A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 9

"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 h.o.a.r, 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 cla.s.sic 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] a.s.serts 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 n.o.bility and landed gentry, and in which a pa.s.sion for sport has kept the n.o.bility 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 subst.i.tute 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 circ.u.mstanced 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 _protege_ 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 pa.s.sages in Spenser, whose poems he ill.u.s.trated. 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 fringed 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 surpa.s.sed his management of water. Adieu to ca.n.a.ls, 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 subst.i.tution 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 _ferme ornee_.

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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.serts 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 t.i.tled 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 n.o.ble art. Its principles are sound and of perpetual application. Yet we have advanced so much farther in the pa.s.sion 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 sh.o.r.e 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, pa.s.sages 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 c.u.m 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 gra.s.sy 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 p.r.o.nounced "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 p.r.o.nounced 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 t.i.tle 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 cla.s.s 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 t.i.tle 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 n.o.bler 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 Parna.s.sus "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 crabbed, 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 pa.s.sionate. 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 Da.s.s sein Gefuhl hinauf und vorwarts 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 pa.s.sage 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 ent.i.tled pieces, among which are Joseph Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy," Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," and Rogers' "Pleasures of Memory."