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 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 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:

Prandeo, poto, cano, ludo, lego, caeno, quiesco.”[12]

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.

She went to plain-work, and to purling brooks, Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks, She went from Opera, Park, Assembly, Play, To morning walks, and prayers three hours a day; To part the time ’twixt reading and bohea, To muse, and spill her solitary tea, Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon, Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon.[13]

Isabella in Dryden’s “The Wild Gallant” speaks the general sentiment: “He I marry must promise me to live at London. I cannot abide to be in the country, like a wild beast in the wilderness.”[14] So, too, Harriet, in “The Man of Mode,” counted all beyond Hyde Park a desert, and said that her love of the town was so intense as to make her hate the country even in pictures and hangings.[15] In “Epsom Wells” the apostle of “a pretty innocent country life” is the boor, Clodpate, but Lucia assures him that people really live nowhere but in London, for the “insipid dull being” of country folk cannot be called life.[16] It was in much the same spirit that Lady Mary Pierrepont responded to Lord Montagu’s proposition that they should live at Wharnecliffe. “Very few people,” she said, “that have settled entirely in the country but have grown at length weary of one another.”[17] Her preference for town life recurs in her poem, “The Bride in the Country.”

By the side of a half rotten wood Melantha sat silently down, Convinced that her scheme was not good, And vexed to be absent from Town.

How simple was I to believe Delusive, poetical dreams! Or the flattering landscapes they give Of meadows and murmuring streams. Bleak mountains, and cold starving rocks, Are the wretched result of my pains; The swains greater brutes than their flocks, The nymphs as polite as the swains.[18]

When Shenstone’s young squire went forth to London in search of a wife the desired lady declared that she “could breathe nowhere else but in town.”[19] Lyttleton’s fair maiden finds country life “supinely calm, and dully innocent,” and affirms that

The town, the Court, is Beauty’s proper sphere.[20]

Young’s Fulvia had a similar passion for the town.

Green fields, and shady groves, and crystal springs, And larks, and nightingales, are odious things; And smoke, and dust, and noise, and crowds, delight, And to be pressed to death, transports her quite.[21]

In Aaron Hill’s poems we find a characteristic contest over the respective merits of city and country. Philemon exclaims,

Let rustic sports engage the lab’ring hind, And cultivated acres plough his mind; Let him to unfrequented woods repair, And snuff, unenvy’d, his lean mountain air.

Damon endeavors to defend

Th’ unglorious preference of a country life

by calling in evidence Cowley’s retirement to the shades, but Philemon triumphantly shows that Cowley’s dislike of the town was a clear case of sour grapes. In the end Damon recognizes that it is weak and unmanly to prefer the country.[22] Browne’s Celia explains to Chloe that country life may become endurable if one does not give herself up to “dull landscape,” but learns to think of the country as “the town in miniature.”[23]

Such expressions as these are typical. They indicate the general dislike for any life away from the city. And even those who loved the country, or thought they did, were far enough from caring for any but the tamest of its possible delights. Pope’s list of country pleasures, though half humorous, is nevertheless suggestive. In contrast to Mrs. M.’s devotion to “play-houses, parks, assemblies, London,” he depicts his own “rapture” in the presence of “gardens, rookeries, fishponds, arbours.”[24] When Bolingbroke “retired from the Court and glory to his country-seat and wife”[25] he bravely insisted that he liked the change. “Here,” he wrote from Dawley, “I shoot strong and tenacious roots. I have caught hold of the earth and neither my enemies nor my friends will find it an easy matter to transplant me again.”[26] But we must join Pope in the laugh against such a catching hold of the earth when we learn that Bolingbroke paid £200 to have his country halls painted with rakes, prongs, spades, and other insignia of husbandry in order to make it perfectly evident that he really did live on a farm.[27] The genuine lover of the country in the classical age expended his enthusiasm on the mild and easy pleasures of a well-kept country house easily accessible from the city. That a sane man could choose to live as Wordsworth did in the Lake District would have passed belief. In general, the country was thought of but as a good place to recruit one’s jaded energies, or as a refuge where disappointments might be hidden and disgrace forgotten.

According to Gay,

Whene’er a Courtier’s out of place, The country shelters his disgrace,[28]

and his deserted, lovelorn Araminta felt that only the melancholy shades and croaking ravens of the country could suit her unhappy fate.[29] Watts thought that none but “useless souls” should “to woods retreat.”[30] On the whole, the words of the city mouse to his country cousin expressed the prevailing sentiment:

Let savage beasts lodge in a country den; You should see towns, and manners know, and men.[31]

The poet might sing the charms of the country if he chose, but he was, after all, as Denham said of Virgil and Cowley, only “gilding dirt.” [32]

The attitude toward Nature in the literature of any age may be tested in two ways: by what is said, and by what is left unsaid, and of these the second is perhaps the more significant. Certainly in the poetry of the classical period the persistent ignoring of the grand and terrible in Nature comes home to the mind as a convincing proof of the prevailing distaste for wild scenery. And when we apply the other test and find that the conspiracy of silence is broken only by expressions indicative of positive dislike of such scenes, the case becomes a strong one. This point may be clearly illustrated by a somewhat detailed study of the poetical treatment of the mountains and the sea.

Rarely in the long period between Waller and Wordsworth do we find any trace of the modern feeling toward mountains. If they are spoken of at all it is to indicate the difficulty in surmounting them or to express the general distaste for anything so savagely and untamably wild. It is interesting to note that passages expressing the most active dislike of mountains show really some close observation and a good deal of picturesque energy of phrase. They were evidently the outcome of a personal experience, the unpleasantness of which demanded forcible epithets. They show that when men were compelled by the exigencies of travel to go into a mountainous region there was not wanting a perception of certain characteristic mountain qualities, but that these qualities were only those exciting repulsion and terror. In no case does a sense of the sublimity and beauty of mountains find, or even apparently seek, expression. This is true in travels, fiction, biography, and letters, as well as in poetry. A few typical illustrations may be given. Howell, who went abroad twice before 1622, strikes the keynote of the travelers who came later. He distinctly objected to the “monstrous abruptness” of the “Pyereny Hills” and he found the Alps even more “high and hideous.” He was obliged to admit that the Welsh mountains were but mole-hills compared to the Alps, but he thought the scale more than turned by the fact that those “huge, monstrous excrescences of nature” were entirely useless, while “Eppint and Penminmaur” at least furnished grass for the cattle.[33] John Evelyn regarded the Alps chiefly as an unpleasant barrier between the “sweete and delicious” gardens of France and the corresponding topiary paradises of Italy, and his final conception of them is as the place where Nature swept up the rubbish of the earth to clear the Plains of Lombardy.[34] Addison was another of these early travelers, and he, too, found the journey over the Alps most trying. The “irregular, misshapen scenes” of a mountainous region gave him little pleasure.[35] He preferred the safe monotony of plains. Both Evelyn and Addison expended all the descriptive energy they had to spare for mountains on Vesuvius, but it was, of course, its character as a striking and curious natural phenomenon that attracted them.[36] Burnet of the Charter House, the tutor of Lady Mary Pierrepont, in his “Theory of the Earth” gives a theological reason for the existence of mountains. He conceives the present world as a gigantic ruin, the result of sin. Originally the earth was perfectly smooth. “It had the beauty of youth and blooming nature, fresh and fruitful, and not a wrinkle, scar, or fracture in all its body; no rocks nor mountains, no hollow caves, nor gaping channels, but even and uniform all over. And the smoothness of the earth made the face of the heavens so too; the air was calm and serene; none of those tumultuary motions and conflicts of vapours, which the winds cause in ours. ’Twas suited to a golden age, and to the first innocency of nature.” But as a punishment for sin the interior fluid of the earth was allowed to break through the beautiful smooth crust, and in the ensuing chaos were piled up those “wild, vast, and indigested heaps of stone and earth,” those “great ruins” that we call mountains.[37] In 1715 Pennecuik said that the swelling hills of Tweeddale were, for the most part, green, grassy, and pleasant, but he objected to the bordering mountains as being “black, craigie, and of a melancholy aspect, with deep and horrid precipices, a wearisome and comfortless piece of way for travellers.”[38] In 1756 Thomas Amory commented on the “dreadful northern fells,” and called Westmoreland a “frightful country,” and spoke of “the ranges and groups of mountains horrible to behold.”[39] So late as 1773 Dr. Johnson said of the Highlands of Scotland: “An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by Nature from her care.”[40] In the same year Hutchinson deprecates the “dreary vicinage of mountains and inclement skies” in the Lake District. He describes Stainmore thus: “As we proceeded Spittle presented its solitary edifice to view; behind which Stainmore arises, whose heights feel the fury of both eastern and western storms; ... a dreary prospect extended to the eye; the hills were clothed in heath, and all around a scene of barrenness and deformity.... All was wilderness and horrid waste over which the wearied eye travelled with anxiety.... The wearied mind of the traveller endeavours to evade such objects, and please itself with the fancied images of verdant plains, purling streams, and happy groves.”[41]

The attitude toward mountains in the passages already referred to appears in the poetry of the period with the same general tone, though with less insistence. Throughout Waller’s poetry the only epithets applied to mountains are “savage”[42] and “craggy.”[43] Marvell, the most genuine lover of Nature in this age, was yet of the age in his feeling toward mountains, for he characterizes them as ill-designed excrescences that deform the earth and frighten heaven, and he calls upon them to learn beauty from the soft access and easy slopes of a well-rounded hill.[44] The unpleasant phrase, “high, huge-bellied mountains”[45] in one of Milton’s youthful poems is hardly atoned for by the lines in “L’Allegro,”

Mountains on whose barren breast The labouring clouds do often rest,[46]

and his poetry is, in general, marked by the absence of mountain scenery. Dryden’s most famous mountains are “drowsy” and “seem to nod.”[47] In Blackmore’s summary of the charges made by Lucretius concerning the “unartful contrivance of the world,” mountains are styled “the earth’s dishonor and encumbering load.” The only defense made by the poet is that these incumbrances do nevertheless restrain the tides, yield veins of ore, and bear forests of useful wood.[48] So John Philips defends his comfortable hypothesis that nothing is made in vain by the fact that even “that cloud-piercing hill Plinlimmon” is of some value since it furnishes “shrubby browze” for the goats.[49] And Yalden explains how erring Nature supplies her own defects by filling with mines the “vast excrescences of hills” that distort the surface of the earth.[50] Prior’s only mountain is Lebanon with “craggy brow.”[51] Pope has some “bright mountains” that serve to prop the incumbent sky,[52] and he occasionally mentions mountains with such epithets as “hanging,”[53] “hollow,”[53] and “headlong.”[54] Tickell showed his attitude toward mountains in his address to Lord Lonsdale whom he proposed to visit at Lowther Castle near Penrith, declaring that he did not dread the harsh climate and rude country, for the Earl’s presence would be sufficient to “hush every wind and every mountain smooth.”[55] Parnell instances in his catalogue of the horrors of Ireland her hills that with naked heads meet the tempests.[56] Dr. Akenside speaks of a “horrid pile of hills.”[57] Along with this frank disapproval of mountains is a similar dislike for their concomitants such as precipices, wildernesses, and even dense thickets.[58]

One cause of this antipathetic attitude toward mountains and wild scenery is, doubtless, as has been often suggested, the hardships and perils of travel before good roads were built. Biese quotes several eighteenth-century letters from German travelers to show how much “die schlechten Strassen” had to do with the failure to appreciate the romantic beauty of the Alps.[59] He finds another partial explanation of the small interest in mountain travel in the fact that scientific study of natural phenomena such as glaciers, geological formations, mountain flora and fauna, was as yet in its infancy and that thus one whole class of motives for enduring fatigue and braving difficulties was wanting.[60] But these two reasons do not sufficiently account for the lack of mountain fervor. It is not merely good roads and scientific enthusiasm that bid men seek mountain solitudes today. Preoccupation with terror and fatigue were not the only nor the chief reason for this general dislike of wild scenery. The two charges even more persistently and definitely brought against mountains are that they are useless, and that they are a deformity on the surface of the earth. Now the first of these is but another expression of the dominant utilitarian standards of value, and the second is an outcome of the prevailing desire for orderly and systematic arrangement. Pronounced irregularity of outline was as irritating to the artistic consciousness as was exceptional license in verse forms. Mountains entered an inevitable protest against the spirit that found its highest pleasure in the symmetrical complexities of a typical eighteenth-century garden. That this protest was on a great scale with accompanying suggestions of mystery and of a remote irresistible power, gives an added reason why the age turned thus decisively from forms of nature to which a romantic age yields fullest homage. Thus the attitude toward mountains finds its real explanation not so much in external conditions as in the spirit of the times.

The place of the ocean in the classical poetry is likewise significant. It awakened no sense of elation as in Byron, no sense of mysterious kinship as in Shelley. It was simply a waste of waters, dangerous at times, and always wearisome. Though more often mentioned than the mountains, it received an even more narrow and conventional treatment. Except in some elaborate similes there are few descriptions of more than a line in length. We find merely casual mention by means of stock epithets, or very short and unmeaning descriptive phrases. To Waller the sea is “the world’s great waste,” “a watery field,” a “watery wilderness,” or a “main,” liquid, or troubled, or angry, as the case may be.[61] Dryden’s epithets are hardly more felicitous. He uses “watery”[62] with an insistence that finally becomes ludicrous. He has one or two little ocean pictures written apparently for their own sake, but his best use of the ocean is in similitudes.[62] In succeeding poets the treatment of the ocean is exceedingly commonplace and unimaginative. Such small interest as the sea aroused was of a prosaic, utilitarian sort. Young’s “Sea Pieces” and “Ocean” may serve as examples, and they are little more than eulogies of England’s commercial and naval prowess. It is for Britain that “the servant Ocean” “both sinks and swells.” It is solely with reference to her prosperity that soft Zephyr, keen Eurus, Notus, and rough Boreas ”urge their toil.”

The main! The main! Is Britain’s reign;

* * * * *

The main! the main! Be Britain’s strain,[63]

is the unvaried theme. The few descriptive passages are of periods when “storms deface the fluid glass,” and seem to have been composed in accordance with Pope’s famous recipe for poetical tempests.[64] The most popular sea poem of the eighteenth century was Falconer’s “Shipwreck” written in 1762. It is a sufficiently remarkable production when thought of as the work of a common sailor but it is difficult for the modern reader to understand the extravagant praise bestowed upon it in its own day.[65] Its tame and conventional love story, its descriptions of the sylvan scenes where Palemon and Anna gave pledges of undying affection, its moralizings on the beneficial effect of poetry, the evils of war, the corrupting lust of gold, its long digression on cities and heroes “renowned in antiquity,” its invocation to the Muses, its mythology, its reverence for “sacred Maro’s art,” are all of the commonplace, classical order. There is in the actual shipwreck scene some vigorous writing, but it deals almost entirely with the emotions of the sailors, and the management of the ship. It would be difficult to find any really effective lines descriptive of the storm itself. The following quotations may stand as fairly representative of the best passages:

It comes resistless, and with foaming sweep Upturns the whitening surface of the deep.

* * * * *

But with redoubling force the tempests blow, And watery hills in dread succession flow.

* * * * *

A sea, upsurging with stupendous roll.[66]

One of the most striking characteristics of the descriptive parts of the poem is the daring and novel use of technical sea terms. Such lines as,

Reef top-sails, reef! the master calls again. The halyards and top-bow-lines soon are gone, To clue-lines and reef-tackles next they run.

* * * * *

Deep on her side, the reeling vessel lies: Brail up the mizzen quick! the master cries, Man the clue-garnets! let the main-sheet fly,[67]

are praised as minutely accurate but it certainly needs a specialist’s training to understand them.[68] There is nothing new in Falconer’s poem except his use of realism in describing the ship’s maneuvers. The sea is, to be sure, more prominent than we have found it in preceding poems, but it is the same “desert waste,” the same “faithless deep,” the same “watery plain,” and is deformed by the typical classical storm. Strange as it may seem, it is yet true that the poets of sea-girt England were very slow in making the discovery of the ocean.[69] The main points in the eighteenth-century conception of the sea were its usefulness as a commercial highway and its destructive power in storms. This impression of irresistible force is sometimes vivid enough to result in strong phrasing, but the changing beauty, the majesty, the mysterious suggestiveness of the sea found no expression in English classical poetry. Even in the poems that mark the transition spirit the adequate word for the sea is surprisingly slow to come.

In connection with the failure to understand or love the mountains or the sea we may note the avoidance of winter[70] or the conception of it as the “deformed wrong side of the year.” Lyttleton thoroughly disliked “gloomy winter’s unauspicious reign,”[71] and Pope said that its bleak prospects set his very imagination a-shivering.[72] Lady Montagu called the glistening snows a painful sight, and said that the whole country was in winter “deform’d by rains and rough with blasting winds.” The “icy, cold, depressing hand” of winter, brought in a season of privations, discomfort, and dangers. Throughout the classical period the typical phrases are “shuddering winter,” “winter’s dreary gloom,” “the sad, inverted year.” Storm and blasts “deface the year.” Hailstorms “deform the flowery spring.” Clouds “sadden the inverted year.” Winter’s “joyless reign” is a season marked by “dusky horrors.”

Fierce winter desolates the year, Deserts of snow fatigue the eye, Successive tempests bloat the sky And gloomy damps oppress the soul,

is a typical description.[73] Another indication of the dislike of this season is found in a curious “Pastoral” by Washbourne in which hell is represented as a place where it is “alwaies winter.”[74] It will be observed later that a sense of joy in winter scenes is one of the very early indications of a reviving interest in the out-door world.

Correspondent with the dislike and neglect of the grand and the terrible in Nature is a similar feeling toward such aspects of the external world as especially suggest mystery, remoteness, unseen forces. That this is true may be seen by a study of the sky phenomena that appear, or fail to appear, in this classical poetry. The day-time sky is but briefly and vaguely mentioned or it passes unobserved. A phrase so imaginative as Blackmore’s “blue gulph of interposing sky”[75] is rare. In general it is only the more striking aspects of the sky that are noticed, such aspects as would catch the attention of a child or of a mere casual observer. Fleeting, delicate effects are unheeded. Clouds receive little attention except as they portend or accompany a storm, and even then their chief use is in similitudes. Apparently the best-known appearance of the day-time sky is the rainbow. But though it is often mentioned there is singularly little variety in the phrases used to describe it. A brief summary of those phrases most frequently used is interesting: “Painted clouds;” “the clouds’ gaudy bow;” “the gaudy heavenly bow;” “the watery bow;” “the painted bow;” “painted tears;” “the gaudy drapery of heaven’s fair bow;” “the showery arch;” the bow “painted by Iris;” the bow “deck’d like a gaudy bride;” “the painted arch of summer skies,”[76] and so on through a wearisome list of kaleidoscopic combinations of the same words. The constant repetition of adjectives so unmeaning as “watery” and “showery,” or so external and artificial as “gaudy” and “painted” is as characteristic of the general attitude toward Nature as is the fact that the attention of poets should have been concentrated on the obvious beauties of the rainbow rather than on the finer, more subtle charms of the sky. In the same way sunrise, and especially sunset, are often mentioned and occasionally described. But there is practically no discriminating and appreciative study of what was actually to be seen in the heavens. It was more natural to sit at home and read the classics, and then announce that the golden god of day “drives down his flaming chariot to the sea.”[77]

Twilight had, as might be expected, little charm or suggestiveness. Moonlight also plays a most subordinate part in this poetry.[78] We seldom find anything more direct or vivid than the time-honored statement that “fair” or “pale” Cynthia “mounts the vaulted sky,” and “adorns the night” with her silver beams.[79]

The night sky was counted beautiful because of its stars. The recurrent conception is that the azure heavens are adorned with these orbs of gold. The favorite words are “spangled” and “gilded.”[80] In Young’s “Night Thoughts” we might expect to find some faithful and sympathetic study of the nocturnal heavens, but in the first eight books not seventy-five lines refer even remotely to external Nature, and in the ninth book the stress is laid on “the moral emanations of the skies.” In his efforts to find a sufficiently varied star vocabulary, Young was driven to the invention of some new phrases, but in no case do they show imaginative power. They are perfunctory and stiff and indicate that his mind was on the “system of divinity” he meant his stars to teach rather than on the stars themselves.[81] In Burnet’s “Theory of the Earth,” a work already quoted from, we find a striking, because an exaggerated, example of the way an undue love of order could modify one’s aesthetic perception. Burnet enjoyed the night sky but he felt that the stars might have been more artistically arranged:

They lie carelessly scattered as if they had been sown in the heaven like seed, by handfuls, and not by a skilful hand neither. What a beautiful hemisphere they would have made if they had been placed in rank and order; if they had all been disposed into regular figures, and the little ones set with due regard to the greater, and then all finished and made up into one fair piece or great composition according to the rules of art and symmetry! What a surprising beauty this would have been to the inhabitants of the earth! What a lovely roof to our little world! This indeed might have given us some temptation to have thought that they had been all made for us; but lest any such vain imagination should now enter into our thoughts Providence (besides more important reasons) seems on purpose to have left them under the negligence or disorder which they appear unto us.[82]

The final impression from the study of these passages that refer to stars or moonlight is that the poets of this period were not unlike Peter Bell into whose heart “nature ne’er could find the way.”

Nor for the moon cared he a tittle, And for the stars he cared as little.[83]

Night itself, aside from its starry glories, was thought of but to be feared for its brown horrors and melancholy shades. The conception of daylight as useful and safe was a part of classical good sense. The earliest poem in which we find the beauty and something of the spiritual power of night represented is by Lady Winchilsea. Later we find the characteristic sentimental melancholy of the poets involved in a tissue of moonlight and mystery, while the faint colors and pearly dews of the dawn, and the gentle sadness of evening shades, or in extreme cases, even midnight glooms, seem to be the only fit setting for struggling emotions and vague aspirations. There are also, as we shall see, throughout the romantic revival, not infrequent studies of the sky, especially of sunrise and sunset, from what we may call the artist’s point of view. But all this belongs to the new spirit and is a very evident break from classical traditions. Poetry in which the classical note is dominant shows the utmost coldness and barrenness in all that has to do with the beauty and significance of the sky whether by night or by day.[84]

In contrast to the general turning away from the grand or the mysterious in Nature we find a certain friendly feeling toward the gentler forms of out-door life. Spring and summer, blue skies, gently sloping hills, flowery valleys, cool springs, and shady groves appear in the poetry with a frequency indicative of some real delight in them.[85] But real affection for Nature even in her idyllic forms, an affection the evident outgrowth of personal experience, is the exception rather than the rule. When such regard for Nature is apparent, however narrow in scope, it is rightly to be regarded as an indication of a new feeling toward the external world, for in general these so-called idyllic descriptions are to the last degree artificial and unreal. They show that what the poet really enjoyed was not so much Nature itself, as the creation of fanciful pictures of Nature, the flowing combination of attractive details into such scenes as he would like to find in the country in case he should go there. Garth’s description of the Fortunate Islands is typical. There

No blasts e’er discompose the peaceful sky, The springs but murmur, and the winds but sigh. The tuneful swans on gliding rivers float And warbling dirges die on every note. Where Flora treads, her Zephyr garlands flings, And scatters odors from his purple wings; Whilst birds from woodbine bowers and jasmine groves Chant their glad nuptials and unenvy’d loves. Mild seasons, rising hills, and silent dales, Cool grottoes, silver brooks, and flowery vales, Groves filled with palmy shrubs, in pomp appear, And scent with gales of sweet the circling year.[86]

The details of this listless, luxurious description are such as are combined and recombined in many a picture of supposedly English scenes. The poet found his pleasure in the vague, highly generalized representation of such scenery as might exist in some imagined Elysium or Garden of Eden. The final effect on the mind of the reader is never one of reality. All is traditional and bookish. Perhaps there is no more effective way of showing the general characteristics of these poetical descriptions than by an accumulation of examples. Since there is no danger of spoiling the poetry, it may be permissible for purposes of emphasis, to print in italics such phrases as belong to the common poetical stock. The first passage is Rosamond’s description of Woodstock Park:

_Flowery mountains, Mossy fountains, Shady woods, Crystal floods._[87]

Here the union of phrases, all conventional in their character, is entirely fortuitous and undiscriminating. It is impossible not to feel that Addison picked up his items at random, according to the scheme of his verse. Take next this invocation by Broome:

Hail ye soft seats! ye _limpid springs_ and _floods_! Ye _flowery meads_, ye _vales_ and _woods_. Ye _limpid floods_ that ever murmuring flow! Ye _verdant meads_, where flowers eternal blow! Ye _shady vales_, where _zephyrs_ ever play! Ye woods where little _warblers_ tune their lay.[88]

Or Shenstone’s description of the place of his birth:

Romantic scenes of _pendent hills_ And _verdant vales_, and _falling rills_ And _mossy banks_, the fields _adorn_, Where Damon, _simple swain_, was born.[89]

Or Lyttleton’s lines:

Here _limpid fountains_ roll through _flowery meads_, Here _rising forests_ lift their _verdant heads_.[90]

Or Congreve’s description of the scenery along the Thames:

And soft and still the _silver surface glides_, The _zephyrs fan the field_, the _whispering breeze_ With fragrant _breath remurmurs through the trees_.[91]

Or Parnell’s

High sunny summits, _deeply shaded dales_, Thick _mossy banks_, and _flowery winding vales_.[92]

Or Prior’s

The _verdant rising_ of the _flowery hill_, The _vale enamelled_ and the _crystal rill_.[93]

Or Pope’s

Her fate is _whispered_ by the _gentle breeze_, And told in _sighs_ to all the _trembling trees_; The _trembling trees_ in every plain and wood, Her fate _remurmur_ to the _silver flood_.[94]

Or Marriott’s

The mimic voice repeats the _gales_, That _sigh along_ the _flowery vales_; The _flowery vales_, the _falling floods_, The _rising rocks_, and _waving woods_, To the _sighing gales_ reply Redoubling all the harmony.[95]

Further quotation is useless. It is easy to see that these passages have no individuality. They might be transposed from poet to poet without injustice either to poem or poet. They are like ready-made clothing, cut out by the quantity to fit the average figure, and never having any niceness or perfection of fit for any individual form. They are not specific. They have no local color. They are, furthermore, absolutely superficial. There is no hint of anything deeper than the conventional external details mentioned.

Throughout the classical age the most genuine interest in Nature had to do with parks and gardens. The formal garden, however, which held its own in England till early in the eighteenth century, makes but a small figure in the poetry of the period. Its affinities were rather with prose. In later poetry we find many references to the classical garden, but they are of the nature of a scornful retrospect, and they belong to the new spirit. The subject of gardening will be presented in a separate section.

In the study of the evolution of the love of Nature from Waller to Wordsworth we may perhaps mark out three stages in the attitude toward the external world. The last of these stages is the one based on the cosmic sense, or the recognition of the essential unity between man and Nature. Of this Wordsworth stands as the first adequate representative. The second stage is marked by the recognition of the world about us as beautiful and worthy of close study, but this study is detailed and external rather than penetrating and suggestive. Very much of the work of the transition period is of this sort. In the first stage Nature is counted of value chiefly as a storehouse of similitudes illustrative of human actions and passions. This first stage represents the use of Nature most characteristic of the classical poetry.

A study of the abundant similitudes of this period indicates that they were drawn from a very narrow range of natural facts. The lily, the rose, the lark, the nightingale, the wren, bees, stars, drops of dew, the sea in a storm, the oak and the ivy, leaves, the Milky Way--these are the most important sources of similitudes. The poet chose his similes from facts already canonized by long literary service, or from the obvious facts of the park or the town garden. There is, in the second place, little apparent effort to secure accuracy or picturesque effect in the statement of the illustrative side of the simile. The entire emphasis is on the human fact to be illustrated. There is, therefore, in the third place, a failure to perceive subtle or delicately true analogies. In most comparisons the likeness is superficial or it is far fetched. The similes from Nature were not the literary expression of inner congruities. They were consciously sought for as a part of the necessary adornment of poetry. Sheridan says:

I often try’d in vain to find, A _simile_ for womankind, A _simile_ I mean to fit ’em, In every circumstance to hit ’em. Through every beast and bird I went, I ransack’d every element; And after peeping through all nature, To find so whimsical a creature, A _cloud_ presented to my view, And strait this parable I drew.[96]

It is this elaborate desire for similitudes, together with the small knowledge of nature that led not only to wearisome iteration of the same similes but also to the still more wearisome iteration of the same points of comparison. A rose, for instance, is a perennially beautiful source of comparisons,[97] but in the eighteenth-century poetry it is used almost exclusively either with the lily in matters of the complexion, or by itself as representative of a young maiden. If she is overtaken by misfortune the rose is easily blasted by northern winds. If she is neglected the rose withers on its stalk. If she weeps the rose bends its head surcharged with dew. If she dies young, the rosebud is blasted before it is blown. The words of the “Angry Rose” to the poet gently satirize this prevalence of rose similes.

Of all mankind you should not flout us; What can the Poet do without us? In every love-song Roses bloom; We lend you color and perfume.[98]

The nightingale also has a conventional use. He generally represents the poet and is either singing with a thorn against his breast, or is engaged in a musical contest with other birds, in which contest he quickly silences all competitors, or is himself driven away by the clamorous noise of a crowd of common birds. The lark has his own established set of applications. Dryden, Waller, and Savage represent the poet as a lark singing when the sun shines, and Waller suits the figure to the times by making the Queen the Sun.[99] Tickell called himself an artless lark.[100] Cowley professed himself emulous of the lark.[101] Somerville is a morning lark.[102] Wycherley compares both Virgil and Pope to larks.[103] Any Fair One has a voice like a lark, and to Dyer’s delighted ear the maidens who spun English yarn sang like a whole choir of larks.[104] Not infrequently comparisons are drawn from the old custom of daring larks by mirrors or objects that would excite terror.[105] The wren carried aloft on the eagle’s back serves a variety of poetical purposes, but is especially apt when representing a needy poet and some powerful patron.[106] Bees are by far the most prolific source of similitude. Their number, their activity, their stings, their honey-making are all recognized means of illustration.[107]

To express great numbers the most useful similes are drawn from stars, pearly drops of dew, and, most frequently, leaves in autumn.[108] An exceedingly popular simile is that of the oak and ivy, or the elm and the vine.[109] Its use is obvious. The rising and the setting sun represent various forms of prosperity and adversity.[110] From Waller on, the Milky Way typifies virtues so numerous that they shine in one undistinguished blaze.[111] A large class of similitudes is drawn from water in some form. In this respect Dryden is typical. It is surprising to observe how many of his metaphors and similes are based on seas, streams, and storms,[112] and his most excellent use of Nature is in these similitudes, though after going over many of them one comes to feel that they are all made upon much the same pattern. After Dryden conventional comparisons based on floods and angry seas are frequent.

The customary form of the river simile of this period is the comparison of some man’s character, or actions, or literary style to some historic rivers with marked features. Prior uses the rapid Volga to represent the impetuous “young Muscovite,” while he compares his own king to the gentle Thames;[113] and he compares the Romans to the Tyber.[114] Pope scornfully likens Curll to the Uridanus.[115] Cowley compares Jonathan to the fair Jordan.[116] Halifax compares the reign of Charles II to the Thames.[117] Armstrong wishes his own style to combine the qualities of the Tweed and the Severn.[118] Hughes likened his Muse to the wanton Thames.[119] Roscommon thought a dull style was like the passive Soane.[120] Somerville compared Allan Ramsay’s poetry to Avona’s silver tide.[121] Thomson said that De La Cour’s numbers went gliding along in “trickling cadence” and were like the flow of the Euphrates.[122] Chief among similes of this sort is Denham’s well-known apostrophe to the Thames.[123] There is also frequent use of rivers in a more general way, as when Parnell compares the strains of the Psalmist to a rolling river,[124] and Stanhope compares Pope’s style to a gliding river,[125] and Addison compares Milton’s poems to a clean current showing an odious bottom,[126] and Dryden compares Sir Robert Howard’s style to a mighty river.[127] The use of a river as a simile for life is not infrequent. For various purposes the Nile was often used. Its annual overflow and its unknown fountain-head are the chief characteristics drawn upon. The river similes seem as a whole to be more effectively worked out and more gracefully managed than most of the other similes of the period, although they have in no case the beauty and profound symbolism characteristic of the river similes of Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, and Lowell.

Another common form of comparison is that in which the seasons or the various aspects of the day are used to describe some person. One of the happiest examples is from Marvell.

She summ’d her life up ev’ry day, Modest as morn, as midday bright, Gentle as ev’ning, calm as night.[128]

Later similes are less graceful, but they usually have the antithetical form of expression.[129]

Fairly numerous similes are drawn from trees. Dryden gives typical examples, as,

And lofty cedars as far upward shoot As to the nether heavens they drive their root.[130]

This equal spread of roots and branches, the heavy fall of a great tree, and the superior height of some tall pine or cedar, are the chief sources of similitudes.

The abundant commonplaces, the fluent ineptitudes, of these eighteenth-century similes did not escape satire in their own day. Now and then a critic looked with scorn upon the ingenious and exhausting attempts of the poet lovers to devise comparisons adequately expressive of the beauty, the fascination, the cruelty, the coldness, the inconstancy, of their Cynthias of the minute. Butler thus notes the tendency of poor and unmeaning metaphors to advance in a mob when female charms were to be depicted:

In praising Chloris, moons, and stars, and skies, Are quickly made to match her face and eyes-- And gold and rubies, with as little care, To fit the colour of her lips and hair; And, mixing suns, and flowers, and pearl, and stones, Make them serve all complexions at once.[131]

This easy method of praising a mistress is also humorously described by Ambrose Philips:

To blooming Phyllis I a song compose, And, for a rhyme, compare her to the Rose; Then, while my Fancy works, I write down Morn, To paint the blush that does her cheek adorn, And, when the whiteness of her skin I show, With extasy bethink myself of Snow. Thus, without pains, I tinkle in the close, And sweeten into Verse insipid Prose.[132]

And Swift in his “Apollo’s Edict,” 1720, specifically prohibits the use of some of the more wearisomely frequent similitudes. Some of the laws he imposes on the poets of his realm are:

No simile shall be begun With _rising_ or with _setting_ sun,

No son of mine shall e’er dare say, _Aurora ushered-in the day_, Or even name the _Milky-Way_.

The bird of Jove shall toil no more To teach that humble wren to soar.

Nor let my votaries show their skill By aping lines from Cooper’s Hill; For know, I can not bear to hear The mimicry of “deep, yet clear.”

In general we may say of the similitudes of this period that in no other literary form was Nature so widely used, and in no other form with so little beauty and spirit; that they were based on an insufficient and inexact knowledge of Nature; and that they were used without any sympathetic sense of inner fitness.

A further characteristic of the use of Nature in the classical period is a personification of natural objects with the ulterior purpose of making them conscious of the charms or emotions of some person. When such personification arises out of an intimate identification of man with Nature, a subjective recognition of the unity of all existence, or when it is the outgrowth of a supreme passion compelling the phenomena of Nature into apparent sympathy with its own joy or grief, the expression is sure to bear the mark of inner conviction or strong emotion. But when the personification is manifestly a laborious artistic device, when it is based on neither belief nor passion, it must be considered the mark of an age slightly touched by real feeling for nature. And such, in general, were the personifications so freely used in the English classical poetry. There is an artificiality, even a grotesqueness, about some of them that forbids even temporary poetic credence on the part of the reader. A good example is in Waller’s “At Pens-hurst,” where the susceptible deer and beeches and clouds mourn with Waller over the cruelty of his stony-hearted Sacharissa.[133] At the death of any illustrious man or fair lady all Nature was convulsed with grief. When Caelestia died the rivulets were flooded by the tears of the water-gods, the brows of the hills were furrowed by new streams, the heavens wept, sudden damps overspread the plains, the lily hung its head, and birds drooped their wings. When Amaryllis had informed Nature of the death of Amyntas all creation “began to roar and howl with horrid yell.”[134] When Thomas Gunston died just before he had finished his seat at Newington, Watts declared that the curling vines would in grief untwine their amorous arms, the stately elms would drop leaves for tears, and that even the unfinished gates and buildings would weep.[135] In love poetry Nature is frequently represented as abashed and discomfited before the superior charms of some fair nymph. Aurora blushes when she sees cheeks more beauteous than her own. Lilies wax pale with envy at a maiden’s fairness.[136] When bright Ophelia comes lilies droop and roses die before their lofty rival.[137] So the sun, when he sees the beautiful ladies in Hyde Park,

Sets in blushes and conveys his fires To distant lands.[138]

And when that modest luminary is aware of the presence of the fair Maria he

Seems to descend with greater care; And, lest she see him go to bed, In blushing clouds conceales his head.[139]

Nature is thus constantly compelled into admiring submission to some Delia or Phyllis or Chloris. Even further than this do the poets go; they make all the beauty of Nature a direct outcome of the lady’s charms. In the gardens at Penshurst the peace and glory of the alleys was given by Dorothea’s more than human grace.[140] No spot could resist the civilizing effect of her beauty. The most charming example of this sort of fanciful exaggeration is in Marvell’s verses on Maria and the Nunappleton gardens.

’Tis she, that to these gardens gave That wondrous beauty which they have; She straightness on the woods bestows; To her the meadow sweetness owes; Nothing could make the river be So crystal pure, but only she, She yet more pure, and straight, and fair Than gardens, woods, meads, rivers, are.[141]

If later examples of the subordination of Nature to man were so graceful and quaintly tender as this poem of Marvell’s we might simply regard them as permissible instances of pathetic fallacy. But even taken at its best we cannot fail to see that this conception of Nature in its relation to man is quite unlike the dominant conception in the romantic school. In the one case we have the subordination of Nature; in the other the ministry of Nature. A significant comparison might be made between Marvell’s Maria, and Wordsworth’s Lucy.[142] The one is the typical fair maiden ruling over her flower world and inspiring to beautiful life all the gentle Nature forms about her. The other is “Nature’s lady.” Her whole being is molded by her susceptibility to the deeper influences of Nature untouched by art. Maria gives to the external world the charm that it has. Lucy is graced by the spirit of nature with all lovely qualities. But Marvell’s poem is really no fair criterion of the use of Nature in the classical love and elegiac poetry, for in most of that poetry the emotion, the passion, that would justify extravagant or even impossible conceptions is conspicuously absent. The extravagance of speech stood as the sign of an intensity of feeling that did not exist. The poet was not swept away by overwhelming passion. He worked out his verses with conscious deliberation. A lady-love was one of the necessary poetical stage properties, so the poet cast about him for a Phyllis or an Amoret, and then cast about him for something to say to her. Such lines as Waller’s on Dorothea, who is so much admired by the plants that

If she sit down, with tops all tow’rds her bow’d, They round about her into arbours crowd: Or if she walks, in even ranks they stand, Like some well-marshal’d and obsequious band,[143]

are at once felt to be merely cold, tasteless hyperbole. The lines do not win a second’s suspension of disbelief. Modes of speech, a conception of Nature, such that high-wrought emotion might justify it, or that might be natural and inevitable when the poet’s thought was ruled by a living mythology, became mere frigid conventionalities when there was no passion, and when the spirits of stream and wood no longer won even poetic faith.

To speak of the poetic diction of the classical poetry has become a commonplace of criticism. By universal consent certain words and phrases seem to have been stamped as reputable, national, and present, and to have formed the authorized storehouse of poetical supplies. If one writer hit out a good word or phrase, it became common property like air or sunshine, and other writers did not waste their time beating the bush for a different form of words. Frequently words in the accepted diction may be traced to some Latin author, but the point to be noted here is that, whatever the origin of the word, its use is incessant. The fatal grip with which certain words clung to the poetical mind in the classical period receives interesting exemplification from a comparison of Chapman’s and Pope’s translations of Homer. It will be observed that in frequent passages Pope uses the words “purple,” “deck,” “adorn,” and “paint,” chief words in the classical poetic diction. But in the corresponding passages in Chapman some other form of words is used. And in most cases Pope’s use of these terms has no warrant in the original. Likewise, in Dryden’s translation of Virgil the stock diction is used when there is no idea or picture in the Latin to call for it and when the use of the stock phraseology results in distinct loss of force or beauty. Compare, for instance, Virgil’s vivid “flavescet” and Dryden’s tame “the fields adorned”[144] used with reference to harvests of ripened grain. Or compare “novis rubeant quam prata coloribus” and “painted meads;”[145] “noctem ducentibus astris,” and “stars adorn the skies.”[146] We find the same spirit illustrated in Dryden’s modernization of Chaucer. The fresh, spontaneous simplicity of a poet like Chaucer serves exceptionally well to show the comparatively insipid and feeble treatment of Nature on the part of those poets who were content to take their expressions, as well as their facts, at second hand. “The briddes” becomes “the painted birds;” “a goldfinch” is amplified into a “goldfinch with gaudy pride of painted plumes.” “At the sun upriste” becomes

Aurora had but newly chased the night And purpled o’er the sky with blushing light.[147]

The same point is well exemplified in some of the changes made by Percy in the Ballads. For instance,

As itt befell in Midsummer time When burds singe sweetlye on every tree

was modernized to,

When Flora with her fragrant flowers Bedeckt the earth so trim and gaye, And Neptune with his daintye showers Came to present the monthe of Maye.[148]

Full illustration would require much more space than is here at command, but the point to be made is clear, namely, that even when the poet had his natural facts furnished for him, he instinctively put them into the molds of an accepted poetic diction.

By all odds the most frequent and significant words in this stock poetic diction, so far as it has to do with the presentation of nature, are indicative of dress or adornment in some form. The word “paint” is everywhere. Snakes and lizards and birds; morning and evening; gardens, meadows, and fields; prospects, scenes, and landscapes; hills and valleys; clouds and skies; sunbeams and rainbows; rivers and waves; and flowers from tulips to white lilies--nothing escapes. It is little wonder that Somerville called God “the Almighty Painter.”[149] The word “paint” is really an Elizabethan survival, and as such came into the possession of Cowley, whose use of it is absolutely vicious. A rainbow is “painted tears.” The wings of birds are “painted oars.” David after the fight with the giant is “painted gay with blood,” and the blood of the Egyptians lost in the Red Sea “new paints the waters’ name.”[150] “Gaudy” is another word of frequent occurrence. In general the meaning was as now, “ostentatiously fine” as we see in Shakspere’s phrase, “rich but not gaudy,” and in Dryden’s “gaudy pride of painted plumes.” In that sense it was fitly applied to peacocks, and perhaps even to rainbows, but such phrases as “a gaudy fly,”[151] the “gaudy plumage”[152] of falcons; the “gaudy axles of the fixed stars,”[153] the “gaudy month” of May,[154] the “gaudy opening dawn,”[155] the “gaudy milky soil”[156] and the “gaudy Tagus”[157] seem to have no exact meaning. “Bright” might often serve as a synonym, but not in the application of the word to flies and falcons. The word “adorn” is likewise eminently serviceable. Fruit adorns the trees, fleecy flocks adorn the hills, flowers adorn the green, rainbows adorn clouds, blades of grass adorn fields, vegetables adorn gardens, Phoebus adorns the west and is himself adorned with all his light, and Emma’s eyes adorn the fields she looks on. “Deck” is another favorite. Flora’s rich gifts deck the field, herbs deck the spring, and corals deck the deep. Vales, meadows, fields, mountains, rivers, shores, plains, paths, turf, gardens--all are profusely “damasked” or “enamell’d” or “embroidered.” The wings of butterflies and linnets are “gilded.” The rising sun gilds the morn; the gaudy bow gilds the sky; gaudy light gilds the heavens; lightning gilds the storm; meteors and stars gild the night; and a duchess gilds the rural sphere when she condescends to visit the country.

These milliner-like words were not, however, the only ones that the poet could claim as lawful heritage. He knew, for instance, that he could always call honey “a dewy harvest,” or “balmy dew,” or “ambrosial spoils,” and have his hearers know what he meant. His birds, though almost necessarily a “choir,” could be “feathered” or “tuneful” or “plumy” or “warbling” according to his taste. His fish were easily labeled as “finny,” “scaly,” or “watery.”

Breezes were “whispering,” “balmy,” “ambrosial;” zephyrs were “gentle,” “soft,” and “bland;” gales were “odoriferous,” “wanton,” “Elysian;” and no other kinds of winds blew except in storm similes. “Vernal” and “verdant” come in at every turn. From Waller on, the epithet “watery” seems eminently satisfactory to the poetic mind. Dryden may be taken as illustrative. To him the ocean is a “watery desert,” a “watery deep,” a “watery plain,” a “watery way,” a “watery reign.” The shore is a “watery brink,” or a “watery strand.” Fish are a “watery line” or a “watery race.” Sea-birds are “watery fowl.” The launching of ships is a “watery war.” Streams are “watery floods.” Waves are “watery ranks.”[158] The word occurs with wearisome iteration in succeeding poets. It is applied not only to the sea but to rivers, clouds, and rain, to glades, meads, and flowers, to landscapes, to mists, to the sky, to the sun, and to the rainbow. The set phrases for the sky are such as “azure sky,” “heaven’s azure,” “concave azure,” “azure vault,” “azure waste,” “blue sky,” “blue arch,” “blue expanse,” “blue vault,” “blue vacant,” “blue serene,” “aërial concave,” “aetherial vault,” “aërial vault,” “vaulted sky,” “vaulted azure,” with such other changes as may be rung on these words. The chief words applied to stars, “spangle” and “twinkle,” have been already noted. The usual adjectives for streams and brooks are pleasant, easy words like “liquid,” “lucid,” “limpid,” “purling,” “murmuring,” and “bubbling.” “Rural,” “rustic,” and “sylvan” are epithets applied to anything belonging to the country, whether to the hours spent there, the songs of the birds, or the charming country-maidens and their loves, their bowers, their bliss, their toil. “Flowery” is so constantly used as descriptive of brooks, borders, banks, vales, hills, paths, plains, and meads, that it really has not much more meaning than the definite article prefixed to a noun. “Vocal” is applied to vales, shades, hills, shores, mountains, grots, and woodlands. “Pendent” and “hanging” belong to cliffs, precipices, mountains, shades, and woods. “Headlong” and “umbrageous” are favorite adjectives for groves or shades of any sort. “Mossy” applies to grottos, fountains, streams, caves, turf, banks, and so on. “Gray” is the usual descriptive word for twilight, and “brown” for night. “Lawns” are usually “dewy.”

Some words in this poetic diction are no longer much used. “Breathing,” is an example. It usually referred to the air in gentle motion, as “breathing gales,” but we also find “breathing earth,” referring to mists, and “breathing sweets,” and “breathing flowers” or “breathing roses,” where the reference is to perfume. “Maze” and “mazy” are also much used. The Thames and other streams lead along “mazy trains.” The track of the hare is an “airy maze.” Paths meet in narrow mazes and stars unite in a mazy, complicated dance. Milton’s stream flows with “mazy error.” This word “error” is frequently used in its exact derived meaning. In another place Milton speaks of streams that wander with “serpent error.”[159] Blair has a stream that slides along in “grateful errors.”[160] In Falconer the light strays through the forest with “gay romantic error.”[161] In Gay the fly floats about with “wanton errors.”[162] Dyer winds along a mazy path with “error sweet.”[163] Armstrong’s “error” leads him through endless labyrinths.[164] Addison’s waves roll in “restless errors,”[165] and Thomson treads the “maze of autumn with cheerful error.”[166] “Amusive” is a word applied by Pitt to the ocean, and by Mallet to clouds; Shenstone says that country joys “amuse securely.”[167] It seems to be half apologetic in tone in some cases; in others it merely means pleasing. Thomson used the word as verb or adjective several times.[168] We also find it in Parnell.[169] “Lawn” is used in the sense of an open glade in the woods. Even so late as Wordsworth this meaning persists.[170] One unpleasant but not uncommon word is “sweat.” It may be a survival from the metaphysical conceits, for we find in Dr. Donne a reference to the “sweet sweat of roses,” and Cowley has flowery Hermon “sweat” beneath the dews of night. Dryden has flowers sweat at night.[171] Fenton’s flowers

all pale and blighted lie, And in cold sweats of sickly mildew die.[172]

Even Gray talks about the “sickly dews”[173] of night, and Thomson has caverns “sweat.”[174] Garth, as a physician, may possibly be excused for having the “sickening flowers” drink up the silver dew, and the grass tainted with “sickly sweats of dew,” but when he has the fair oak adorned with “luscious sweats,”[175] he has gone into the realm of aesthetics, and no excuse can prevail.

The power of fashion in words in a conventional age is further shown by the prevalence of adjectives ending in “y.” They are favorites with Dryden, and hold their own steadily through the century that followed. Beamy, bloomy, forky, branchy, flamy, purply, steepy, spumy, surgy, foamy, blady, dampy, chinky, sweepy, sheltry, moony, paly, tusky, heapy, miny, saggy, and many more, occur where at present there would be no ending or the ending “-ing.”

The stock poetic diction may serve also to illustrate the indebtedness of the English classical poets to their Latin masters in the matter of phraseology. Compare, for instance, the use of the word “cavus” in its application to “montes,” “cavernae,” “trunci,” “saxa,” “umbra,” and “flumina,” and the English word, “hollow,” as applied to caves, rocks, mountains, shores, valleys, and even to the dark. Or compare the Latin use of “horridus,” meaning rough, rugged, wild, with “horrid,” in its application to mountains, rocks, and thickets. “Savage mountains” and “shaggy mountains” sound like an echo from Virgil’s “montes feri” and “intonsi montes.” The fundamental conception is certainly the same. Milton’s “hairy thickets” and bushes with “frizzled hair” and Dryden’s “hairy honours of the vine” are suggestive of the Latin use of “comae” as a trope for foliage. The word “honours,” as applied to foliage or fruits, is also of Latin origin. The “tristis” or “dura hiems” of Virgil finds its echo in the general epithets applied to winter in English poetry. “Deform’d” and “inverted” seem to be mere Latin transcripts. Dryden was fond of the word “nodding.” He used it twice in translations in places where some other word would more accurately represent the original.[176] In its application to mountains the word may, perhaps, be traced to Virgil’s “nutantem mundum.” Its further use by Dryden, Pope, Akenside, Shenstone, and others, with reference to forests, rocks, and precipices, is apparently a later outgrowth from its application to mountains. “Sylvan Muse” and “silvestris musa;” “flowery plains” and “florea rura;” “liquid fountains” and “liquidi fontes;” “mossy springs” and “muscosi fontes,” are but a few of the many exact parallels between the English and Latin phrases descriptive of scenery. So, too, the superficial conception of the various beauties of Nature as “adornments” of the earth finds its prototype in such expressions as “lucidum caeli decus,” applied to the moon, or “pulla ficus, ornat arborem,” or “vitis ut arboribus decori est, ut vitibus uvae.” An instructive example of the way in which borrowed epithets lose their significance and become merely conventional is the word “painted” in its application to birds. In Virgil “pictaeque volucrae”[177] meant birds of many colors, or of bright colors. Milton uses the phrase “painted wings,”[178] referring apparently to brilliant birds in the Garden of Eden. But by Pope’s time the word “painted” had become a stock epithet with its connotation so vaguely widened that it would be difficult to give its exact meaning. It was simply indefinitely associated with birds, hence Pope applied it to the brown wings of a pheasant.[179] Shenstone uses it of the wings of a fly,[180] and Parnell applies it to the eye of a peacock,[181] and Waller to the peacock’s nest.[182] In the same way “painted,” in its application to flowers, might easily be a picturesque descriptive adjective for bright blossoms of any sort, but being gradually more and more closely associated with flowers, it would lose its first meaning and come to be applied to white lilies as well as tulips. “Purple” is another borrowed word. It brought with it its whole train of Latin meanings. In ordinary English speech “purple” had a fairly definite reference to a specific color composed of red and blue, but in the English classical poetry it was used in exactly the Latin sense. The fundamental idea of “purpureus” was color, but a secondary meaning was brightness; in its twofold application it was a descriptive epithet applicable to light,[183] to flowers in general, to roses, spring, or morning. The English phrases, “morning’s purple wings,” “the purple day,” “the purple east,” “the purpled air,” “ground empurpled with roses,” “the purple spring,” “purple daffodils,” are such as would serve the purpose of a modern impressionist painter, but in eighteenth-century poetry they chiefly indicate a knowledge of the classics. They were clearly imitative phrases.

In individual cases the charge of imitation is a hazardous one to make because so difficult to prove. However close the parallelism, it is always possible to believe that two persons thought of the same thing independently. Where a whole literary period is under consideration as here, all that can be said is that the similarities between the English and the Latin forms of expression are numerous and striking, that the phrases are frequently such as would not naturally occur to an English poet, that the English poets had little first-hand knowledge of Nature, and that they knew their Virgil and Horace by heart. But after all, the inner conviction of imitation with which one turns from a consecutive reading of the two literatures is a more legitimate proof, perhaps, than even a liberal assemblage of debatable specific cases.

The imitation is not confined to diction. Many of the favorite similes, especially those drawn from trees, bees, leaves in autumn, the oak and vine, angry seas, and streams, have a Latin cast. They seem to be worked out on Virgilian models, and it is impossible not to feel that the English poet owed more to his classical library than to his knowledge of Nature. One striking mark of imitation is the prevalence of the artificial cumulative simile so common in Virgil.

The details in the Latin pastoral poetry are also freely transferred to descriptions of English scenes. The poet could not describe English meadows without a desire to transplant therein some fairer blooms from “the unenvious fields of Greece and Rome.” English rivers, skies, seas, plains, hills, and valleys were presided over by classic deities. Ceres, Pomona, and Bacchus, Dryads and Naiads, were as omnipotent as if they were still believed in. The hardy English shepherd was transformed into a languid swain eternally seeking mossy caves as a refuge against burning heats. His chief occupation was to lie beside some murmuring rill, or beneath some spreading beech, or under some myrtle hedge, and charm the listening vale with love ditties played on his pipe: or, for variety, to enter into some amoebean contest with a neighboring swain concerning the rival beauty of their respective nymphs. His chief troubles were the coyness, fickleness, and desertion of this same much-praised Phyllis or Chloris,[184] and the occasional incursion of nightly predatory wolves among his fleecy flocks. And all this calmly in the face of the fact that there were no predatory animals in English forests, that the chief enemies of the English shepherd were cold and storm, and that he would be much more likely to seek a sunny bank than a cooling grot. The classical English poets not only knew nothing of the genuine English shepherd such as Wordsworth’s Michael, but they did not wish to know of him. It was their ambition to follow in the path marked out by the Mantuan swain. If they could write so that every line would “confess Virgil”[185] they were satisfied. Pope said that it was the poet’s office to represent shepherds not as they are but as they may be conceived to have been in some past golden age.[186] That golden age existed apparently in the Italy of Virgil and the Greece of Theocritus. Dryden gave the acceptable advice,

For guides take Virgil and read Theocrite. By them alone you’ll easily comprehend How poets, without shame, may condescend To sing of gardens, fields, of flowers, and fruit, To stir up shepherds, and to tune the flute.[187]

Except in burlesque no poet of that day cared to change “Strephon and Phyllis” into “Tom and Bess.” The great effort was to dignify humble themes by constant reference to the great poems of the past.

The general structure of many English poems was evidently conformed to Latin models. A comparison of the “Pastorals” of Pope, Gay, and Ambrose Philips with Virgil’s “Eclogues” would sufficiently establish this point.[188]

Throughout the classical poetry of Nature there is little reliance on first-hand observation. There was safety and dignity in following Dick Minim’s advice, “When you sit down to write think what your favorite author would say under such and such circumstances,” and the favorite authors were sure to be Virgil, and Horace, and Ovid.

The imitations were not, however, exclusively from the Latin authors. Often the Latin borrowings came at second hand from other English poets, and English poets borrowed freely from each other. A single instance may be cited to show how an insipid and almost unmeaning collocation of words could hold its own and be re-echoed from poet to poet. Addison’s couplet,

My humble verse demands a softer theme, A painted meadow, or a purling stream,[189]

was imitated by Tickell in,

By Nature fitted for an humble theme A painted prospect, or a murmuring stream,[190]

and twice by Pope in,

Enough to shame the gentlest bard that sings Of painted meadow and of purling springs,[191]

and

Like gentle Fanny’s was my flowery theme, A painted mistress or a purling stream.[192]

Compare also,

Most of our poets choose their early theme A flowery meadow or a purling stream.[193]

But one other sort of imitation can be noticed here, and that is a natural outcome from the use of the rhymed couplet. It is what Pope calls “the sure return of still expected rhymes.” The common rhyme of “stream” and “theme” has already been noted. Pope calls attention to others:

Whene’er you find the “cooling western breeze” In the next line it “whispers through the trees.” If crystal streams “with pleasing murmurs creep” The reader’s threatened, not in vain, with “sleep.”[194]

The last reference is an ungracious hit at one of Wycherley’s poems recommendatory of Pope’s “Pastorals,” but the rhyme of “breeze” and “trees” is certainly of a bewildering frequency. There is a stanza in point in one of the doubtful poems attributed to Gray:

First when Pastorals I read, Purling streams and cooling breezes I only wrote of; and my head Rhimed on, reclined beneath the Tree-zes.[195]

One cause of the artificial and forced effect of the classical poetry of Nature is undoubtedly the sameness of impression produced by this frequent recurrence of the same rhymes.

In the foregoing study of the attitude of the classical poets toward Nature certain dominant characteristics have been indicated, all of them pointing to a lack of interest in Nature. The attention of the age was concentrated elsewhere. Not Nature, but man was the supreme interest. And the limitations must be drawn even more closely, for the interest was not in man as man according to the democratic spirit of the succeeding romantic age, nor in man as a creature of daring, of wild passions, of lawless enthusiasms, of boundless energies, as in the preceding Elizabethan age, but man as part of a well-organized social system. Man in London was the central thought of the age. This supremacy of the interest in man accounts for the acknowledged preference for city life. In the country bad roads and poor conveyances effectually separated men from each other. In the city the wits of the coffee-house and the beaux and belles of the drawing-room were able to gain the social converse and mutual admiration necessary to their happiness. What they had to say to each other was incomparably more interesting than any revelation from Nature’s solitary places. Men feared and disliked mountains and the sea because these natural features stood as obstacles to the easy pursuit of many pleasures, and because in the presence of forces so vast and elemental men felt themselves overawed and threatened. What they could not understand and conquer was their foe. They turned uneasily from all forms of Nature that suggest mysterious, unseen forces over which man has no control. The limitless spaces of the sky, the “solemn midnight’s tingling silentness,” the magical charm of moonlight, whatever is infinite in its suggestiveness, drawing the spirit of man into the vast, shadowy realms of the unknown, filled them with dismay. In Nature as in everything else they instinctively confined themselves to such portions of truth as they could clearly state and use. The kind of Nature they loved was that in which man was easily supreme. Their delight in cultivated rural England was largely based on its power of ministering to man’s ease and physical well-being.[196] Their delight in the formal garden grew out of their pleasure in seeing the triumphal expenditure of human effort. There Nature was “rhymed and twisted and harmonized” at pleasure. Man’s supremacy was nowhere else more effectually acknowledged. Not art concealed but art manifest was the ideal. Evelyn’s enjoyment of French and Italian gardens is almost always based on his pleasure in some mechanical device whereby man had conquered Nature.[197] What Cowley most enjoyed in the country was the sense of his own skill and mastery. The “best natured” satisfaction of all is, he says, the husbandman’s delight in “looking round about him and seeing nothing but the effects and improvements of his own art.”[198] The supremacy of the interest in man is further explanatory of the facts already sufficiently commented upon that the most abundant use of Nature was in similitudes for human qualities and passions, that these similitudes were drawn from a surprisingly small number of natural phenomena, and that the Nature side of the similitudes was often carelessly and ignorantly handled. The dominance of man is also back of the conception of Nature as stirred by man’s joys and woes, and plunged into despair by his death. Nature is, at the utmost, but the comparatively unimportant background against which man acts his part, and there is seldom any effort to suit the background to the picture. There is likewise significance in the twofold fact that in the set poetic diction there are many words and phrases relating to Nature and comparatively few relating to man. Where there was a concentration of interest the vividness of the conception demanded new and original forms of speech, while the stock diction, like cant in religious expression, showed the absence of genuine feeling. It is in Pope’s “Pastorals” not in “The Dunciad” that we find stock words, conventional phrases, and hereditary similes.

In summary we may note that the characteristic attitude toward Nature in the classical period is marked by:

_a_) Prevailing dislike or neglect of the grand or the terrible in Nature as mountains, the ocean, storms, and winter.

_b_) A similar dislike or neglect of the mysterious or the remote, as the various phenomena of the sky.

_c_) A certain apparent friendliness toward the gentle, pleasant, serviceable forms of Nature as in rural cultivated England, in spring and summer, in good weather, in various forms of horticulture.

_d_) An especial pleasure in Nature ordered and made symmetrical by art, as in formal gardens and parks.

_e_) Descriptions of a highly generalized sort with almost no touches of local color.

_f_) Full but conventional and superficial use of Nature in similitudes for human passions and actions.

_g_) Narrow, uninterested, and hence frequently inaccurate observation of natural facts.

_h_) Cold and lifeless imitation of the forms and details without the spirit of Latin models.

_i_) A vocabulary restricted and imitative in character.

_j_) An underlying conception of Nature as entirely apart from man, and to be reckoned with merely as his servant or his foe.