A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century

ndscap

nt that began in the eighteenth century, is obvious enough. Ruskin and Leslie Stephen have already been quoted, as witnesses to the fact that naturalism and romanticism had a common root: the desire, namely, to escape into the fresh air and into freer conditions, from a literature which dealt, in a strictly regulated way, with the indoor life of a highly artificial society. The pastoral had ceased to furnish a

Spenserians: Dyer was a landscape painter, as well as a poet; and Shenstone was one of the best of landscape gardeners. But it is the beginnings that are important. It will be needless to pursue the history of nature poet

publication of Thomson's 'Spring' ['Winter'] in 1726, to that of Gray's 'Elegy' in 1751, the nine or ten leading poems or collections of verse which appeared were all of a new type; somber, as a rule, certainly stately, romantic in tone to the extreme, prepared to return, ignorantly indeed, but with respect, to what was 'Gothic' in manners, architecture, and language; all showing a more or less vague aspiration towards

or disdaining the graces of his youthful muse, had spoken of rhyme as "the invention of a barbarous age," as "a thing trivial and of no true musical delight." Milton's example, of course, could not fail to give dignity and authority to the majestic rhythm that he had used; and Phili

ona's bard, t

t, in rime-unf

eedom sing the

odulation of numbers into his work."[4] Johnson hated Adam Smith, but when Boswell mentioned that Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow University, had given the preference to rhyme over blan

n's friend and biographer (1762) the Rev. Patrick Murdoch, says that the poem was "no sooner read than universally admired; those only excepted who had not been used to feel, or to look for anything in poetry beyond a point of satirical or epigrammatic wit, a smart antithesis richly trimmed with rhyme." This is a palpable hit at the stronger contrast than between Thomson and Pope, not alone

young idea h

c by Haydn. J. P. Uz (1742) and Wieland each produced a "Frühling," in Thomson's manner; but the most distinguished of his German disciples was Ewald Christian von Kleist, whose "Fruhling" (1749) was a description of a country walk in spring, in 460 hexameter lines, accompanied, as in Thomson's "Hymn," with a kind of "Gloria in excelsis," to the creator of nature. "The Seasons" was translated into French by Madame Bontemps in 1759, and called forth, among other imitations, "Les Saisons" of Saint

o the innermost arcana-with a dozen other moods familiar to the modern mind-it seems to us unimaginative. Thomson has been likened, as a colorist, to Rubens; and possibly the glow, the breadth, and the vital energy of his best passages, as of Rubens' great canvases, leave our finer perceptions untouched, and we ask for something more esoteric, more intense. Still there are permanent and solid qualities in Thomson's land

ovingly and with his "eye upon the object," is evident f

-flower stained

r

ws his time, wit

he soundin

chmond Hill." His delineations, if less sharp and finished in detail than Cowper's, have greater breadth. Coleridge's comparison of the two poets is well known: "The love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful relig

country seat at Hagley in 1845, describes the fam

in the height fr

ospect spreads

r hill and dale a

ld and darkenin

embosomed s

n, by surging

ke, your eye ext

broken landsc

oughens into

mbrian mountains,

e blue horizo

ch the entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of vast extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. . . Now the prospect from the hill at Hagley furnished me with the true explanation of this enumerative style. Measured along the horizon, it must, on the lowest estimate, be at least fifty miles in longitudinal extent; measured laterally, from the spectator forwards, at least twenty. . . The real area must rather exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles: the fields

not always worthy of his poetic feeling and panoramic power over landscape. It is academic and often tumid and wordy, abounding in Latinisms like effusive, precipitant, irriguous, horrific, turgent, amusive. The lo

n your hook th

the in agonizi

o the sylvan shades they were accompanied sometimes, indeed, by Milton's "mountain nymph, sweet Libe

is too apt to be, at least in his translation of Homer.[10] Mr. Saintsbury[11] detects a mannerism in the verse of "The Seasons," which he illustrates

s beneath the

addens at th

ows through her

r instances of this type of clima

mbles for his

w and continuity of his measure, offers, as has been said, the greatest contrast to Pope's system of versification; yet wherever he seeks to be ne

ense and pants

bid.

e nerves and boils

etc. Wordsworth asserts that these sentimental passages "are the parts of the work which were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice."[14] They strike us now as insipid enough. But many coming attitudes cast their shadows before across the page of "The Seasons." Thomson's denunciation of the slave trade, and of cruelty to animals, especially the caging of birds and the coursing of hares; his preference of country to town; his rhapsodies on domestic love and the innocence of the Golden Age; his contrast between

hat range th

ghter I

he power th

to pit

ir. Pope was not a sentimental

riot dooms t

son, would he

last, he crops

just raised to sh

ed till noon, and who, as Savage told Johnson, "was perhaps never in cold water in his life." Johnson reports, not without some spice of malice, that the Countess of Hertford, "whose practice it was to invite every summer some poet into the country,

landscape, a soft, cultivated landscape of lawns, gardens, fields, orchards, sheep-walks, and forest preserves. Only now and then that attraction to

e summit of a

deep, such as

a's shore, who

ing sun to Indi

orthern Ocean,

he naked, mel

hule, and the

g the stormy

ription of the thunde

6-68), closing

eights of heath

ows through he

on page 94, gave Collins the clew for his "Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," which contained, says Lowell, the whole romantic school in

he silence

farthest

l-was not unsensitive

olves, on Orca

rings of the No

t, and which we shall see gaining more and more upon English poetry as the centur

n to vast embo

roves and vis

ottos and pro

orms athwart

eep, or seem

than human, th

seize the enthu

ch recalls "

d the rigors

pth of winter,

winds blow ice

oaning forest

oundless mult

eltered, so

ire and beami

oom. There stud

nverse with the

perstitions as literary material, after a rationalizing a

ss, o'er many a

nk and unfreq

e the fairy p

game and re

ht, as village

d they wander

his ungentle

n sad breast t

iolence. The

, whose mournfu

fancy dreams, th

e the occurrence of the word roman

looms, Where the dim umbrage o'er th

broad at "pensive dusk," or by moonlight, through groves and along brooksides.[26] The word is applied likewise to clouds, "rolled into romantic shapes,

ill song into th

es beneath th

mparative lightness

, errone

e imperfect sur

image on the

ne 29, 1760), Gray comments t

weet is their voice between the gusts of

l of an Aeolian harp? I do assure you, there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit. Thomson had an ear sometimes; he was not deaf to this, and has described it gl

say, through all

ard, shrill sounds

by the demon

ed wretch of w

ds. He had a little house and grounds in Kew Lane where he used to compose poetry on autumn nights and loved to

oft shall hau

n summer wrea

spend the

gentle sp

Thomson's residence there, and forsook t

of it, nor yet do at all comprehend it, when they see it."[28] Gray's "not forty years" carries us back with sufficient precision to the date of "The Seasons" (1726-30), and it is not perhaps giving undue credit to Thomson, to acknowledge him as, in a great measure, the father of the national school of landscape gardening. That this has always been recognized upon the Continent as an art of English invention, is evidenced by the names Englische Garten, jardin Anglais, still given in Germany and France to pleasure grounds laid out in the natural taste.[29] Schopenhauer gives the philosophy of the opposing styles as follows: "The great distinction between the Engl

ed it from the seventeenth century. In Bacon's essay on gardens, as well as in the essays on the same subject by Cowley and Sir William Temple, the ideal pleasure ground is very much like that which Le Notre realized so brilliantly at Versailles.[30] Addison, in fact, in the Spectator

next your adm

you look, be

intricacie

dness to perp

rove, each alle

atform just ref

eye inverted

atues, statues

ountain, neve

mer house, that

e sails throug

rs fight, or d

the drooping s

roost in Nilu

Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren. Grounds were laid out in rectangular plots, bordered by straight alleys, sometimes paved with vari-colored sand, and edged with formal hedges of box and holly. The turf was inlaid with parterres cut in geometric shapes and set, at even distances, with yew trees clipped into cubes, cones, pyramids, sphere

Many French groves seem green chests set upon poles. . . In the garden of Marshal de Biron at Paris, consisting of fourteen acres, every walk is buttoned on each side by lines of flower-pots, which succeed in their seasons. When I saw it, there were nine thousand pots of asters, or la reine Marguerite. . . At Lady Orford's, at Piddletown, in Dorsetshire, there was, when my brother married, a doub

d coats of arms were sometimes cut in yew, box, and holly. He refers with respect to a recent work by the Rev. Thomas Whately, or Wheatley, "Observations on Modern Gardening," 1770; and to a poem, then and still in

in his poem "The English Garden," 1757, speaks o

the scene my

etofore, with

formal, dull d

called a garden

east full many

ruel pair, whe

c skill, they

lummet and un

erdure what th

stone

e sidelo

; the holly's

igh arcades; t

aic mode of

ured carpet of

ound uplifted

d of flat

the poet, Taste "ex

e awfu

nks spontaneou

crisp?d knots,

l; the fountai

asted crystal

brious o'er th

prim but lovely old garden, with its avenues, terraces, and sun dials, the loss of which is deeply deplored, now th

"Pleasures of Imagination" (1742-44), Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health" (1744), Dyer's "Fleece" (1757) and Grainger's "Sugar Cane" (1764). Mason's blank verse, like Mallet's, is closely imitative of Thomson's and the influence of Thomson's inflated d

atefu

heme, becomes t

try by mod

dence and se

e, without in

ify tha

y speaking of a net as the "sportsma

ntrails hide the sulphur

-house, it is under

re rude where

t his conge

ay his tepid

e chill

The best of them are not free from it, not even Gray, not even Collins; and it pervades Wordsworth's earliest verses, his "Descriptive Sketches" and "Evening Walk" published in 1793. But perhaps t

ook II. 34-78) that, in the reaction against straight alleys, many gardeners had gone to an extreme in the use of zigzag meanders; and he

aws to her dew-sprent

, thickets, and artificial mounds, hardly suggest to the modern reader a very successful attempt to reproduce nature. To be sure, Pope had only five acres to experiment with, and that parklike scenery which distinguishes the English landscape garden requires a good deal of room. The art is the natural growth of a country where primogeniture has kept large estates

houses; straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every kind of straight line, where the foot has to travel over what the eye has done before. . . To stand still and survey such avenues may afford some slender satisfaction, through the change derived from perspective; but to move on continually and find no change of scene in the least attendant on our change of place, must give actual pain to a person of taste. . . I conceived some idea of the sensation he must feel from walking but a few minutes, immured between Lord D--'s high shorn yew hedges, which run exactly parallel at the distance of about ten feet, and are contrived perfectly to exclude all kind of objects whatsoever. . . The side trees in vistas should be so circumstanced as to afford a probability that they grew by nature. . . The shape of groun

uniformity, and artifice, and that new taste in literature which discarded the couplet for blank verse, or for various stanza forms, which left the world of society

n to whom Pope inscribed his "Epistle on the Use of Riches," already quoted (see ante p. 121), and who gave Kent a home at his country house. Kent is said to have acknowledged that he caught his taste in gar

nice art in

poured forth o

of Paradise;

ts, and caves

aters, down the

ng?d banks in

ral seat of

ro" "retired leisure," takes his pleasu

nd heal

lawn or fo

of all the beauties he added to the face of this beautiful country, none surpassed his management of water. Adieu to canals, circular basins, and cascades tumbling down marble steps. . . The gentle stream was taught to serpentine seemingly at its pleasure."[37] The treatment of the garden as a part of the landscape in general was commonly accomplished by the removal of walls, hedges, and other inclosure

ening designs. Mr. Saintsbury has described Shenstone as a master of "the artificial-natural style of poetry."[39] His pastoral insipidities about pipes and crooks and kids, Damon and Delia, Strephon and Chloe, excited the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who was also at no pains to conceal his contempt for the poet's horticultural pursuits. "Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves and to place a bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view; to make water run where it will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden, demands any great powers of mind, I will not enquire." The doctor reports that Lyttelton was jealous of the fame which the Leasowes soon acquired, and that when visitors to

ore and more fady, till they end in the almond-willow or silver osier." To have Lord Lyttelton bring in a party at the small, or willow end of such a walk, and thereby spoil the whole trick, must indeed have been provoking. Johnson asserts that Shenstone's house was ruinous and that "nothing raised his indign

skill in landscape gardening, which he exercised at Enfield Chase and afterward at Hayes.[41] Thomson, who was Lyttelton's guest at Hagley every summer during the last three or four years of his life, was naturally familiar with the Leasowes. There are many references to the "sweet descriptive bard," in Shenstone's poems[42] and a seat was inscribed to his memory in a part of the grounds known as Vergil's Grove. "This seat," says Dodsley, "is placed upon a s

farther in the passion for nature than the men of Shenstone's day that we are apt to be impatient of the degree of artifice pres

rt, most all

valley's pe

hints from N

rcadia bl

fringe the

elow the ve

horrid bra

s groups of

sheltered

s and spires, and bri

rs a lane to a winding avenue, and an old orchard or stony pasture to a lawn decorated with coppices. "I do confess," says Howitt, "that in the 'Leasowes' I have always found so much ado about nothing; such

dedicated to Lyttelton, Thomson, Somerville,[44] Dodsley, or some other friend. He supplied these with inscriptions expressive of the sentiments appropriate to the spot, passages from Vergil, or English or Latin verses of his own composition. Walpole says that Kent went so far in his imitation of natural scenery as to plant dead trees in Kensington Garden. Walpole himself see

iption for a Grotto," which is not unworthy of Landor. Matthew Green, the author of "The Spleen," wrote a poem of some 250 lines upon Queen Caroline's celebrated grotto in Richmond Garden. "A grotto," says Johnson, apropos of that still more celebrated one at Pope's Twickenham villa, "is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun"; but the increasing prominence of the mossy cave and hermit's

o pronounced "The Schoolmistress" a masterpiece in its kind, made a rather slighting mention of its author.[45] "I have read an 8vo volume of Shenstone's letters; poor man! He was always wishing for money, for fame and other distinctions; and his whole philosophy consisted in living, against his will, in retirement and in a place which his taste had adorned, but which he only enjoyed when people of note came to see and commend it." Gray unquestionably profited by a reading of Shenstone's "Elegies," which antedate his own "Elegy Written

is his "Pastoral Ballad," written in 1743 in four parts and in a tripp

d out a gift

here the wood-

ledged the prettin

y she bade

hat she bad

mmend the well-known lines

travell'd lif

s stages ma

think he sti

t welcome

ly find to be like the blank verses of his neighbors." Shenstone encouraged Percy to publish his "Reliques." The plans for the g

bscurity and said it was issued nine years too early, but admitted that now and then it rose "even to the best, particularly in description." Akenside was harsh, formal, and dogmatic, as a man. Smollett caricatured him in "Peregrine Pickle." Johnson hated his Whig principles and represents him, when settled at Northampton, as "having deafened the place with clamors for liberty."[47] He furthermore disliked the class of poetry to which Akenside's work belonged, and he told Boswell that he couldn't read it. Still he speaks of him with a

o call romantic. His doctrine at least, if not his practice, was in harmony with the fresh impulse which was coming into English poetry. Thus he celebrates heaven-born g

ncy, from the

nce thy rosy

nd dews to spri

haksper

takes imagination as its subject rather than its method will inevitably remain, not poetry but a lecture o

ng is divin

rabb?d, as dull

as is Apol

sical, and, as a consequence, frigid. Following Addison, he names greatness and novelty, i.e., the sublime and the wonderful, as, equally with beauty, the chief sources of imaginative plea

Alpine heights

the wide hori

es rolling hi

lains, through empir

of sand, will

windings of

t his feet? Th

est her heave

ative quarry.

nal scene, sh

f air; pursues t

ied lightning thr

hirlwinds and th

long trac

n's second paper (Spectator, 412) and the emotion is the same to

em ist es

hinauf und vorw

detail, richness of invention, energy of

a second in 1760. They are of little value, but show here and there traces of Milton's minor poetry and that elegiac sentiment, common to the lyrical verse of the time, noticeable particularly in a passage on the nightingale in Ode XV, book i;, "

d "The Country Walk," written by John Dyer, a young Welshman, in the octosyllabic couplet of Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Pensoroso." ("Grongar Hill," a

landscape seen from the top of his favorite summit in South Wales. It is a slight piece of work, careless and even slovenly in execution, but with an ease and lightness of touch that contrast pleasantly with Thomson's and Akenside's ponderosity. When Dyer w

valleys w

ummit, wild

alludes to in his sonnet on Dyer-"Long

flowers Q

and mountai

by the murm

rush while a

groves of G

e "power of hills" was on him. Like Wordsworth, too, he moralized his song. In "Grongar Hill," the ruined tower suggests the tran

lends enchant

ountain in its

o owe someth

mmits soft

colors o

hose who j

own and ro

ead the sam

's still a

country parson. In 1757 he published his most ambitious work, "The Fleece," a poem in blank verse and in four books, descriptive of English wool-growing. "The subject of 'The Fleece,' sir," pronounced Johnson, "ca

f salt Teach th

ade poetical, by dragging in episodes and digressions which do not inhere in the subject itself but are artificially asso

mbayed, Dimetian land, By green hill

line about the Si

k level of

hepherd" from the same; "the light fantastic toe" from "L'Allegro"; "level brine" and "nor taint-worm shall

f "The Fleece," said that "he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer's 'Fleece'; for if that were ill received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect

ad of

t, midst his

of Time dispart

s. Perhaps the doctor's

to the picture of the m

"solitary Stonehenge g

ee

c and Classical in English Literat

h Century Lite

mn," line

fe of P

h Century Lite

bitoure bumbleth in the m

"Life of Lyttelto

ression of Eng

e to the Second Editio

91) is Milton's "spotty globe." The apostrophe to light ("Spring" 90-96) borrows its "efflux divine" from M

Athwart the roving T

431-32; and "W

er of an icy isle, While

L., I.

glish Poets," V

inally three damsels

pisode that Pope supp

eauty, she was be

s that he took the first hint of "The Seasons" from the names of

ace to Second Edition

The He

y on Man,"

us, will not man awak

ld winter keens th

hivering, linge

. 125

ife of

pring,"

utumn,"

stle of A

," 1030-37.

e in some vas

ss contiguit

inter,"

pring,"

groves whose shade the

tch

ads and path

h pale pass

d

walks when

used, save ba

to Howe, S

to Howe, Nov

taking place, not only in gardening but in the world of literature and of fashion. The extremely artificial French taste had long taken the lead in civilized Europe, and now there was an attempt to shake off the shackles of its exaggerated formalism. The poets of the age were also pioneers of this school of nature. Dyer, in his poem of 'Grongar Hill,

d. Charles II. imported some of Le Notre's pupils and assistants, who laid out the grounds at Ha

orer of Gothic, also recommended the natural style of landscape

of Gardening

I. 38

illiam Mason," in 4

s "the rough, careless strokes of nature" against "the nice touches and embellishments of art," and complains that "our British gardeners, instead of humoring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in all its luxurianc

nders of the s

s-adorning, th

columns, pyra

rns and budding

tal dials o

by cunning a

rim, on no lo

oots there eve

ying sails out-spre

nners," Shenstone's Works,

" Works of the Earl of Orf

collections of S

nglish Poets,"

fe of Sh

for his visits to Gi

Ode," and "Verses Written towa

of England," and Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the Poets" (1846), Vol. I. pp. 258-63. The last gives an engraving of the house and grounds. Miller, who was at Hagley-"The British Tempe"-and the Leasowes just a century after Shenstone began t

ence about an urn which she was erecting to Somerville's memory. She was a sis

to Nichols,"

lusively with elegiac poetry. Shenstone's collected poems were not published till 1764, though some of them had been printed in Dodsley's "Miscellanies." Only a few of his elegies are dated in the collect

ses, that wit

ld insensate s

spirit quits

es, with radiant

hear the distan

ncy sweetness

egy

er ignobly cr

egy

on fired their

egy

m veil of eveni

ane or yew's fun

egy

twilight and t

step to these s

tal dews impearl

bi

fe of Ak

easures

. Words

out that broke

aginable to

cclesiastical