A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 8

"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 a.s.sist her studies," extended this courtesy to Thomson, "who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hertford and his friends than a.s.sisting 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sages above quoted, and the stanza from "The Castle of Indolence," cited on page 94, gave Collins the clew for his "Ode on the Superst.i.tions 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 p.r.o.nounces 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 pa.s.sage 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 sh.o.r.e, Beat by the boundless mult.i.tude 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 superst.i.tions as literary material, after a rationalizing and skeptical age, is signalized by such a pa.s.sage as this:

"Onward they pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sure 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 a.n.a.logy between the French garden, with its trim regularity and artificial smoothness, and the couplets which Pope wrote: just such an a.n.a.logy as exists between the whole cla.s.sical 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 _etoile_ imposed their unsatisfying sameness on every royal and n.o.ble 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 b.u.t.toned 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.n.u.script, but pa.s.sages of which are given by Amherst,[32]

ent.i.tled "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 p.r.i.c.kly 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 ca.n.a.l."[33]

But now, continues the poet, Taste "exalts her voice" and

"At the awful sound The terrace sinks spontaneous; on the green, Broidered with crisped 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 parched 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.