A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 7

--Goldsmith.

[31] The poem was projected, and perhaps partly written, fourteen or fifteen years earlier.

[32] _Cf_. Tennyson's "land in which it seemed always afternoon."--_The Lotus Eaters_.

[33] Mickle's authors.h.i.+p of this song has been disputed in favor of one Jean Adams, a poor Scotch school-mistress, whose poems were printed at Glasgow in 1734.

[34] Rev. John Sim's "Life of Mickle" in "Mickle's Poetical Works," 1806, p. xi.

[35] _Cf._ Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 35. "It has been fas.h.i.+onable of late to imitate Spenser; but the likeness of most of these copies hath consisted rather in using a few of his ancient expressions than in catching his real manner. Some, however, have been executed with happiness, and with attention to that simplicity, that tenderness of sentiment and those little touches of nature that const.i.tute Spenser's character. I have a peculiar pleasure in mentioning two of them, 'The Schoolmistress' by Mr. Shenstone, and 'The Education of Achilles' by Mr.

Bedingfield. And also, Dr. Beattie's charming 'Minstrel.' To these must be added that exquisite piece of wild and romantic imagery, Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence.'"

[36] Byron, to be sure, began his first canto with conscious Spenserian.

He called his poem a "romaunt," and his valet, poor Fletcher, a "stanch yeoman," and peppered his stanzas thinly with _sooths_ and _wights_ and_ whiloms_, but he gave over this affectation in the later cantos and made no further excursions into the Middle Ages.

[37] Pope's, "s.n.a.t.c.h a grace beyond the reach of art."

--_Essay on Criticism_.

[38] "History of England," Vol. II. p. 739.

CHAPTER IV.

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 c.o.c.kneys like Philips and Pope. When the romantic spirit took possession of the poetry of nature, it manifested itself in a pa.s.sion 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 s.h.i.+lling" (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 n.o.bly 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 t.i.tled 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 ant.i.thesis 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 pa.s.sage from Brockes' translation (1745) was set to music by Haydn. J. P. Uz (1742) and Wieland each produced a "Fruhling," 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 Sh.e.l.ley's pa.s.sionate pantheism, with Byron's romantic gloom in presence of the mountains and the sea, with Keats' joyous re-creation of mythology, with Th.o.r.eau'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 pa.s.sages, 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 pa.s.sages as those which describe the first spring showers, the thunderstorm in summer, the trout-fis.h.i.+ng, the sheep-was.h.i.+ng, 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 chast.i.ty 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, s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 cla.s.ses 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] p.r.o.nounced "The Seasons" "a work of inspiration," and said that much of it was "written from himself, and n.o.bly 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 ill.u.s.trates by citing three lines with which the poet "caps the climax of three several descriptive pa.s.sages, all within the compa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 ant.i.thetical 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 a.s.serts that these sentimental pa.s.sages "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 att.i.tudes 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 antic.i.p.ate, in particular, that half affected itch of simplicity which t.i.tillated 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 pa.s.sage 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