THE TREATMENT OF NATURE IN ENGLISH POETRY

BETWEEN POPE AND WORDSWORTH

By

MYRA REYNOLDS

CHICAGO THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 1909

Copyright 1909 By The University of Chicago

Composed and Printed By The University of Chicago Press Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A.

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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The eighteenth century is a period of transition and as such its literature holds two elements, a vital impulse past its prime but still dominant, and a new conception gradually emerging into dominance. It is the interweaving of these elements, the slow fading of the old, the slow gain of the new in fulness, definiteness, and ardor of statement, that make this period peculiarly interesting for detailed study. The interest persists even when the transition to be studied is limited to so narrow a section of human experience as the attitude toward Nature.

The investigation, the results of which are embodied in this book, was primarily undertaken to determine the place of Nature in the poetry before Wordsworth. Every genius is, to be sure, more or less of a miracle, and certainly not to be accounted for by any conditions of literary heredity or even environment. But he cannot, on the other hand, be justly thought of as an isolated phenomenon. Though not the direct heir of any particular predecessors, he is, nevertheless, in a vital and inescapable way, the heir of the general tone and temper of his own and preceding times. In that fact lies the justification of a study along historical lines of any recognized tendency in thought. The pleasure of the biologist in the lower forms of life is paralleled by the delight of the student of literature in tracing out the first vague, ineffective attempts to express ideas that are afterward regnant. In the present study the final effect is one of surprise to discover not only how early the new thought of Nature finds expression, but how completely the ideas of the period of Wordsworth were

represented in the germ in the eighteenth century. The whole impression is that before the work of such men as Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, there was a great stir of getting ready. It may fairly be said that before Wordsworth most[vi] of his characteristic thoughts on Nature had received explicit statement.

In the pursuance of this study it soon became apparent that to confine it to poetry was to limit the investigation unwarrantably. The interest of the work was many times increased, and the deductions were rendered much more certain, when the same transitions, the same periods of change, the same tastes, the same emotions, revealed themselves side by side in poetry, painting, fiction, travels, and gardens. Furthermore, the vitality of the new impulse toward Nature is shown by the number of directions in which it insistently demanded expression. Almost independently of each other the various arts seem to have been pushed forward from within to some sort of recognition of the growing interest in the external world. In each art there seemed to be an unconscious preparation for the master that was to come. Notably does this appear from the chapter on painting. Constable and Turner were foreshadowed and prepared for as evidently as was Wordsworth. When at the end of such a period of preparation the great poet or artist comes, he is

great by virtue of his power to penetrate beneath literary conventions and to give final literary form to the half-articulate thoughts and feelings out of which the thoughts and feelings of his own epoch grow. He has his natural place in the development. The significance of his work rests in the fact that while it directs the future it also sums up the past.

The first edition of this book has long been out of print. The natural impulse, after an interval of ten years, is to subject a new edition to a complete revision, with the rewriting of many portions. Revision as drastic as might be desirable has not, however, proved practicable. Various studies of special authors have been brought up to date in the light of new material concerning them, as, notably, in the sketch of Lady Winchilsea. Two chapters, the one on “Painting” and the one on “Gardening,” are entirely new, and it has, fortunately, proved possible to add a number of interesting illustrations of these chapters, mainly from old prints. With these exceptions the book remains substantially as it was[vii] ten years ago. In no case has further study made it necessary to modify any of the general conclusions on the basis of the earlier work. More intensive work in the different realms has happily but reinforced these conclusions.

Myra Reynolds

August, 1909

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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INTRODUCTION

The general theme of the treatment of Nature in literature is not a new one. Schiller’s essay entitled “Ueber die naive und sentimentale Dichtung” (1794), was the first attempt to state and explain the difference between the classical way of looking at Nature and the modern way. The externality in the classical attitude toward Nature, he attributed to the fact that the Greeks were in their thoughts and habits of life so a part of Nature that they felt no impulse to seek her with the passionate longing of the modern poet, whose ardent and heartfelt love of Nature is but the result of a mode of thought and life out of harmony with her. This essay, however inadequate as a presentation of the Greek attitude toward Nature,[1] determined the lines of much succeeding study.

Alexander von Humboldt in his “Kosmos” (1845–58), in the midst of his scientific generalization and his encyclopedic accumulation of natural facts, takes occasion to discuss the treatment of Nature in poetry and landscape painting. The chapter on landscape painting is chiefly confined to such topographical, botanical, and other pictorial representations as serve to add to our knowledge of distant lands. The boundaries of the whole question are enlarged by a representation of the profound feeling for Nature in Semitic and IndoEuropean[xvi] races. There is a brief study of the mediaeval feeling for Nature as it appears in Dante, and finally of the treatment of Nature in some prose writers of the eighteenth century. The only English poets mentioned are Shakspere, Thomson, and Byron, the subject of English poetry being disposed of in less than a page.

In Ruskin’s “Modern Painters” (1843–60) are several most interesting chapters on landscape in classical, mediaeval, and modern times. “Of the Pathetic Fallacy” and “The Moral of Landscape” are also suggestive though misleading studies.

Victor de Laprade’s “La sentiment de la nature” (1866, 1868) contains in full the theories already suggested in the preface to his “Les symphones.” In the introductory chapters he outlines his conception of the development of art. He regards architecture as essentially the expression of man’s interest in religion; sculpture of his interest in the demi-god or hero; painting of his interest in the complex and varied life of man as man; while the characteristic art of the present age is music with which the love of Nature is closely allied, since both affect the mind indirectly through indeterminate and vaguely suggestive harmonies, and both tend by their complexity and subtlety to rouse sweet reveries, luxurious emotion, nameless longings, ineffectual aspirations, but leave the conscience and the will untouched. No one can read these critical studies by Laprade or his earlier poems without feeling his enthusiastic joy in the presence of Nature. But he feared this joy and counted it a part of the concupiscence of the flesh

except as it became an avenue to communion with the divine spirit. His indictment against the passion for Nature in modern music, painting, poetry, fiction, science is that the material is everywhere exalted at the expense of the spiritual. To be of value the presentation of the external[xvii] world in whatever realm of art should subordinate its appeal to the senses, and emphasize its appeal to man’s inner life. Laprade’s work is a plea for idealism as against realism. In all his brilliant presentation of the attitude toward external Nature of different races in different epochs, this point of view must be taken into account. In his rapid survey of English poetry the poets to receive closest attention are Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton. In later times the most significant of the poets who “gravitent autour de Lord Byron” are Wordsworth and Shelley, who, in their attitude toward Nature, are respectively moralist and metaphysician. Byron’s distinction is that he alone found “le juste équilibre entre l’exubérance de la nature et

celle du pur esprit.” Thomson’s “Seasons” are of value because of good genre pictures and vivid descriptions of English sports, but the initial force in the return to Nature is Burns.

Unquestionably the most important of the books that treat of Nature in the realm of art is Biese’s “Die Entwickelung des Naturgefühls im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit” (1888).[2] The book is written with enthusiasm and is stimulating and suggestive. The subject-matter is well in hand, and so thoroughly organized that the great movements in the historical development of the love of Nature are easily grasped. The plan is comprehensive, including not only poetry, but, in briefer outline, landscape painting and gardening, and, incidentally, even fiction and philosophy. The least satisfactory portion of the book is the treatment of the love of Nature in English life and thought. There is some stress on[xviii] the development of the English garden, but English landscape painting is not mentioned. In the casual mention of English fiction the emphasis is on Defoe. In poetry two epochs are recognized, that of Shakspere and that of Byron. The chapter on Shakspere is a close and valuable study. The work of Byron is estimated with

justness and sympathy, as is also that of Shelley. But the study of Wordsworth as a poet of Nature is singularly inadequate. His genius is considered as essentially of the pastoral-idyllic order, with now and then glimpses of an “echte Liebe für die Natur,” and an unmistakable pantheism. He is chiefly important as having done for England what Scott did for Scotland and Moore for Ireland, and as sounding certain notes which rang again in Byron “in verstärkter Tonart.” Thomson is the only eighteenth-century poet studied. Here again is a failure to recognize the real importance of the poet’s work. Biese acknowledges the truth of Thomson’s separate pictures of Nature, and his genuine love of the country, but denies his importance as a “pathfinder,” saying that he but followed where Pope’s “Pastorals” and “Windsor Forest” had marked out the way.

In 1887 appeared John Veitch’s “The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry.” The first volume begins with the early romances and national epics, and takes up the chief poets down to James VI. The second volume is devoted to the modern period from Ramsay to David Gray. Most of the authors treated belong to the nineteenth century, but there are admirable brief studies of Ramsay, Thomson, Hamilton of Bangour, Bruce, Fergusson, and Burns. There is also a short but interesting chapter on the rise of landscape painting, with especial attention to its development in Scotland. Veitch’s book is written out of a full knowledge and warm appreciation of Scottish poetry and of Scottish Nature, and[xix] his critical dicta are usually trustworthy, though he shows, perhaps, a tendency to overemphasize the influence of Scottish poetry on the love of Nature in succeeding English poetry.

In John Campbell Shairp’s “Poetic Interpretation of Nature” (1889) are to be found studies of Homer, Lucretius, and Virgil; of Chaucer, Shakspere, and Milton; and of Wordsworth. Two chapters are devoted to the eighteenth century. Ramsay is the poet to whom the reappearance of the feeling for natural beauty is traced. Thomson is praised for his minute faithfulness in description, and his genuine love of the country, but his tawdry diction and superficial conception of Nature are heavy indictments against him. The chapter on Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Ossian, and the Ballads is interesting, but from its brevity is necessarily inadequate. The most suggestive chapter in the book is the one in which there is a classification of the ways in which poets deal with Nature.[3] The whole subject of the treatment of Nature in poetry is an attractive one to Mr. Shairp, and he frequently recurs to it in his “Studies in Poetry and Philosophy” and “Aspects of Poetry.”

In many books, also, not devoted exclusively to the treatment of Nature in literature there are special studies and much running comment of a valuable sort. This is true of almost all essays on the early nineteenth-century poets, and especially so of the various essays on Wordsworth. There is something to be found in manuals of English literature, as in[xx] Gosse’s “Eighteenth Century” in the chapter, “The Dawn of Naturalism,” in various notes in Perry’s “English Literature of the Eighteenth Century,” Phelps’ “The English Romantic Movement,” and others; also, in some histories, as in Lecky’s “History of England in the Eighteenth Century;” in some philosophical studies, as in Leslie Stephen’s “English Thought in the Eighteenth Century” (“The Literary Reaction”), and in Stopford Brooke’s “Theology in the English Poets” (passim); in various literary studies, as in McLaughlin’s “Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature” (“The Mediaeval Feeling for Nature”), Vernon Lee’s “Euphorion” (“The Outdoor Poetry”), Symonds’

“Essays Speculative and Suggestive” (“Landscape,” “Nature Myths and Allegories”), Burroughs’ “Fresh Fields” (“Birds and Poets”), and Fischer’s “Drei Studien zur Englischen Litteraturgeschichte” “Ueber den Einfluss der See auf die Englische Litteratur”).[4]

The books indicated show that there is much interest in the general theme of Nature as an element of art. The literary periods that have been most studied are, however, the[xxi] Greek and Roman, the mediaeval, and the modern. The treatment of Nature in so barren a time as the eighteenth century in England has naturally received little close attention. In my own work on this period I have endeavored to discover what indications there are that the attitude toward Nature of the early nineteenth century is but the legitimate outcome of influences actively at work during the eighteenth century. This study is therefore one of origins.

I have divided my work into three parts. I have endeavored to give first a general statement of the chief characteristics that marked the treatment of Nature under the dominance of the English classical poets. Then follows a detailed study of such eighteenth-century poets as show some new conception of Nature. The third division is made up of briefer studies of the fiction, the books of travel, the landscape gardening, and the painting of the eighteenth century, the purpose being to determine in how far the spirit found in the poetry reveals itself in other realms in which the love of Nature might be expected to find expression.

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CHAPTER I THE TREATMENT OF NATURE IN ENGLISH CLASSICAL POETRY

The poetry of the English classical period falls naturally into four subdivisions:

1. The period of inception may be reckoned as beginning with Waller’s first couplets in 1621 and including the work of his followers, Denham, Davenant, and Cowley.[5]

2. The period of establishment includes the work between the Restoration and about 1700. Dryden is the central figure.

3. The period of culmination is a brief period covering less than the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Pope is the central figure.

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

Any generalizations concerning the attitude of this classical period toward Nature must be based on a large number of specific instances, but in collecting and using these specific instances certain cautions must be observed. Chief among these is the necessity of keeping in mind the point of view from which the study should be made. It is not the purpose to discover all that has been said about Nature by the classical poets between 1623 and 1798. It is the purpose, rather, to eliminate exceptions, and to dwell on the general, obvious qualities, the typical features, of the classical poet’s conception of Nature. This principle determines the relative importance of the periods noted above. Illustrations drawn from a large number of poems in the second and third periods would serve as the basis for a general statement. Illustrations from[2] periods one and four would need to be scrutinized, for they might be purely classical, or they might be survivals of the Elizabethan romantic age or prophecies of the modern romantic age.

Cowley, for instance, belongs to the first classical period because he wrote in couplets, but his diction, his conceits, and in some respects his attitude toward Nature are post-Elizabethan rather than classical. Illustrations from his poems are of value, therefore, for the present purpose, only when they are in accord with the spirit afterward found in the time of Dryden and Pope. So, too, Milton and Marvell, though coming chronologically within the first and second periods, stand in the main quite aloof from any tendencies that can be called classical, and their poetry is referred to only when it seems to illustrate the dominant classical conception. Abundant and valuable illustration of the classical conception may be drawn from the fourth period because tendencies are nowhere more clearly shown than in the inevitable exaggerations of a time of decadence, but the legitimacy of any illustration is determined by its likeness to the dominating traits of the preceding periods. While this study is confined in the main to the

poets of the period, journals, letters, travels, essays, and plays have been quoted where they serve as proof that the poetry represents the spirit of the age in which it was written.

Pope called Wycherley an “obstinate lover of the town,”[6] and the phrase may well be taken to mark one characteristic of the orthodox classicists. Poems, letters, journals, biographies, and essays bear witness to the reluctance with which the men and women of this age bade farewell to the “dear, damned, distracting town.”[7] Charles Lamb’s lifelong devotion to Fleet Street and the Strand, and the sentiment of the cockneys who, as Hazlitt said, preferred hanging in London[3] to a natural death out of it,[8] have their true prototypes in the classical age. “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life,” is Dr. Johnson’s dictum. Gibbon said that when he visited the country it was to see his friends and not the trees. Boswell’s only justification of a hastily expressed liking for the country was that he had “appropriated the finest descriptions in the ancient Classicks to certain scenes there.”[9] But not even the classics could reconcile most people to a country life. It was dreary, monotonous, difficult. There was no

society, no news. The days went yawningly by with no vivid interests, no stirring occurrences. “No person of sense,” exclaimed Mr. Mallet’s sister, “would live six miles out of London.”[10] To live in the country was to be buried. Lord Bathurst looked upon his sojourn in his country home as a “sound nap”[11] preparatory to Parliament. “If you wish to know how I live, or rather lose, a life in the country,” wrote Pope, “Martial will inform you in one line:

Pope found pure air and regular hours a physical necessity, but he often rebelled at his banishment from town delights, as did his “fond virgin” when compelled to seek wholesome country air.

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