently a later outgrowth from

its application to mountains. “Sylvan Muse” and “silvestris musa;”

“flowery plains” and “florea rura;” “liquid fountains” and “liquidi

fontes;” “mossy springs” and “muscosi fontes,” are but a few of the

many exact parallels between the English and Latin phrases descriptive

of scenery. So, too, the superficial conception of the various

beauties of Nature as “adornments” of the earth finds its prototype

in such expressions as “lucidum caeli decus,” applied to the moon, or

“pulla ficus, ornat arborem,” or “vitis ut arboribus decori est, ut

vitibus uvae.” An instructive example of the way in which borrowed

epithets lose their significance and become merely conventional is

the word “painted” in its application to birds. In Virgil “pictaeque

volucrae”[177] meant birds of many colors, or of bright colors. Milton

uses the phrase “painted wings,”[178] referring apparently to brilliant

birds in the Garden of Eden. But by Pope’s time the word “painted”

had become a stock epithet with its connotation so vaguely widened

that it would be difficult to give its exact meaning. It was simply

indefinitely associated with birds, hence Pope applied it to the brown

wings of a pheasant.[179] Shenstone uses it of the wings of a fly,[180]

and Parnell applies it to the eye of a peacock,[181] and Waller to the

peacock’s nest.[182] In the same way “painted,” in its application

to flowers, might easily be a picturesque descriptive adjective for

bright blossoms of any sort, but being gradually more and more closely

associated with flowers, it would lose its first meaning and come to

be applied to white lilies as well as tulips. “Purple” is another

borrowed word. It brought with it its whole train of Latin meanings. In

ordinary English speech “purple” had a fairly definite reference to a

specific color composed of red and blue, but in the English classical

poetry it was used in exactly the Latin sense. The fundamental idea

of “purpureus” was color, but a secondary meaning was brightness; in

its twofold application it was a descriptive epithet applicable to

light,[183] to flowers in general, to roses, spring, or morning. The

English phrases, “morning’s purple wings,” “the purple day,” “the

purple east,” “the purpled air,” “ground empurpled with roses,” “the

purple spring,” “purple daffodils,” are such as would serve the purpose

of a modern impressionist painter, but in eighteenth-century poetry

they chiefly indicate a knowledge of the classics. They were clearly

imitative phrases.

In individual cases the charge of imitation is a hazardous one to make

because so difficult to prove. However close the parallelism, it is

always possible to believe that two persons thought of the same thing

independently. Where a whole literary period is under consideration as

here, all that can be said is that the similarities between the English

and the Latin forms of expression are numerous and striking, that the

phrases are frequently such as would not naturally occur to an English

poet, that the English poets had little first-hand knowledge of Nature,

and that they knew their Virgil and Horace by heart. But after all, the

inner conviction of imitation with which one turns from a consecutive

reading of the two literatures is a more legitimate proof, perhaps,

than even a liberal assemblage of debatable specific cases.

The imitation is not confined to diction. Many of the favorite similes,

especially those drawn from trees, bees, leaves in autumn, the oak

and vine, angry seas, and streams, have a Latin cast. They seem to

be worked out on Virgilian models, and it is impossible not to feel

that the English poet owed more to his classical library than to his

knowledge of Nature. One striking mark of imitation is the prevalence

of the artificial cumulative simile so common in Virgil.

The details in the Latin pastoral poetry are also freely transferred

to descriptions of English scenes. The poet could not describe English

meadows without a desire to transplant therein some fairer blooms from

“the unenvious fields of Greece and Rome.” English rivers, skies, seas,

plains, hills, and valleys were presided over by classic deities.

Ceres, Pomona, and Bacchus, Dryads and Naiads, were as omnipotent

as if they were still believed in. The hardy English shepherd was

transformed into a languid swain eternally seeking mossy caves as a

refuge against burning heats. His chief occupation was to lie beside

some murmuring rill, or beneath some spreading beech, or under some

myrtle hedge, and charm the listening vale with love ditties played on

his pipe: or, for variety, to enter into some amoebean contest with

a neighboring swain concerning the rival beauty of their respective

nymphs. His chief troubles were the coyness, fickleness, and desertion

of this same much-praised Phyllis or Chloris,[184] and the occasional

incursion of nightly predatory wolves among his fleecy flocks. And

all this calmly in the face of the fact that there were no predatory

animals in English forests, that the chief enemies of the English

shepherd were cold and storm, and that he would be much more likely to

seek a sunny bank than a cooling grot. The classical English poets not

only knew nothing of the genuine English shepherd such as Wordsworth’s

Michael, but they did not wish to know of him. It was their ambition to

follow in the path marked out by the Mantuan swain. If they could write

so that every line would “confess Virgil”[185] they were satisfied.

Pope said that it was the poet’s office to represent shepherds not as

they are but as they may be conceived to have been in some past golden

age.[186] That golden age existed apparently in the Italy of Virgil and

the Greece of Theocritus. Dryden gave the acceptable advice,

For guides take Virgil and read Theocrite.

By them alone you’ll easily comprehend

How poets, without shame, may condescend

To sing of gardens, fields, of flowers, and fruit,

To stir up shepherds, and to tune the flute.[187]

Except in burlesque no poet of that day cared to change “Strephon and

Phyllis” into “Tom and Bess.” The great effort was to dignify humble

themes by constant reference to the great poems of the past.

The general structure of many English poems was evidently conformed to

Latin models. A comparison of the “Pastorals” of Pope, Gay, and Ambrose

Philips with Virgil’s “Eclogues” would sufficiently establish this

point.[188]

Throughout the classical poetry of Nature there is little reliance on

first-hand observation. There was safety and dignity in following Dick

Minim’s advice, “When you sit down to write think what your favorite

author would say under such and such circumstances,” and the favorite

authors were sure to be Virgil, and Horace, and Ovid.

The imitations were not, however, exclusively from the Latin authors.

Often the Latin borrowings came at second hand from other English

poets, and English poets borrowed freely from each other. A single

instance may be cited to show how an insipid and almost unmeaning

collocation of words could hold its own and be re-echoed from poet to

poet. Addison’s couplet,

My humble verse demands a softer theme,

A painted meadow, or a purling stream,[189]

was imitated by Tickell in,

By Nature fitted for an humble theme

A painted prospect, or a murmuring stream,[190]

and twice by Pope in,

Enough to shame the gentlest bard that sings

Of painted meadow and of purling springs,[191]

and

Like gentle Fanny’s was my flowery theme,

A painted mistress or a purling stream.[192]

Compare also,

Most of our poets choose their early theme

A flowery meadow or a purling stream.[193]

But one other sort of imitation can be noticed here, and that is a

natural outcome from the use of the rhymed couplet. It is what Pope

calls “the sure return of still expected rhymes.” The common rhyme of

“stream” and “theme” has already been noted. Pope calls attention to

others:

Whene’er you find the “cooling western breeze”

In the next line it “whispers through the trees.”

If crystal streams “with pleasing murmurs creep”

The reader’s threatened, not in vain, with “sleep.”[194]

The last reference is an ungracious hit at one of Wycherley’s poems

recommendatory of Pope’s “Pastorals,” but the rhyme of “breeze” and

“trees” is certainly of a bewildering frequency. There is a stanza in

point in one of the doubtful poems attributed to Gray:

First when Pastorals I read,

Purling streams and cooling breezes

I only wrote of; and my head

Rhimed on, reclined beneath the Tree-zes.[195]

One cause of the artificial and forced effect of the classical poetry

of Nature is undoubtedly the sameness of impression produced by this

frequent recurrence of the same rhymes.

In the foregoing study of the attitude of the classical poets toward

Nature certain dominant characteristics have been indicated, all of

them pointing to a lack of interest in Nature. The attention of the

age was concentrated elsewhere. Not Nature, but man was the supreme

interest. And the limitations must be drawn even more closely, for

the interest was not in man as man according to the democratic spirit

of the succeeding romantic age, nor in man as a creature of daring,

of wild passions, of lawless enthusiasms, of boundless energies, as

in the preceding Elizabethan age, but man as part of a well-organized

social system. Man in London was the central thought of the age.

This supremacy of the interest in man accounts for the acknowledged

preference for city life. In the country bad roads and poor conveyances

effectually separated men from each other. In the city the wits of

the coffee-house and the beaux and belles of the drawing-room were

able to gain the social converse and mutual admiration necessary to

their happiness. What they had to say to each other was incomparably

more interesting than any revelation from Nature’s solitary places.

Men feared and disliked mountains and the sea because these natural

features stood as obstacles to the easy pursuit of many pleasures,

and because in the presence of forces so vast and elemental men felt

themselves overawed and threatened. What they could not understand

and conquer was their foe. They turned uneasily from all forms of

Nature that suggest mysterious, unseen forces over which man has no

control. The limitless spaces of the sky, the “solemn midnight’s

tingling silentness,” the magical charm of moonlight, whatever is

infinite in its suggestiveness, drawing the spirit of man into the

vast, shadowy realms of the unknown, filled them with dismay. In

Nature as in everything else they instinctively confined themselves

to such portions of truth as they could clearly state and use. The

kind of Nature they loved was that in which man was easily supreme.

Their delight in cultivated rural England was largely based on its

power of ministering to man’s ease and physical well-being.[196] Their

delight in the formal garden grew out of their pleasure in seeing the

triumphal expenditure of human effort. There Nature was “rhymed and

twisted and harmonized” at pleasure. Man’s supremacy was nowhere else

more effectually acknowledged. Not art concealed but art manifest was

the ideal. Evelyn’s enjoyment of French and Italian gardens is almost

always based on his pleasure in some mechanical device whereby man had

conquered Nature.[197] What Cowley most enjoyed in the country was the

sense of his own skill and mastery. The “best natured” satisfaction

of all is, he says, the husbandman’s delight in “looking round about

him and seeing nothing but the effects and improvements of his own

art.”[198] The supremacy of the interest in man is further explanatory

of the facts already sufficiently commented upon that the most abundant

use of Nature was in similitudes for human qualities and passions,

that these similitudes were drawn from a surprisingly small number of

natural phenomena, and that the Nature side of the similitudes was

often carelessly and ignorantly handled. The dominance of man is also

back of the conception of Nature as stirred by man’s joys and woes, and

plunged into despair by his death. Nature is, at the utmost, but the

comparatively unimportant background against which man acts his part,

and there is seldom any effort to suit the background to the picture.

There is likewise significance in the twofold fact that in the set

poetic diction there are many words and phrases relating to Nature and

comparatively few relating to man. Where there was a concentration of

interest the vividness of the conception demanded new and original

forms of speech, while the stock diction, like cant in religious

expression, showed the absence of genuine feeling. It is in Pope’s

“Pastorals” not in “The Dunciad” that we find stock words, conventional

phrases, and hereditary similes.

In summary we may note that the characteristic attitude toward Nature

in the classical period is marked by:

_a_) Prevailing dislike or neglect of the grand or the terrible in

Nature as mountains, the ocean, storms, and winter.

_b_) A similar dislike or neglect of the mysterious or the remote,

as the various phenomena of the sky.

_c_) A certain apparent friendliness toward the gentle, pleasant,

serviceable forms of Nature as in rural cultivated England, in spring

and summer, in good weather, in various forms of horticulture.

_d_) An especial pleasure in Nature ordered and made symmetrical

by art, as in formal gardens and parks.

_e_) Descriptions of a highly generalized sort with almost no

touches of local color.

_f_) Full but conventional and superficial use of Nature in

similitudes for human passions and actions.

_g_) Narrow, uninterested, and hence frequently inaccurate

observation of natural facts.

_h_) Cold and lifeless imitation of the forms and details without

the spirit of Latin models.

_i_) A vocabulary restricted and imitative in character.

_j_) An underlying conception of Nature as entirely apart from

man, and to be reckoned with merely as his servant or his foe.