The Landscape Poets
There is nothing necessarily romantic in literature that concerns itself
with rural life or natural scenery. Yet we may accept, with some
qualification, the truth of Professor McClintock's statement, that the
"beginning and presence of a creative, romantic movement is almost always
shown by the love, study, and interpretation of physical nature."[1] Why
this should be true, at all events of the romantic movement that began in
the eighteenth century, is obvious enough. Ruskin and Leslie Stephen
have already been quoted, as witnesses to the fact that naturalism and
romanticism had a common root: the desire, namely, to escape into the
fresh air and into freer conditions, from a literature which dealt, in a
strictly regulated way, with the indoor life of a highly artificial
society. The pastoral had ceased to furnish any relief. Professing to
chant the praises of innocence and simplicity, it had become itself
utterly unreal and conventional, in the hands of cockneys like Philips
and Pope. When the romantic spirit took possession of the poetry of
nature, it manifested itself in a passion for wildness, grandeur,
solitude. Of this there was as yet comparatively little even in the
verse of Thomson, Shenstone, Akenside, and Dyer.
Still the work of these pioneers in the "return to nature" represents the
transition, and must be taken into account in any complete history of the
romantic movement. The first two, as we have seen, were among the
earliest Spenserians: Dyer was a landscape painter, as well as a poet;
and Shenstone was one of the best of landscape gardeners. But it is the
beginnings that are important. It will be needless to pursue the history
of nature poetry into its later developments; needless to review the
writings of Cowper and Crabbe, for example,--neither of whom was romantic
in any sense,--or even of Wordsworth, the spirit of whose art, as a
whole, was far from romantic.
Before taking up the writers above named, one by one, it will be well to
notice the general change in the forms of verse, which was an outward
sign of the revolution in poetic feeling. The imitation of Spenser was
only one instance of a readiness to lay aside the heroic couplet in favor
of other kinds which it had displaced, and in the interests of greater
variety. "During the twenty-five years," says Mr. Goss, "from the
publication of Thomson's 'Spring' ['Winter'] in 1726, to that of Gray's
'Elegy' in 1751, the nine or ten leading poems or collections of verse
which appeared were all of a new type; somber, as a rule, certainly
stately, romantic in tone to the extreme, prepared to return, ignorantly
indeed, but with respect, to what was 'Gothic' in manners, architecture,
and language; all showing a more or less vague aspiration towards the
nature, and not one composed in the heroic couplet hitherto so vigorously
imposed on serious verse. 'The Seasons,' 'Night Thoughts' and 'The
Grave' are written in blank verse: 'The Castle of Indolence' and 'The
Schoolmistress' in Spenserian stanza; 'The Spleen' and 'Grongar Hill' in
octosyllabics, while the early odes of Gray and those of Collins are
composed in a great variety of simple but novel lyric measures."[2]
The only important writer who had employed blank verse in undramatic
poetry between the publication of "Paradise Regained" in 1672, and
Thomson's "Winter" in 1726, was John Philips. In the brief prefatory
note to "Paradise Lost," the poet of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso,"
forgetting or disdaining the graces of his youthful muse, had spoken of
rhyme as "the invention of a barbarous age," as "a thing trivial and of
no true musical delight." Milton's example, of course, could not fail to
give dignity and authority to the majestic rhythm that he had used; and
Philips' mock-heroic "The Splendid Shilling" (1701), his occasional
piece, "Blenheim" (1705), and his Georgic "Cyder" (1706), were all avowed
imitation of Milton. But the well-nigh solitary character of Philips'
experiments was recognized by Thomson, in his allusion to the last-named
poem:
"Philips, Pomona's bard, the second thou
Who nobly durst, in rime-unfettered verse,
With British freedom sing the British song."[3]
In speaking of Philips' imitations of Milton, Johnson said that if the
latter "had written after the improvements made by Dryden, it is
reasonable to believe he would have admitted a more pleasing modulation
of numbers into his work."[4] Johnson hated Adam Smith, but when Boswell
mentioned that Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow University,
had given the preference to rhyme over blank verse, the doctor exclaimed,
"Sir, I was once in company with Smith and we did not take to each other;
but had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I
should have hugged him."
In 1725 James Thomson, a young Scotchman, came to London to push his
literary fortunes. His countryman, David Malloch,--or Mallet, as he
called himself in England,--at that time private tutor in the family of
the Duke of Montrose, procured Thomson introductions into titled society,
and helped him to bring out "Winter," the first installment of "The
Seasons," which was published in 1726. Thomson's friend and biographer
(1762) the Rev. Patrick Murdoch, says that the poem was "no sooner read
than universally admired; those only excepted who had not been used to
feel, or to look for anything in poetry beyond a _point_ of satirical or
epigrammatic wit, a smart antithesis richly trimmed with rhyme." This is
a palpable hit at the stronger contrast than between Thomson and Pope,
not alone in subject and feeling, but in diction and verse. Thomson's
style is florid and luxuriant, his numbers flowing and diffuse, while
Pope had wonted the English ear to the extreme of compression in both
language and meter. Pope is among the most quotable of poets, while
Thomson's long poem, in spite of its enduring popularity, has contributed
but a single phrase to the stock of current quotation:
"To teach the young idea how to shoot."
"Winter" was followed by "Summer" in 1727, "Spring" in 1728, and the
completed "Seasons" in 1730. Thomson made many changes and additions in
subsequent editions. The original "Seasons" contained only 3902 lines
(exclusive of the "Hymn"), while the author's final revision of 1746 gave
5413. One proof that "The Seasons" was the work of a fresh and
independent genius is afforded by the many imitations to which it soon
gave birth. In Germany, a passage from Brockes' translation (1745) was
set to music by Haydn. J. P. Uz (1742) and Wieland each produced a
"Frühling," in Thomson's manner; but the most distinguished of his German
disciples was Ewald Christian von Kleist, whose "Fruhling" (1749) was a
description of a country walk in spring, in 460 hexameter lines,
accompanied, as in Thomson's "Hymn," with a kind of "Gloria in excelsis,"
to the creator of nature. "The Seasons" was translated into French by
Madame Bontemps in 1759, and called forth, among other imitations, "Les
Saisons" of Saint Lambert, 1769 (revised and extended in 1771.) In
England, Thomson's influence naturally manifested itself less in direct
imitations of the scheme of his poem than in the contagion of his manner,
which pervades the work of many succeeding poets, such as Akenside,
Armstrong, Dyer, Somerville and Mallet. "There was hardly one verse
writer of any eminence," says Gosse,[5] "from 1725-50, who was not in
some manner guided or biased by Thomson, whose genius is to this day
fertile in English literature."
We have grown so accustomed to a more intimate treatment and a more
spiritual interpretation of nature, that we are perhaps too apt to
undervalue Thomson's simple descriptive or pictorial method. Compared
with Wordsworth's mysticism, with Shelley's passionate pantheism, with
Byron's romantic gloom in presence of the mountains and the sea, with
Keats' joyous re-creation of mythology, with Thoreau's Indian-like
approach to the innermost arcana--with a dozen other moods familiar to
the modern mind--it seems to us unimaginative. Thomson has been likened,
as a colorist, to Rubens; and possibly the glow, the breadth, and the
vital energy of his best passages, as of Rubens' great canvases, leave
our finer perceptions untouched, and we ask for something more esoteric,
more intense. Still there are permanent and solid qualities in Thomson's
landscape art, which can give delight even now to an unspoiled taste. To
a reader of his own generation, "The Seasons" must have come as the
revelation of a fresh world of beauty. Such passages as those which
describe the first spring showers, the thunderstorm in summer, the
trout-fishing, the sheep-washing, and the terrors of the winter night,
were not only strange to the public of that day, but were new in English
poetry.
That the poet was something of a naturalist, who wrote lovingly and with
his "eye upon the object," is evident from a hundred touches, like
"auriculas with shining meal";
"The yellow wall-flower stained with iron brown;"
or,
"The bittern knows his time, with bill engulfed,
To shake the sounding marsh."[6]
Thomson's scenery was genuine. His images of external nature are never
false and seldom vague, like Pope's. In a letter to Lyttelton,[7] he
speaks of "the Muses of the great simple country, not the little
fine-lady Muses of Richmond Hill." His delineations, if less sharp and
finished in detail than Cowper's, have greater breadth. Coleridge's
comparison of the two poets is well known: "The love of nature seems to
have led Thomson to a cheerful religion, and a gloomy religion to have
led Cowper to a love of nature. . . In chastity of diction and the
harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him; yet
I still feel the latter to have been the born poet."
The geologist Hugh Miller, who visited Lyttelton's country seat at Hagley
in 1845, describes the famous landscape which Thomson had painted in
"Spring":
"Meantime you gain the height from whose fair brow
The bursting prospect spreads immense around,
And, snatched o'er hill and dale and wood and lawn,
And verdant field and darkening heath between,
And villages embosomed soft in trees,
And spiry town, by surging columns marked
Of household smoke, your eye extensive roams. . .
To where the broken landscape, by degrees
Ascending, roughens into rigid hills,
O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds,
That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise."
"That entire prospect," says Miller,[8]--"one of the finest in England,
and eminently characteristic of what is best in English scenery--enabled
me to understand what I had used to deem a peculiarity--in some measure a
defect--in the landscapes of the poet Thomson. It must have often struck
the Scotch reader that, in dealing with very extended prospects, he
rather enumerates than describes. His pictures are often mere
catalogues, in which single words stand for classes of objects, and in
which the entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of
vast extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. . . Now the prospect from
the hill at Hagley furnished me with the true explanation of this
enumerative style. Measured along the horizon, it must, on the lowest
estimate, be at least fifty miles in longitudinal extent; measured
laterally, from the spectator forwards, at least twenty. . . The real
area must rather exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles: the
fields into which it is laid out are small, scarcely averaging a square
furlong in superficies. . . With these there are commixed innumerable
cottages, manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the surface is dimpled by
unreckoned hollows; there fretted by uncounted mounds; all is amazing,
overpowering multiplicity--a multiplicity which neither the pen nor the
pencil can adequately express; and so description, in even the hands of a
master, sinks into mere enumeration. The picture becomes a catalogue."
Wordsworth[9] pronounced "The Seasons" "a work of inspiration," and said
that much of it was "written from himself, and nobly from himself," but
complained that the style was vicious. Thomson's diction is, in truth,
not always worthy of his poetic feeling and panoramic power over
landscape. It is academic and often tumid and wordy, abounding in
Latinisms like _effusive_, _precipitant_, _irriguous_, _horrific_,
_turgent_, _amusive_. The lover who hides by the stream where his
mistress is bathing--that celebrated "serio-comic bathing"--is described
as "the latent Damon"; and when the poet advises against the use of worms
for trout bait, he puts it thus:
"But let not on your hook the tortured worm
Convulsive writhe in agonizing folds," etc.
The poets had now begun to withdraw from town and go out into the
country, but in their retirement to the sylvan shades they were
accompanied sometimes, indeed, by Milton's "mountain nymph, sweet
Liberty," but quite as frequently by Shenstone's nymph, "coy Elegance,"
who kept reminding them of Vergil.
Thomson's blank verse, although, as Coleridge says, inferior to Cowper's,
is often richly musical and with an energy unborrowed of Milton--as
Cowper's is too apt to be, at least in his translation of Homer.[10] Mr.
Saintsbury[11] detects a mannerism in the verse of "The Seasons," which
he illustrates by citing three lines with which the poet "caps the climax
of three several descriptive passages, all within the compass of half a
dozen pages," viz.:
"And Egypt joys beneath the spreading wave."
"And Mecca saddens at the long delay."
"And Thule bellows through her utmost isles."
It would be easy to add many other instances of this type of climacteric
line, _e.g. _("Summer," 859),
"And Ocean trembles for his green domain."
For the blank verse of "The Seasons" is a blank verse which has been
passed through the strainer of the heroic couplet. Though Thomson, in
the flow and continuity of his measure, offers, as has been said, the
greatest contrast to Pope's system of versification; yet wherever he
seeks to be nervous, his modulation reminds one more of Pope's
antithetical trick than of Shakspere's or Milton's freer structure. For
instance ("Spring," 1015):
"Fills every sense and pants in every vein."
or (_Ibid._ 1104):
"Flames through the nerves and boils along the veins."
To relieve the monotony of a descriptive poem, the author introduced
moralizing digressions: advice to the husbandman and the shepherd after
the manner of the "Georgics"; compliments to his patrons, like Lyttelton,
Bubb Dodington, and the Countess of Hertford; and sentimental narrative
episodes, such as the stories of Damon and Musidora,[12] and Celadon and
Amelia in "Summer," and of Lavinia and Palemon[13] in "Autumn"; while
ever and anon his eye extensive roamed over the phenomena of nature in
foreign climes, the arctic night, the tropic summer, etc. Wordsworth
asserts that these sentimental passages "are the parts of the work which
were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general
notice."[14] They strike us now as insipid enough. But many coming
attitudes cast their shadows before across the page of "The Seasons."
Thomson's denunciation of the slave trade, and of cruelty to animals,
especially the caging of birds and the coursing of hares; his preference
of country to town; his rhapsodies on domestic love and the innocence of
the Golden Age; his contrast between the misery of the poor and the
heartless luxury of the rich; all these features of the poem foretoken
the sentimentalism of Sterne and Goldsmith, and the humanitarianism of
Cowper and Burns. They anticipate, in particular, that half affected
itch of simplicity which titillated the sensibilities of a corrupt and
artificial society in the writings of Rousseau and the idyllic pictures
of Bernardin de St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia." Thomson went so far in
this vein as to decry the use of animal food in a passage which recalls
Goldsmith's stanza:[15]
"No flocks that range the valley free
To slaughter I condemn:
Taught by the power that pities me,
I learn to pity them."
This sort of thing was in the air. Pope was not a sentimental person,
yet even Pope had written
"The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food.
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."[16]
It does not appear that Thomson was personally averse to a leg of mutton.
His denunciations of luxury, and his praise of early rising[17] and cold
bathing[18] sound rather hollow from the lips of a bard--"more fat than
bard beseems"-who used to lie abed till noon, and who, as Savage told
Johnson, "was perhaps never in cold water in his life." Johnson reports,
not without some spice of malice, that the Countess of Hertford, "whose
practice it was to invite every summer some poet into the country, to
hear her verses and assist her studies," extended this courtesy to
Thomson, "who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hertford and his
friends than assisting her ladyship's poetical operations, and therefore
never received another summons."[19]
The romantic note is not absent from "The Seasons," but it is not
prominent. Thomson's theme was the changes of the year as they affect
the English landscape, a soft, cultivated landscape of lawns, gardens,
fields, orchards, sheep-walks, and forest preserves. Only now and then
that attraction toward the savage, the awful, the mysterious, the
primitive, which marks the romantic mood in naturalistic poetry, shows
itself in touches like these.
"High from the summit of a craggy cliff,
Hung o'er the deep, such as amazing frowns
On utmost Kilda's shore, whose lonely race
Reigns the setting sun to Indian worlds."[20]
"Or where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."[21]
Compare also the description of the thunderstorm in the mountains
("Summer," 1156-68), closing with the lines:
"Far seen the heights of heathy Cheviot blaze,
And Thule bellows through her utmost isles."
The Western Islands appear to have had a peculiar fascination for
Thomson. The passages above quoted, and the stanza from "The Castle of
Indolence," cited on page 94, gave Collins the clew for his "Ode on the
Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," which contained, says Lowell,
the whole romantic school in the germ. Thomason had perhaps found the
embryon atom in Milton's "stormy Hebrides," in "Lycidas," whose echo is
prolonged in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper"--
"Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides."
Even Pope--he had a soul--was not unsensitive to this, as witness his
"Loud as the wolves, on Orcas' stormy steep,
Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep."[22]
The melancholy which Victor Hugo pronounces a distinguishing badge of
romantic art, and which we shall see gaining more and more upon English
poetry as the century advanced, is also discernible in "The Seasons" in a
passage like the following:
"O bear me then to vast embowering shades,
To twilight groves and visionary vales,
To weeping grottos and prophetic glooms;
Where angel-forms athwart the solemn dusk
Tremendous sweep, or seem to sweep along;
And voices more than human, through the void,
Deep-sounding, seize the enthusiastic ear;"[23]
or this, which recalls "Il Penseroso":
"Now all amid the rigors of the year,
In the wild depth of winter, while without
The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat
Between the groaning forest and the shore,
Beat by the boundless multitude of waves,
A rural, sheltered, solitary scene;
Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join
To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit
And hold high converse with the mighty dead."[24]
The revival again, of the preternatural and of popular superstitions as
literary material, after a rationalizing and skeptical age, is signalized
by such a passage as this:
"Onward they pass, o'er many a panting height,
And valley sunk and unfrequented, where
At fall of eve the fairy people throng,
In various game and revelry to pass
The summer night, as village stories tell.
But far around they wander from the grave
Of him whom his ungentle fortune urged
Against his own sad breast to life the hand
Of impious violence. The lonely tower
Is also shunned, whose mournful chambers hold,
So night-struck fancy dreams, the yelling ghost."
It may not be uninstructive to note the occurrence of the word _romantic_
at several points in the poem:
"glimmering shades and sympathetic glooms,
Where the dim umbrage o'er the falling stream
Romantic hangs."[25]
This is from a passage in which romantic love once more comes back into
poetry, after its long eclipse; and in which the lover is depicted as
wandering abroad at "pensive dusk," or by moonlight, through groves and
along brooksides.[26] The word is applied likewise to clouds, "rolled
into romantic shapes, the dream of waking fancy"; and to the scenery of
Scotland--"Caledonia in romantic view." In a subtler way, the feeling of
such lines as these is romantic:
"Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart,
As home he goes beneath the joyous moon;"
or these, of the comparative lightness of the summer night:
"A faint, erroneous ray,
Glanced from the imperfect surfaces of things,
Flings half an image on the straining eye."
In a letter to Stonehewer (June 29, 1760), Gray comments thus upon a
passage from Ossian:
"'Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night:
Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind:
_Their songs are of other worlds._'
"Did you never observe (_while rocking winds are piping loud_) that pause,
as the gust is re-collecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill
and plaintive note, like the soul of an Aeolian harp? I do assure you,
there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit. Thomson had
an ear sometimes; he was not deaf to this, and has described it
gloriously, but given it another, different turn, and of more horror. I
cannot repeat the lines: it is in his 'Winter.'" The lines that Gray had
in mind were probably these (191-94):
"Then, too, they say, through all the burdened air,
Long groans are heard, shrill sounds and distant sighs
That, uttered by the demon of the night,
Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death."
Thomson appears to have been a sweet-tempered, indolent man, constant in
friendship and much loved by his friends. He had a little house and
grounds in Kew Lane where he used to compose poetry on autumn nights and
loved to listen to the nightingales in Richmond Garden; and where, sang
Collins, in his ode on the poet's death (1748),
"Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore,
When Thames in summer wreaths is drest,
And oft suspend the dashing oar
To bid his gentle spirit rest."
Collins had been attracted to Richmond by Thomson's residence there, and
forsook the neighborhood after his friend's death.
Joseph Warton, in his "Essay on Pope" (1756), testified that "The
Seasons" had been "very instrumental in diffusing a taste for the
beauties of nature and landscape." One evidence of this diffused taste
was the rise of the new or natural school of landscape gardening. This
was a purely English art, and Gray, writing in 1763,[27] says "It is not
forty years since the art was born among us; and it is sure that there
was nothing in Europe like it": he adds that "our skill in gardening and
laying out grounds" is "the only taste we can call our own, the only
proof of our original talent in matter of pleasure." "Neither Italy nor
France have ever had the least notion of it, nor yet do at all comprehend
it, when they see it."[28] Gray's "not forty years" carries us back with
sufficient precision to the date of "The Seasons" (1726-30), and it is
not perhaps giving undue credit to Thomson, to acknowledge him as, in a
great measure, the father of the national school of landscape gardening.
That this has always been recognized upon the Continent as an art of
English invention, is evidenced by the names _Englische Garten_, _jardin
Anglais_, still given in Germany and France to pleasure grounds laid out
in the natural taste.[29] Schopenhauer gives the philosophy of the
opposing styles as follows: "The great distinction between the English
and the old French garden rests, in the last analysis, upon this, viz.,
that the former are laid out in the objective, the latter in the
subjective sense, that is to say, in the former the will of Nature, as it
manifests (_objektivirt_) itself in tree, mountain, and water, is brought
to the purest possible expression of its ideas, _i.e._, of its own being.
In the French gardens, on the other hand, there is reflected only the
will of the owner who has subdued Nature, so that, instead of her own
ideas, she wears as tokens of her slavery, the forms which he has forced
upon her-clipped hedges, trees cut into all manner of shapes, straight
alleys, arched walks, etc."
It would be unfair to hold the false taste of Pope's generation
responsible for that formal style of gardening which prevailed when "The
Seasons" was written. The old-fashioned Italian or French or Dutch
garden--as it was variously called--antedated the Augustan era, which
simply inherited it from the seventeenth century. In Bacon's essay on
gardens, as well as in the essays on the same subject by Cowley and Sir
William Temple, the ideal pleasure ground is very much like that which Le
Notre realized so brilliantly at Versailles.[30] Addison, in fact, in
the _Spectator_ (No. 414) and Pope himself in the _Guardian_ (No. 173)
ridiculed the excesses of the reigning mode, and Pope attacked them again
in his description of Timon's Villa in the "Epistle to the Earl of
Burlington" (1731), which was thought to be meant for Canons, the seat of
the Duke of Chandos.
"His gardens next your admiration call,
On every side you look, behold the wall!
No pleasing intricacies intervene,
No artful wildness to perplex the scene;
Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
The suffering eye inverted nature sees,
Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees;
With here a fountain, never to be played;
And there a summer house, that knows no shade;
Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers;
There gladiators fight, or die in flowers;
Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn,
And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn."
Still the criticism is not merely fanciful which discovers an analogy
between the French garden, with its trim regularity and artificial
smoothness, and the couplets which Pope wrote: just such an analogy as
exists between the whole classical school of poetry and the Italian
architecture copied from Palladio and introduced in England by Inigo
Jones and Christopher Wren. Grounds were laid out in rectangular plots,
bordered by straight alleys, sometimes paved with vari-colored sand, and
edged with formal hedges of box and holly. The turf was inlaid with
parterres cut in geometric shapes and set, at even distances, with yew
trees clipped into cubes, cones, pyramids, spheres, sometimes into
figures of giants, birds, animals, and ships--called "topiary work"
(_opus topiarium_). Terraces, fountains, bowling-greens (Fr.
_boulingrin_) statues, arcades, quincunxes, espallers, and artificial
mazes or labyrinths loaded the scene. The whole was inclosed by a wall,
which shut the garden off from the surrounding country.
"When a Frenchman reads of the Garden of Eden," says Horace Walpole, in
his essay "On Modern Gardening" (written in 1770, published in 1785), "I
do not doubt but he concludes it was something approaching to that of
Versailles, with clipped hedges, _berceaux_ and trellis work. . . The
measured walk, the quincunx and the _étoile_ imposed their unsatisfying
sameness on every royal and noble garden. . . Many French groves seem
green chests set upon poles. . . In the garden of Marshal de Biron at
Paris, consisting of fourteen acres, every walk is buttoned on each side
by lines of flower-pots, which succeed in their seasons. When I saw it,
there were nine thousand pots of asters, or _la reine Marguerite_. . .
At Lady Orford's, at Piddletown, in Dorsetshire, there was, when my
brother married, a double enclosure of thirteen gardens, each I suppose
not much above a hundred yards square, with an enfilade of correspondent
gates; and before you arrived at these, you passed a narrow gut between
two stone terraces that rose above your head, and which were crowned by a
line of pyradmidal yews. A bowling green was all the lawn admitted in
those times: a circular lake the extent of magnificence."[31]
Walpole names Theobalds and Nonsuch as famous examples of the old formal
style of garden; Stourhead, Hagley, and Stowe--the country seat of
Lyttelton's brother-in-law, Lord Cobham--of the new. He says that
mottoes and coats of arms were sometimes cut in yew, box, and holly. He
refers with respect to a recent work by the Rev. Thomas Whately, or
Wheatley, "Observations on Modern Gardening," 1770; and to a poem, then
and still in manuscript, but passages of which are given by Amherst,[32]
entitled "The Rise and Progress of the Present Taste in Planting Parks,
Pleasure Grounds, Gardens, etc. In a poetic epistle to Lord Viscount
Irwin," 1767.
Gray's friend and editor, the Rev. William Mason, in his poem "The
English Garden," 1757, speaks of the French garden as already a thing of
the past.
"O how unlike the scene my fancy forms,
Did Folly, heretofore, with Wealth conspire
To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene
Which once was called a garden! Britain still
Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound
Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid
From geometric skill, they vainly strove
By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears
To form with verdure what the builder formed
With stone. . .
Hence the sidelong walls
Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms
Trimmed into high arcades; the tonsile box,
Wove in mosaic mode of many a curl
Around the figured carpet of the lawn. . .
The terrace mound uplifted; the long line
Deep delved of flat canal."[33]
But now, continues the poet, Taste "exalts her voice" and
"At the awful sound
The terrace sinks spontaneous; on the green,
Broidered with crispëd knots, the tonsile yews
Wither and fall; the fountain dares no more
To fling its wasted crystal through the sky,
But pours salubrious o'er the parchëd lawn."
The new school had the intolerance of reformers. The ruthless Capability
Brown and his myrmidons laid waste many a prim but lovely old garden,
with its avenues, terraces, and sun dials, the loss of which is deeply
deplored, now that the Queen Anne revival has taught us to relish the
_rococo_ beauties which Brown's imitation landscapes displaced.
We may pause for a little upon this "English Garden" of Mason's, as an
example of that brood of didactic blank-poems, begotten of Phillips'
"Cyder" and Thomson's "Seasons," which includes Mallet's "Excursion"
(1728), Somerville's "Chase" (1734), Akenside's "Pleasures of
Imagination" (1742-44), Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health" (1744),
Dyer's "Fleece" (1757) and Grainger's "Sugar Cane" (1764). Mason's blank
verse, like Mallet's, is closely imitative of Thomson's and the influence
of Thomson's inflated diction is here seen at its worst. The whole poem
is an object lesson on the absurdity of didactic poetry. Especially
harrowing are the author's struggles to be poetic while describing the
various kinds of fences designed to keep sheep out of his inclosures.
"Ingrateful sure,
When such the theme, becomes the poet's task:
Yet must he try by modulation meet
Of varied cadence and selected phrase
Exact yet free, without inflation bold,
To dignify that theme."
Accordingly he dignified his theme by speaking of a net as the
"sportsman's hempen toils," and of a gun as the
"--fell tube
Whose iron entrails hide the sulphurous blast
Satanic engine!"
When he names an ice-house, it is under a form of conundrum:
"--the structure rude where Winter pounds,
In conic pit his congelations hoar,
That Summer may his tepid beverage cool
With the chill luxury."
This species of verbiage is the earmark of all eighteenth-century poetry
and poets; not only of those who used the classic couplet, but equally of
the romanticizing group who adopted blank verse. The best of them are
not free from it, not even Gray, not even Collins; and it pervades
Wordsworth's earliest verses, his "Descriptive Sketches" and "Evening
Walk" published in 1793. But perhaps the very worst instance of it is in
Dr. Armstrong's "Economy of Love," where the ludicrous contrast between
the impropriety of the subject and the solemn pomp of the diction amounts
almost to _bouffe_.
In emulation of "The Seasons" Mason introduced a sentimental love
story--Alcander and Nerina--into his third book. He informs his readers
(book II. 34-78) that, in the reaction against straight alleys, many
gardeners had gone to an extreme in the use of zigzag meanders; and he
recommends them to follow the natural curves of the footpaths which the
milkmaid wears across the pastures "from stile to stile," or which
--"the scudding hare
Draws to her dew-sprent seat o'er thymy heaths."
The prose commentary on Mason's poem, by W. Burgh,[34] asserts that the
formal style of garden had begun to give way about the commencement of
the eighteenth century, though the new fashion had but very lately
attained to its perfection. Mason mentions Pope as a champion of the
true taste,[35] but the descriptions of his famous villa at Twickenham,
with its grotto, thickets, and artificial mounds, hardly suggest to the
modern reader a very successful attempt to reproduce nature. To be sure,
Pope had only five acres to experiment with, and that parklike scenery
which distinguishes the English landscape garden requires a good deal of
room. The art is the natural growth of a country where primogeniture has
kept large estates in the hands of the nobility and landed gentry, and in
which a passion for sport has kept the nobility and gentry in the country
a great share of the year. Even Shenstone--whose place is commended by
Mason--Shenstone at the Leasowes, with his three hundred acres, felt his
little pleasance rather awkwardly dwarfed by the neighborhood of
Lyttelton's big park at Hagley.
The general principle of the new or English school was to imitate nature;
to let trees keep their own shapes, to substitute winding walks for
straight alleys, and natural waterfalls or rapids for _jets d'eau_ in
marble basins. The plan upon which Shenstone worked is explained in his
"Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening"[36] (1764), a few sentences from
which will indicate the direction of the reform: "Landscape should
contain variety enough to form a picture upon canvas; and this is no bad
test, as I think the landscape painter is the gardener's best designer.
The eye requires a sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon
probable nature. A wood or hill may balance a house or obelisk; for
exactness would be displeasing. . . It is not easy to account for the
fondness of former times for straight-lined avenues to their houses;
straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every kind of
straight line, where the foot has to travel over what the eye has done
before. . . To stand still and survey such avenues may afford some
slender satisfaction, through the change derived from perspective; but to
move on continually and find no change of scene in the least attendant on
our change of place, must give actual pain to a person of taste. . . I
conceived some idea of the sensation he must feel from walking but a few
minutes, immured between Lord D----'s high shorn yew hedges, which run
exactly parallel at the distance of about ten feet, and are contrived
perfectly to exclude all kind of objects whatsoever. . . The side trees
in vistas should be so circumstanced as to afford a probability that they
grew by nature. . . The shape of ground, the disposition of trees and
the figure of water must be sacred to nature; and no forms must be
allowed that make a discovery of art. . . The taste of the citizen and
of the mere peasant are in all respects the same: the former gilds his
balls, paints his stonework and statues white, plants his trees in lines
or circles, cuts his yew-trees, four-square or conic, or gives them what
he can of the resemblance of birds or bears or men; squirts up his
rivulets in _jets d'eau_; in short, admires no part of nature but her
ductility; exhibits everything that is glaring, that implies expense, or
that effects a surprise because it is unnatural. The peasant is his
admirer. . . Water should ever appear as an irregular lake or winding
stream. . . Hedges, appearing as such, are universally bad. They
discover art in nature's province."
There is surely a correspondence between this new taste for picturesque
gardening which preferred freedom, variety, irregularity, and naturalness
to rule, monotony, uniformity, and artifice, and that new taste in
literature which discarded the couplet for blank verse, or for various
stanza forms, which left the world of society for the solitudes of
nature, and ultimately went, in search of fresh stimulus, to the remains
of the Gothic ages and the rude fragments of Norse and Celtic antiquity.
Both Walpole and Mason speak of William Kent, the architect and landscape
painter, as influential in introducing a purer taste in the gardener's
art. Kent was a friend of Pope and a _protégé_ of Lord Burlington to
whom Pope inscribed his "Epistle on the Use of Riches," already quoted
(see _ante_ p. 121), and who gave Kent a home at his country house. Kent
is said to have acknowledged that he caught his taste in gardening from
the descriptive passages in Spenser, whose poems he illustrated. Walpole
and Mason also unite in contrasting with the artificial gardening of
Milton's time the picture of Eden in "Paradise Lost:"
"--where not nice art in curious knots,
But nature boon poured forth on hill and dale
Flowers worthy of Paradise; while all around
Umbrageous grots, and caves of cool recess,
And murmuring waters, down the slope dispersed,
Or held by fringëd banks in crystal lakes.
Compose a rural seat of various hue."
But it is worth noting that in "L'Allegro" "retired leisure," takes his
pleasure in "_trim_ gardens," while in Collins,
"Ease and health retire
To breezy lawn or forest deep."
Walpole says that Kent's "ruling principle was that nature abhors a
straight line." Kent "leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a
garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley, changing
imperceptibly into each other. . . and remarked how loose groves crowned
an easy eminence with happy ornament. . . The great principles on which
he worked were perspective and light and shade. . . But of all the
beauties he added to the face of this beautiful country, none surpassed
his management of water. Adieu to canals, circular basins, and cascades
tumbling down marble steps. . . The gentle stream was taught to
serpentine seemingly at its pleasure."[37] The treatment of the garden
as a part of the landscape in general was commonly accomplished by the
removal of walls, hedges, and other inclosures, and the substitution of
the ha-ha or sunken fence. It is odd that Walpole, though he speaks of
Capability Brown, makes no mention of the Leasowes, whose proprietor,
William Shenstone, the author of "The School-mistress," is one of the
most interesting of amateur gardeners. "England," says Hugh Miller, "has
produced many greater poets than Shenstone, but she never produced a
greater landscape gardener."
At Oxford, Shenstone had signalized his natural tastes by wearing his own
hair instead of the wig then (1732) universally the fashion.[38] On
coming of age, he inherited a Shropshire farm, called the Leasowes, in
the parish of Hales Owen and an annuity of some three hundred pounds. He
was of an indolent, retiring, and somewhat melancholy temperament; and,
instead of pursuing a professional career, he settled down upon his
property and, about the year 1745, began to turn it into a _fermé ornée_.
There he wooed the rustic muse in elegy, ode, and pastoral ballad,
sounding upon the vocal reed the beauties of simplicity and the vanity of
ambition, and mingling with these strains complaints of Delia's cruelty
and of the shortness of his own purse, which hampered him seriously in
his gardening designs. Mr. Saintsbury has described Shenstone as a
master of "the artificial-natural style of poetry."[39] His pastoral
insipidities about pipes and crooks and kids, Damon and Delia, Strephon
and Chloe, excited the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who was also at no pains to
conceal his contempt for the poet's horticultural pursuits. "Whether to
plant a walk in undulating curves and to place a bench at every turn
where there is an object to catch the view; to make water run where it
will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to
thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden, demands any
great powers of mind, I will not enquire." The doctor reports that
Lyttelton was jealous of the fame which the Leasowes soon acquired, and
that when visitors to Hagley asked to see Shenstone's place, their host
would adroitly conduct them to inconvenient points of view--introducing
them, _e.g._, at the wrong end of a walk, so as to detect a deception in
perspective, "injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain."[40]
Graves, however, denies that any rivalry was in question between the
great domain of Hagley and the poet's little estate. "The truth of the
case," he writes, "was that the Lyttelton family went so frequently with
their company to the Leasowes, that they were unwilling to break in upon
Mr. Shenstone's retirement on every occasion, and therefore often went to
the principal points of view, without waiting for anyone to conduct them
regularly through the whole walks. Of this Mr. Shenstone would sometimes
peevishly complain."
Shenstone describes in his "Thoughts on Gardening," several artifices
that he put in practice for increasing the apparent distance of objects,
or for lengthening the perspective of an avenue by widening it in the
foreground and planting it there with dark-foliaged trees, like yews and
firs, "then with trees more and more fady, till they end in the
almond-willow or silver osier." To have Lord Lyttelton bring in a party
at the small, or willow end of such a walk, and thereby spoil the whole
trick, must indeed have been provoking. Johnson asserts that Shenstone's
house was ruinous and that "nothing raised his indignation more than to
ask if there were any fishes in his water." "In time," continues the
doctor, "his expenses brought clamors about him that overpowered the
lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his groves were haunted by beings
very different from fawns and fairies;" to wit, bailiffs; but Graves
denies this.
The fame of the Leasowes attracted visitors from all parts of the
country--literary men like Spence, Home, and Dodsley; picturesque
tourists, who came out of curiosity; and titled persons, who came, or
sent their gardeners, to obtain hints for laying out their grounds.
Lyttelton brought William Pitt, who was so much interested that he
offered to contribute two hundred pounds toward improvements, an offer
that Shenstone, however, declined. Pitt had himself some skill in
landscape gardening, which he exercised at Enfield Chase and afterward at
Hayes.[41] Thomson, who was Lyttelton's guest at Hagley every summer
during the last three or four years of his life, was naturally familiar
with the Leasowes. There are many references to the "sweet descriptive
bard," in Shenstone's poems[42] and a seat was inscribed to his memory in
a part of the grounds known as Vergil's Grove. "This seat," says
Dodsley, "is placed upon a steep bank on the edge of the valley, from
which the eye is here drawn down into the flat below by the light that
glimmers in front and by the sound of various cascades, by which the
winding stream is agreeably broken. Opposite to this seat the ground
rises again in an easy concave to a kind of dripping fountain, where a
small rill trickles down a rude niche of rock work through fern,
liverwort, and aquatic weeds. . . The whole scene is opaque and
gloomy."[43]
English landscape gardening is a noble art. Its principles are sound and
of perpetual application. Yet we have advanced so much farther in the
passion for nature than the men of Shenstone's day that we are apt to be
impatient of the degree of artifice present in even the most skillful
counterfeit of the natural landscape. The poet no longer writes odes on
"Rural Elegance," nor sings
"The transport, most allied to song,
In some fair valley's peaceful bound
To catch soft hints from Nature's tongue,
And bid Arcadia bloom around;
Whether we fringe the sloping hill,
Or smooth below the verdant mead;
Or in the horrid brambles' room
Bid careless groups of roses bloom;
Or let some sheltered lake serene
Reflect flowers, woods and spires, and brighten all the scene."
If we cannot have the mountains, the primeval forest, or the shore of the
wild sea, we can at least have Thomson's "great simple country," subdued
to man's use but not to his pleasure. The modern mood prefers a lane to
a winding avenue, and an old orchard or stony pasture to a lawn decorated
with coppices. "I do confess," says Howitt, "that in the 'Leasowes' I
have always found so much ado about nothing; such a parade of miniature
cascades, lakes, streams conveyed hither and thither; surprises in the
disposition of woods and the turn of walks. . . that I have heartily
wished myself out upon a good rough heath."
For the "artificial-natural" was a trait of Shenstone's gardening no less
than of his poetry. He closed every vista and emphasized every opening
in his shrubberies and every spot that commanded a prospect with come
object which was as an exclamation point on the beauty of the scene: a
rustic bench, a root-house, a Gothic alcove, a grotto, a hermitage, a
memorial urn or obelisk dedicated to Lyttelton, Thomson, Somerville,[44]
Dodsley, or some other friend. He supplied these with inscriptions
expressive of the sentiments appropriate to the spot, passages from
Vergil, or English or Latin verses of his own composition. Walpole says
that Kent went so far in his imitation of natural scenery as to plant
_dead_ trees in Kensington Garden. Walpole himself seems to approve of
such devices as artificial ruins, "a feigned steeple of a distant church
or an unreal bridge to disguise the termination of water." Shenstone was
not above these little effects: he constructed a "ruinated priory" and a
temple of Pan out of rough, unhewn stone; he put up a statue of a piping
faun, and another of the Venus dei Medici beside a vase of gold fishes.
Some of Shenstone's inscriptions have escaped the tooth of time. The
motto, for instance, cut upon the urn consecrated to the memory of his
cousin, Miss Dolman, was prefixed by Byron to his "Elegy upon Thyrza":
"Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!" The
habit of inscription prevailed down to the time of Wordsworth, who
composed a number for the grounds of Sir George Beaumont at Coleorton.
One of Akenside's best pieces is his "Inscription for a Grotto," which is
not unworthy of Landor. Matthew Green, the author of "The Spleen," wrote
a poem of some 250 lines upon Queen Caroline's celebrated grotto in
Richmond Garden. "A grotto," says Johnson, apropos of that still more
celebrated one at Pope's Twickenham villa, "is not often the wish or
pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than
exclude the sun"; but the increasing prominence of the mossy cave and
hermit's cell, both in descriptive verse and in gardening, was
symptomatic. It was a note of the coming romanticism, and of that
pensive, elegiac strain which we shall encounter in the work of Gray,
Collins, and the Wartons. It marked the withdrawal of the muse from the
world's high places into the cool sequestered vale of life. All through
the literature of the mid-century, the high-strung ear may catch the
drip-drip of spring water down the rocky walls of the grot.
At Hagley, halfway up the hillside, Miller saw a semi-octagonal temple
dedicated to the genius of Thomson. It stood in a grassy hollow which
commanded a vast, open prospect and was a favorite resting place of the
poet of "The Seasons." In a shady, secluded ravine he found a white
pedestal, topped by an urn which Lyttelton had inscribed to the memory of
Shenstone. This contrast of situation seemed to the tourist emblematic.
Shenstone, he says, was an egotist, and his recess, true to his
character, excludes the distant landscape. Gray, who pronounced "The
Schoolmistress" a masterpiece in its kind, made a rather slighting
mention of its author.[45] "I have read an 8vo volume of Shenstone's
letters; poor man! He was always wishing for money, for fame and other
distinctions; and his whole philosophy consisted in living, against his
will, in retirement and in a place which his taste had adorned, but which
he only enjoyed when people of note came to see and commend it." Gray
unquestionably profited by a reading of Shenstone's "Elegies," which
antedate his own "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). He
adopted Shenstone's stanza, which Shenstone had borrowed from the love
elegies of a now forgotten poet, James Hammond, equerry to Prince
Frederick and a friend of Cobham, Lyttelton, and Chesterfield. "Why
Hammond or other writers," says Johnson, "have thought the quatrain of
ten syllables elegiac, it is difficult to tell. The character of the
elegy is gentleness and tenuity, but this stanza has been pronounced by
Dryden. . .to be the most magnificent of all the measures which our
language affords."[46]
Next after "The Schoolmistress," the most engaging of Shenstone's poems
is his "Pastoral Ballad," written in 1743 in four parts and in a tripping
anapestic measure. Familiar to most readers is the stanza beginning:
"I have found out a gift for my fair,
I have found where the wood-pigeons breed."
Dr. Johnson acknowledged the prettiness of the conceit:
"So sweetly she bade me adieu,
I thought that she bade me return;"
and he used to quote and commend the well-known lines "Written at an Inn
at Henley:
"Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round,
Where'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn."
As to Shenstone's blank verse--of which there is not much--the doctor
says: "His blank verses, those that can read them may probably find to be
like the blank verses of his neighbors." Shenstone encouraged Percy to
publish his "Reliques." The plans for the grounds at Abbotsford were
somewhat influenced by Didsley's description of the Leasowes, which Scott
studied with great interest.
In 1744 Mark Akenside, a north country man and educated partly in
Scotland, published his "Pleasures of Imagination," afterwards rewritten
as "The Pleasures of the Imagination" and spoiled in the process. The
title and something of the course of thought in the poem were taken from
Addison's series of papers on the subject (_Spectator_, Nos. 411-421).
Akenside was a man of learning and a physician of distinction. His poem,
printed when he was only twenty-three, enjoyed a popularity now rather
hard to account for. Gray complained of its obscurity and said it was
issued nine years too early, but admitted that now and then it rose "even
to the best, particularly in description." Akenside was harsh, formal,
and dogmatic, as a man. Smollett caricatured him in "Peregrine Pickle."
Johnson hated his Whig principles and represents him, when settled at
Northampton, as "having deafened the place with clamors for liberty."[47]
He furthermore disliked the class of poetry to which Akenside's work
belonged, and he told Boswell that he couldn't read it. Still he speaks
of him with a certain cautious respect, which seems rather a concession
to contemporary opinion than an appreciation of the critic's own. He
even acknowledges that Akenside has "few artifices of disgust than most
of his brethren of the blank song." Lowell says that the very title of
Akenside's poem pointed "away from the level highway of commonplace to
mountain paths and less dogmatic prospects. The poem was stiff and
unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births. Without it,
the 'Lines Written at Tintern Abbey' might never have been."
One cannot read "The Pleasures of Imagination" without becoming sensible
that the writer was possessed of poetic feeling, and feeling of a kind
that we generally agree to call romantic. His doctrine at least, if not
his practice, was in harmony with the fresh impulse which was coming into
English poetry. Thus he celebrates heaven-born genius and the
inspiration of nature, and decries "the critic-verse" and the effort to
scale Parnassus "by dull obedience." He invokes the peculiar muse of the
new school:
"Indulgent _Fancy_, from the fruitful banks
Of Avon, whence thy rosy fingers cull
Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf
Where Shakspere lies."
But Akenside is too abstract. In place of images, he presents the reader
with dissertations. A poem which takes imagination as its subject rather
than its method will inevitably remain, not poetry but a lecture on
poetry--a theory of beauty, not an example of it. Akenside might have
chosen for his motto Milton's lines:
"How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbëd, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute."
Yet he might have remembered, too, what Milton said about the duty of
poetry to be simple, sensuous, and passionate. Akenside's is nothing of
these; it is, on the contrary obscure, metaphysical, and, as a
consequence, frigid. Following Addison, he names greatness and novelty,
_i.e._, the sublime and the wonderful, as, equally with beauty, the chief
sources of imaginative pleasure, and the whole poem is a plea for what we
are now accustomed to call the ideal. In the first book there is a
passage which is fine in spirit and--though in a less degree--in
expression:
"Who that from Alpine heights his laboring eye
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey
Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave
Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade.
And continents of sand, will turn his gaze
To mark the windings of a scanty rill
That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul
Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing
Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft
Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm;
Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens;
Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
Sweeps the long trace of day."
The hint for this passage was furnished by a paragraph in Addison's
second paper (_Spectator_, 412) and the emotion is the same to which
Goethe gives utterance in the well-known lines of "Faust";
"Doch jedem ist es eingeboren
Dass sein Gefühl hinauf und vorwärts dringt," etc.
But how greatly superior in sharpness of detail, richness of invention,
energy of movement is the German to the English poet!
Akenside ranks among the earlier Spenserians by virtue of his "Virtuoso"
(1737) and of several odes composed in a ten-lined variation on Spenser's
stanza. A collection of his "Odes" appeared in 1745--the year before
Collins' and Joseph Warton's-and a second in 1760. They are of little
value, but show here and there traces of Milton's minor poetry and that
elegiac sentiment, common to the lyrical verse of the time, noticeable
particularly in a passage on the nightingale in Ode XV, book i;, "To the
Evening Star." "The Pleasures of Imagination" was the parent of a
numerous offspring of similarly entitled pieces, among which are Joseph
Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy," Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," and
Rogers' "Pleasures of Memory."
In the same year with Thomson's "Winter" (1726) there were published in
two poetical miscellanies a pair of little descriptive pieces, "Grongar
Hill" and "The Country Walk," written by John Dyer, a young Welshman, in
the octosyllabic couplet of Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Pensoroso."
("Grongar Hill," as first printed was a sort of irregular ode with
alternate rhyming; but it was much improvised in later editions, and
rewritten throughout in couplets.)
Dyer was a landscape painter who had been educated at Westminster school,
studied under Richardson at London, and spent some time wandering about
the mountains of Wales in the practice of his art. "Grongar Hill" is, in
fact, a pictorial poem, a sketch of the landscape seen from the top of
his favorite summit in South Wales. It is a slight piece of work,
careless and even slovenly in execution, but with an ease and lightness
of touch that contrast pleasantly with Thomson's and Akenside's
ponderosity. When Dyer wrote blank verse he slipped into the Thomsonian
diction, "cumbent sheep" and "purple groves pomaceous." But in "Grongar
Hill"--although he does call the sun Phoebus--the shorter measure seems
to bring shorter words, and he has lines of Wordsworthian simplicity--
"The woody valleys warm and low,
The windy summit, wild and high."
or the closing passage, which Wordsworth alludes to in his sonnet on
Dyer--"Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill":
"Grass and flowers Quiet treads
On the meads and mountain heads. . .
And often, by the murmuring rill,
Hears the thrush while all is still,
Within the groves of Grongar Hill."
Wordsworth was attracted by Dyer's love of "mountain turf" and "spacious
airy downs" and "naked Snowdon's wide, aerial waste." The "power of
hills" was on him. Like Wordsworth, too, he moralized his song. In
"Grongar Hill," the ruined tower suggests the transience of human life:
the rivers running down to the sea are likened to man's career from birth
to death; and Campbell's couplet,
"'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view
And robes the mountain in its azure hue,"[48]
is thought to owe something to Dyer's
"As yon summits soft and fair,
Clad in colors of the air
Which to those who journey near
Barren, brown and rough appear,
Still we tread the same coarse way,
The present's still a cloudy day."
Dyer went to Rome to pursue his art studies and, on his return in 1740,
published his "Ruins of Rome" in blank verse. He was not very successful
as a painter, and finally took orders, married, and settled down as a
country parson. In 1757 he published his most ambitious work, "The
Fleece," a poem in blank verse and in four books, descriptive of English
wool-growing. "The subject of 'The Fleece,' sir," pronounced Johnson,
"cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and
druggets?" Didactic poetry, in truth, leads too often to ludicrous
descents. Such precepts as "beware the rot," "enclose, enclose, ye
swains," and
"-the utility of salt
Teach thy slow swains";
with prescriptions for the scab, and advice as to divers kinds of wool
combs, are fatal. A poem of this class has to be _made_ poetical, by
dragging in episodes and digressions which do not inhere in the subject
itself but are artificially associated with it. Of such a nature is the
loving mention--quoted in Wordsworth's sonnet--of the poet's native
Carmarthenshire
"-that soft tract
Of Cambria, deep embayed, Dimetian land,
By green hills fenced, by Ocean's murmur lulled."
Lowell admired the line about the Siberian exiles, met
"On the dark level of adversity."
Miltonic reminiscences are frequent in Dyer. Sabrina is borrowed from
"Comus"; "bosky bourn" and "soothest shepherd" from the same; "the light
fantastic toe" from "L'Allegro"; "level brine" and "nor taint-worm shall
infect the yearning herds," from "Lycidas"; "audience pure be thy
delight, though few," from "Paradise Lost."
"Mr. Dyer," wrote Gray to Horace Walpole in 1751, "has more of poetry in
his imagination than almost any of our number; but rough and
injudicious." Akenside, who helped Dyer polish the manuscript of "The
Fleece," said that "he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste
by the fate of Dyer's 'Fleece'; for if that were ill received, he should
not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence." The
romantic element in Dyer's imagination appears principally in his love of
the mountains and of ancient ruins. Johnson cites with approval a
sentence in "The Ruins of Rome":
"At dead of night,
The hermit oft, midst his orisons, hears
Aghast the voice of Time disparting towers."[49]
These were classic ruins. Perhaps the doctor's sympathy would not have
been so quickly extended to the picture of the moldering Gothic tower in
"Grongar Hill," or of "solitary Stonehenge gray with moss," in "The
Fleece."
[1] W. D. McClintock, "The Romantic and Classical in English Literature,"
_Chautauquan_, Vol. XIV, p. 187.
[2] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 207.
[3] "Autumn," lines 645-47.
[4] "Life of Philips."
[5] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 221
[6] _Cf_. Chaucer: "And as a bitoure bumbleth in the mire."
--_Wyf of Bathes Tale_.
[7] Phillimore's "Life of Lyttelton," Vol. I, p. 286.
[8] "First Impression of England," p. 135.
[9] Appendix to Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads,"
[10] There are, of course, Miltonic reminiscences in "The Seasons." The
moon's "spotted disk" ("Autumn," 1091) is Milton's "spotty globe." The
apostrophe to light ("Spring" 90-96) borrows its "efflux divine" from
Milton's "bright effluence of bright essence increate" ("Paradise Lost,"
III. 1-12) And _cf._ "Autumn," 783-84:
"--from Imaus stretcht
Athwart the roving Tartar's sullen bounds,"
with P.L., III, 431-32; and "Winter," 1005-08.
"--moors
Beneath the shelter of an icy isle,
While night o'erwhelms the sea."
with P.L., I. 207-208.
[11] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. p. 171.
[12] There were originally _three_ damsels in the bathing scene!
[13] It was to this episode that Pope supplied the lines (207-14)
"Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty's self," etc.,
which form his solitary essay in blank verse. Thomson told Collins that
he took the first hint of "The Seasons" from the names of the
divisions--Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter--in Pope's "Pastorals."
[14] Appendix to Preface to Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads."
[15] "The Hermit."
[16] "Essay on Man," Epistle I.
[17] "Falsely luxurious, will not man awake?" etc.
--_Summer_, 67.
[18] "Nor, when cold winter keens the brightening flood,
Would I, weak shivering, linger on the brink."
--_Ibid._ 1259-60.
[19] "Life of Thomson."
[20] "Spring," 755-58.
[21] "Autumn," 862-65.
[22] "Epistle of Augustus."
[23] "Autumn," 1030-37. _Cf._ Cowper's
"O for a lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade!"
[24] "Winter," 424-32.
[25] "Spring," 1026-28.
[26] Shakspere's "broom groves whose shade the dismist bachelor loves;"
Fletcher's
"Fountain heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves,"
and his
"Moonlight walks when all the fowls
Are safely housed, save bats and owls."
[27] Letter to Howe, September 10.
[28] Letter to Howe, November, 1763.
[29] Alicia Amherst ("History of Gardening in England," 1896, p. 283)
mentions a French and an Italian work, entitled respectively "Plan de
Jardins dans le gout Anglais," Copenhagen, 1798; and "Del Arte dei
Giardini Inglesi," Milan, 1801. "This passion for the imitation of
nature," says the same authority, "was part of the general reaction which
was taking place, not only in gardening but in the world of literature
and of fashion. The extremely artificial French taste had long taken the
lead in civilized Europe, and now there was an attempt to shake off the
shackles of its exaggerated formalism. The poets of the age were also
pioneers of this school of nature. Dyer, in his poem of 'Grongar Hill,'
and Thomson, in his 'Seasons,' called up pictures which the gardeners and
architects of the day strove to imitate." See in this work, for good
examples of the formal garden, the plan of Belton House, Lincoln, p. 245;
of Brome Hall, Suffolk; of the orangery and canal at Euston, p. 201; and
the scroll work patterns of turf and parterres on pp. 217-18.
[30] In Temple's gardens at Moor Park, Hertfordshire, _e.g._, there were
terraces covered with lead. Charles II. imported some of Le Notre's
pupils and assistants, who laid out the grounds at Hampton Court in the
French taste. The maze at Hampton Court still existed in Walpole's time
(1770).
[31] It is worth noticing that Batty Langley, the abortive restorer of
Gothic, also recommended the natural style of landscape gardening as
early as 1728 in his "New Principles of Gardening."
[32] "History of Gardening in England."
[33] I. 384-404.
[34] "The Works of William Mason," in 4 vols., London, 1811.
[35] See Pope's paper in the _Guardian_ (173) for some rather elaborate
foolery about topiary work. "All art," he maintains, "consists in the
imitation and study of nature." "We seem to make it our study to recede
from nature, not only in the various tonsure of greens into the most
regular and formal shapes, but," etc., etc. Addison, too, _Spectator_
414, June 25, 1712, upholds "the rough, careless strokes of nature"
against "the nice touches and embellishments of art," and complains that
"our British gardeners, instead of humoring nature, love to deviate from
it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids.
We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not
know whether I am singular in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs
and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical
figure." See also _Spectator_, 477, for a pretty scheme of a garden laid
out with "the beautiful wildness of nature." Gilbert West's Spenserian
poem "Education," 1751 (see _ante_, p. 90) contains an attack, in six
stanzas, upon the geometric garden, from which I give a single stanza.
"Alse other wonders of the sportive shears,
Fair nature mis-adorning, there were found:
Globes, spiral columns, pyramids, and piers,
With sprouting urns and budding statues crowned;
And horizontal dials on the ground,
In living box by cunning artists traced;
And gallies trim, on no long voyage bound
But by their roots there ever anchored fast,
All were their bellying sails out-spread to every blast."
[36] "Essays on Men and Manners," Shenstone's Works, Vol. II. Dodsley's
edition.
[37] "On Modern Gardening," Works of the Earl of Orford, London, 1798,
Vol. II.
[38] Graves, "Recollections of Shenstone," 1788.
[39] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. 271.
[40] "Life of Shenstone."
[41] See _ante_, p. 90, for his visits to Gilbert West at Wickham.
[42] See especially "A Pastoral Ode," and "Verses Written toward the Close
of the Year 1748."
[43] "A Description of the Leasowes by R. Dodsley," Shenstone's Works,
Vol. II, pp. 287-320 (3d ed.) This description is accompanied with a
map. For other descriptions consult Graves' "Recollections," Hugh
Miller's "First Impressions of England," and Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the
Poets" (1846), Vol. I. pp. 258-63. The last gives an engraving of the
house and grounds. Miller, who was at Hagley--"The British Tempe"-and
the Leasowes just a century after Shenstone began to embellish his
paternal acres, says that the Leasowes was the poet's most elaborate
poem, "the singularly ingenious composition, inscribed on an English
hillside, which employed for twenty long years the taste and genius of
Shenstone."
[44] See "Lady Luxborough's Letters to Shenstone," 1775, for a long
correspondence about an urn which _she_ was erecting to Somerville's
memory. She was a sister of Bolingbroke, had a seat at Barrels, and
exchanged visits with Shenstone.
[45] "Letter to Nichols," June 24, 1769.
[46] Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis," Davenant's "Gondibert," and Sir John
Davies' "Nosce Teipsum" were written in this stanza, but the universal
currency of Gray's poem associated it for many years almost exclusively
with elegiac poetry. Shenstone's collected poems were not published till
1764, though some of them had been printed in Dodsley's "Miscellanies."
Only a few of his elegies are dated in the collected editions (Elegy
VIII, 1745; XIX, 1743; XXI, 1746), but Graves says that they were all
written before Gray's. The following lines will recall to every reader
corresponding passages in Gray's "Churchyard":
"O foolish muses, that with zeal aspire
To deck the cold insensate shrine with bays!
"When the free spirit quits her humble frame
To tread the skies, with radiant garlands crowned;
"Say, will she hear the distant voice of Fame,
Or hearing, fancy sweetness in the sound?"
--_Elegy II_.
"I saw his bier ignobly cross the plain."
--_Elegy III_.
"No wild ambition fired their spotless breast."
--_Elegy XV_.
"Through the dim veil of evening's dusky shade
Near some lone fane or yew's funereal green," etc.
--_Elegy IV_.
"The glimmering twilight and the doubtful dawn
Shall see your step to these sad scenes return,
Constant as crystal dews impearl the lawn," etc.
--_Ibid_.
[47] "Life of Akenside."
[48] "Pleasures of Hope."
[49] _cf._ Wordsworth's
"Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of time."
--_Mutability: Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, XXXIV.