Christian, and more suited to the tranquil prosperity of the reigns of the first and second Georges.86 They are repeatedly recognizable in poetry up to 1750 or 1760. Often, however, we must suppose that the poet has been reading not Shaftesbury, but Thomson, who probably is echoing Pope, who, in his turn, is transmitting ideas received sometimes directly from Shaftesbury, sometimes at second hand through Bolingbroke.87 Even more often we find it wholly impossible to trace the optimism of a particular poet with certainty to any of these sources. For Shaftesbury's immediate appeal was not to the untrained mind, but to the aristocrat in literature. His philosophy did not become truly popular until it had been simplified and, as it were, translated into the language of the bourgeois reader. I have been reading my Lord Shaftesbury's Moralist [writes Mrs. Rowe 88 to the Countess of Hertford] which has fill'd my head with 66 86 Cf. Leonard Welsted, Dissertation Concerning the State of Poetry (1724). May it not, my Lord, be reasonably hop'd, that the Peace, the Happiness, the universal Quiet and Tranquillity, which Great Britain and All Europe enjoys under the Influence of his Majesty's Councils, will have such happy Consequences for all the Studies of Humanity, as may, in Time, and under just Encouragements, bring them to that Standard or Perfection, which denominates a Classical Age?" Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1725, ed. Durham, p. 358. 87 Collins, J. C., Bolingbroke, pp. 137, 138. Bolingbroke's Minutes of Letters to Mr. Pope, which form the basis of the Essay on Man, were probably written between 1727 and 1733, but not published until 1754, after having been much revised. Sichel, W., Bolingbroke and His Times, vol. II, pp. 326-329, and Collins, op. cit., p. 194. [Bolingbroke's] deism . . . gave some form and impulse not only to Pope but also to Voltaire, and so to the whole century. . . . His thought, though not his own, was coined anew by Voltaire and Pope, and ran broadcast among the lands that read the Dictionnaire and the Essay on Man." Elton, The Augustan Ages, p. 288. Cf. Moore, C. A., op. cit., p. 324. 88 Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse, vol. II, p. 44. beauties, and love, and harmony, but all of a divine and mysterious nature. However superior his notions may be to my capacity, I have been agreeably led on thro' I know not what enchanting scenes of happiness. I wish you would read it, for it would make you the most charming and agreeable enthusiast in the world. Whether I am in my right senses at present I cannot tell... In the fields of philosophy and religion, his interpreter was Francis Hutcheson; 89 in poetry, his chief exponents were Thomson and Pope. His social ethics are to be found in popular form in Pope's Essay on Man, although Pope probably had received them already clarified by Bolingbroke. His personal ethics, based on the idea of selfdevelopment through submission to the influence of the world of physical nature, formed a large, though subsidiary, part of Thomson's Seasons, 1726-30. When thus separately developed, these two leading ideas were later perceived to be ethically opposed, for the eighteenth century continued to regard the contemplative attitude towards man and nature as "melancholy," and therefore anti-social. On the other hand, Pope's conception of man as a purely social being, without individual rights or importance, was regarded by the eighteenth century as a cure for melancholy. The first effect on melancholy poetry of the acceptance of a more optimistic philosophy was, however, a new emphasis on the pleasures of melancholy, a new enthusiasm for the life of retirement, and a renewed assertion of its moral defensibility. These effects are most clearly seen in the descriptive poetry of James Thomson and his followers. 89 Shaftesbury was probably more popular after Mandeville's attack on his ideas in the latter's Fable of the Bees, 1723, and Hutcheson's defense called An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 1725. Hutcheson occupied the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1729 until his death in 1746, and continued to spread Shaftesbury's ideas in his lectures. CHAPTER IV MELANCHOLY AND DESCRIPTION 1725-1750 IN the poetry of the Romantic Movement, melancholy plays a large part, and this melancholy is often communicated through nature description, the poet's mood, whether merely pensive or sad, foreboding, gloomy, or desperate, seeming to arise naturally from the surroundings in which he finds himself.1 The scene may be actually observed, as in Wordsworth's Yew-Trees, Coleridge's Dejection, Byron's Elegy on Newstead Abbey, Lamartine's Isolement; or it may be present to the mind's eye only, as in Shelley's Alastor. In either case, as Ruskin has made us forever sensible, the source of the effect is usually the pathetic fallacy, the representation of the outer world as feeling human emotions, or animated by human motives. Ruskin has further pointed out that the same fallacy exists when nature is reproached by the poet for remaining unmoved while he himself is suffering. In order, therefore, to understand the melancholy of the eighteenth century, it seems necessary to inquire how early in that century descriptions of nature become the poet's "vehicle for conveying the melancholy mood; and whether, in so using description, he makes his landscape suffer with 1 "Sentiment de la nature, mélancolie, lyrisme: sur tous ces points, qui au fond se réduisent à un, Rousseau dépasse Richardson." Texte, Joseph, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et les Origines du Cosmopolitisme littéraire, p. 308. (The italics are mine.) Cf. Morel, James Thomson, pp. 352-3, and Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, p. 305. him, or, whatever his own mood, preserves his sense of objective reality. And first, let us go back for a moment to our starting point, the late seventeenth century. 2 In the seventeenth century, as literary histories recognize, there was almost nothing that we should now call "nature poetry." It is true that the Elizabethan poets had had to a high degree the power of placing their men and women against a background clearly and beautifully indicated, just as Italian painters in Raphael's time, though not themselves landscape artists, were singularly competent to set in true Italian scenery their portraits and their madonnas. And in such men as William Browne of Tavistock and Robert Herrick, we even see an interest in landscape for its own sake. But these powers had gradually died of inani¦ tion, like the other impulses to poetic expression. It is true also, that in Lucretius, Virgil, the Psalms and the other classical and biblical sources we have noted for the melancholy poetry of the seventeenth century, philosophic or religious reflection often grows out of the description of nature or is closely associated with it. But while seventeenth century poets admired and imitated these descriptive passages, they seem to have had either little impulse or little power to look about them and describe the English 2 Reynolds, Treatment of Nature in English Poetry between Pope and Wordsworth, [2d ed.] Palgrave, Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson, p. 166. Neilson, Essentials of Poetry, p. 71. ... The And this "The poets [in the latter half of the seventeenth century] literally lose the best of their senses, and cease to perceive with joy, or interpret with insight, the colour and outline of things, the cadence of sound or motion, and the life of creatures. whole interest in the outwardly beautiful declines. decline expresses the general invasion of poetry by ideas, arguments, and abstractions, which minister both to the rational spirit and to a false notion of literary dignity. The concrete interest confines itself chiefly to society and persons." Elton, The Augustan Ages, p. 211. 3 Ante, ch. II. landscape at first hand, independently of classical or biblical inspiration. Such lyric descriptions as do occur fall into three classes. First, descriptions at the beginnings and endings of the many pastorals and elegies on the death of friends or public characters. These are always direct reflections of similar passages in classical originals, and, like the originals, are intended to induce in the reader the appropriate mood of gloom. The Temple of Death, by Sheffield, begins with such a description (already quoted ante p. 80), and we readily perceive that the scene has no relation either to real landscape or real feeling. Truth to outward fact and sincerity are both lacking. Descriptions of another sort are found in the lyric passages of the tragedies of the day, and are also evidently intended to bring the spectator to a particular mood, in this case a mood consonant with the approaching portion of the action. This is a device common to playwrights of all ages, and was probably inherited by the late seventeenth century directly from Shakespeare and his contemporaries, whose descriptions had skilfully eked out meagre scenery. Such a passage occurs for instance at the beginning of Dryden's All for Love, act I, sc. 1, 17.4 Serapion (Priest of Isis): Last night, between the hours of twelve and one, A whirlwind rose, that, with a violent blast, The iron wicket, that defends the vault Where the long race of Ptolemies is laid, ... 4 Quotations from Dryden, Dramatic Works, ed. Scott and Saintsbury. |