Chapter 3

She goes into the world, and there she meets her death. The poem is not an allegory, but there is no mistaking the thought that generated it. The mirror and the web are the emblems of Romantic art. The feelings which stir the heart to action, which spring to meet the occasion or the object, are contrasted, in the poem, with the more pensive feelings which are excited by the sight of the object in a mirror, and the suggestions of color and design which are to be transferred to the embroidery. The mirror is a true and subtle symbol. When Shakespeare treated the same problem, he made King Richard II, the most romantically minded of all his kings, call for a mirror. The thing that it is easiest for a man to see in a mirror is himself; egotism in its many forms, self-pity, self-cultivation, self-esteem, dogs Romanticism like its shadow. The desire to be the spectator of your own life, to see yourself in all kinds of heroic and pathetic attitudes, is the motive-power of Romantic poetry in many of its later developments. Yet life must be arrested and falsified before the desire can be fulfilled. No one has ever seen himself in a mirror as he is seen by others. He cannot catch himself looking away, self-forgetful, intent on something outward; yet only when he is in these attitudes does his true character show itself in his face. Nor, if he could so see himself, would he be a witness of the truth. The sensation of drowning, or of leading an assault in war, is very unlike the sentiment which is aroused in the spectator of either of these adventures. Romanticism, in its decline, confuses the sentiment with the sensation, and covets the enjoyment of life on the easy terms of a by- stander.

These faults and failings of late Romance are far enough removed from the simple heroism of the death of Roland in the pass of Roncesvalles. Later Romance is known everywhere by its derivative, secondary, consciously literary character. Yet it draws sometimes from the original source of inspiration, and attains, by devious ways, to poetic glories not inferior to the old.

IMITATION AND FORGERY

Romance is a perennial form of modern literature, and has passed through many phases. No period has been without it, though the esteem in which it is held has varied a good deal from age to age. English literature is strong in romance; there is something in the English temper which makes scepticism ungrateful to it, and disposes it to treat even dreams seriously. Chaucer, who laughed at the romantic writers of his day, yet gave a new lease of life to Romance in _Troilus and Cressida_ and _The Knightes Tale_. Many of the poets of the seventeenth century chose romantic themes for their most serious work; if Davenant and Chamberlayne and others had been as successful as they were ambitious, they would have anticipated the Revival of Romance. Even in the age of Pope, the old romance subjects were still popular, though they were celebrated in books which have long been forgotten. Everyone who has studied the Troy legend of the Middle Ages knows how great a share in the popularization of the legend belongs to the Sicilian lawyer, Guido delle Colonne, who summarized, in the dull style of a Latin chronicle, and without acknowledgment, the brilliant _Roman de Troie_ which the French poet, Benoit de Sainte-More had written for Queen Eleanor of England. Guide's matter-of-fact compilation had an enormous vogue; Chaucer, Lydgate, and Shakespeare treated it as an authority; and Caxton translated it into English prose. Through all the changes of fashion Caxton's version continued in esteem; it was repeatedly revised and reissued; and, in the very age of Pope, found what was doubtless a large public under the title _The Destruction of Troy_, _In Three Books . . . With many Admirable Acts of Chivalry and Martial Prowess_, _effected by Valiant Knights_, _in the Defence and Love of distressed Ladies. The Thirteenth Edition_, _Corrected and much Amended_. London, _Printed for Eben. Tracey_, _at the Three Bibles on London-Bridge_. _1708_. In the underworld of literature Romance never died out. The Revival of Romance took its special character from a gradual and powerful reaction against Dryden and Pope and all those masters of Classical method who, during half a century, had legislated for English poetry. It began very early in the eighteenth century, long before the death of Pope. No sooner did a dynasty of moralists and satirists claim possession of the high places, and speak in the name of English literature, than all the other interests and kinds, which survived among the people, began to range themselves in opposition, and to assert their right to be heard. The supremacy of Dryden and Pope was the most despotic rule that English poetry has ever known, and the revolt was strong in proportion. Satire and morality very easily becomes tedious, especially when they are in close alliance. Despotism may be tempered by epigrams, and so become tolerable, but it is important that the epigrams should not be made by the despot. Outside the charmed circle of his friendships, Pope was ready enough to use his wit against any pretender.

The change began gradually, and in very innocent fashion. Poetry had been taught to be scholarly, self-conscious, experimental; and it showed its skill in half-playful imitations of the older English masters. Pope himself imitated Chaucer and Spenser in burlesque fashion. John Philips, in _The Splendid Shilling_, used Milton's heightened style to describe the distresses of an impecunious poet. William Shenstone in _The School- mistress_, parodied Spenser, yet the parody is in no way hostile, and betrays an almost sentimental admiration. Spenser, like Milton, never lost credit as a master, though his fame was obscured a little during the reign of Dryden. His style, it must be remembered, was archaic in his own time; it could not grow old, for it had never been young. Addison, in _An Account of the Greatest English Poets_, says that Spenser's verse

Can charm an understanding age no more; The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, While the dull moral lies too plain below.

But the _Account_ is a merely juvenile work; its dogma is not the sword of judgment, but the shield of ignorance. "The character he gives of Spenser," said Pope, "is false; and I have heard him say that he never read Spenser till fifteen years after he wrote it." As for Pope himself, among the English poets Waller, Spenser, and Dryden were his childhood's favorites, in that order; and the year before his death he said to Spence--"I don't know how it is; there is something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read the Faerie Queene, when I was about twelve, with infinite delight; and I think it gave me as much when I read it over, about a year or two ago."

The lyrical Milton and the romantic Spenser found disciples among poets in the early half of the eighteenth century. Two of these disciples may be mentioned, both born about the year 1700, only twelve years later than Pope. John Dyer, the son of a solicitor in Wales, was bred to the law, but gave it up to study painting under Jonathan Richardson. His earlier and better poems were written while he wandered about South Wales in pursuit of his art. _Grongar Hill_, the most notable of them, was published in 1726. Love of the country is what inspires his verses, which have a very winning simplicity, only touched here and there by the conventions deemed proper for poetry:

Grass and flowers Quiet treads, On the meads and mountain-heads, Along with Pleasure, close ally'd, Ever by each other's side; And often, by the murmuring rill, Hears the thrush, while all is still, Within the groves of Grongar Hill.

The truth of his observation endeared him to Wordsworth; and his moral, when he finds a moral, is without violence:

How close and small the hedges lie! What streaks of meadows cross the eye! A step methinks may pass the stream, So little distant dangers seem; So we mistake the Future's face, Ey'd thro' Hope's deluding glass; As yon summits soft and fair, Clad in colours of the air, Which, to those who journey near, Barren, and brown, and rough appear, Still we tread tir'd the same coarse way, The present's still a cloudy day.

It takes a good poet to strike a clear note, with no indecision, in the opening lines of his poem, as Dyer does in _The Country Walk_:

I am resolv'd, this charming day, In the open fields to stray; And have no roof above my head But that whereon the Gods do tread.

His landscapes are delicately etched, and are loved for their own sake:

And there behold a bloomy mead, A silver stream, a willow shade, Beneath the shade a fisher stand, Who, with the angle in his hand, Swings the nibbling fry to land.

It would be absurd to speak solemnly of Dyer's debt to Milton; he is an original poet; but the writer of the lines quoted above can never have been blind to the beauties of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_. His two arts brought him little material prosperity; in 1740 he took orders in the Church of England, and in his later years did harm to his fame by a long industrial poem called _The Fleece_, which has on it none of the dew that glistens on his youthful verses.

James Thomson, who won a great reputation in his own age, was the son of a parish minister in Scotland. He was educated in Edinburgh, and came to London to seek his fortune. All Thomson's work shows the new tendencies in poetry struggling with the accepted fashions. His language in _The Seasons_ is habitually rhetorical and stilted, yet there is hardly a page without its vignettes of truth and beauty. When he forgets what he has learned in the Rhetoric class, and falls back on his own memories and likings, the poet in him reappears. In _The Castle of Indolence_, published just before his death in 1748, he imitates Spenser. One stanza of this poem is more famous than all the rest; it is pure and high romance:

As when a shepherd of the Hebrid-Isles, Placed far amid the melancholy main, (Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles, Or that aerial beings sometimes deign To stand embodied to our senses plain), Sees on the naked hill, or valley low, The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain, A vast assembly moving to and fro; Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show.

Many who are familiar with this simile have never been at the pains to remember, or enquire, what it illustrates. Indeed its appearance in the poem is almost startling, as if it were there for no purpose but to prophesy of the coming glories of English poetry. The visitors to the Castle of Indolence are met at the gate by the porter, who supplies them with dressing-gowns and slippers, wherein to take their ease. They then stroll off to various parts of the spacious grounds, and their disappearance is the occasion for this wonderful verse. Thomson cared no more than his readers for the application of the figure; what possessed him was his memory of the magic twilight on the west coast of Scotland.

Pope and Prior were metropolitan poets; it is worth noting that Dyer belonged to Wales, and Thomson to Scotland. It is even more significant that Dyer was by profession a painter, and that Thomson's poems were influenced by memories of the fashionable school of landscape painting. The development of Romantic poetry in the eighteenth century is inseparably associated with pictorial art, and especially with the rise of landscape painting. Two great masters of the seventeenth century, Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain, are more important than all the rest. We have here to do not with the absolute merits of painting, nor with its technical beauties and subtleties, but with its effect on the popular imagination, which in this matter does not much differ from the poetic imagination. The landscapes of Salvator Rosa and Claude were made familiar to an enormous public by the process of engraving, and poetry followed where painting led. There are exquisite landscapes in the backgrounds of the great Italian masters; Leonardo, Titian, and others; but now the background became the picture, and the groups of figures were reduced to serve as incidents in a wider scheme. Exactly the same change, the same shift of the centre of interest, may be seen in Thomson's poetry compared with Spenser's. No doubt it would be difficult to balance the creditor and debtor account as between poetry and painting; the earlier pictorial landscapes borrowed some hints from the older romances; but in England, at least, landscapes of wild rocks, and calm lakes, and feudal castles lit up by the glow of the setting sun were familiar before the reaction in poetry set in. Romance, in its modern development, is largely a question of background. A romantic love-affair might be defined as a love-affair in other than domestic surroundings. Who can use the word "romantic" with more authority than Coleridge? In _Kubla Khan_, a poem which some would choose as the high-water mark of English romantic poetry, he gets his effect from the description of a landscape combining the extremes of beauty and terror:

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, * * * * * It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean; And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!

Romance demands scenery; and it should never be forgotten that the age of Pope, the age of symmetry and correctness in poetry, was an age when the taste for wild scenery in painting and in gardening was at its height. If the house was set in order, the garden broke into a wilderness. Addison in the _Spectator_ (No. 414) praises the new art of landscape gardening:

There is generally in nature something more grand and august, than what we meet with in the curiosities of art. When, therefore, we see this imitated in any measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted kind of pleasure, than what we receive from the nicer and more accurate productions of art. On this account our _English_ gardens are not so entertaining to the fancy as those in _France_ and _Italy_, where we see a larger extent of ground covered over with an agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which represent everywhere an artificial wildness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we meet with in those of our own country.

Addison would have hesitated to apply this doctrine to poetry; indeed the orthodoxy of that age favored the highest possible contrast between the orderly works of man, and the garden, which it chose to treat as the outpost of rebellious nature. Pope was a gardener as well as a poet, and his gardening was extravagantly romantic. He describes his ideal garden in the _Epistle to the Earl of Burlington_:

Let not each beauty everywhere be spy'd, Where half the skill is decently to hide. He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds, Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds. Consult the genius of the place in all; That tells the waters or to rise, or fall; Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale, Or scoops in circling theatres the vale; Calls in the country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades; Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines; Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

Pope carried out these ideas as well as he could in his garden at Twickenham, where he attempted to compress every variety of scenic effect within the space of five acres, so that it became a kind of melodramatic peep-show. The professional landscape-gardeners worked on a larger scale; the two chief of them perhaps were Bridgeman, who invented the haha for the purpose of concealing the bounds; and William Kent, Pope's associate and contemporary, who disarranged old gardens, and designed illustrations for Spenser's _Faerie Queene_. Kent was an architect and bad painter, much favored by George I. Lord Chesterfield compares him to Apelles, who alone was permitted to paint the portrait of Alexander:

Equal your varied wonders! save This difference we see, One would no other painter have-- No other would have thee.

From 1716 onward he was much employed by the Earl of Burlington. He helped to lay out Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, with a fresh and surprising view at every turn; the wandering visitor was introduced, among other delights, to the Hermitage, the Temple of Venus, the Egyptian pyramid, St. Augustine's cave (artfully constructed of roots and moss), the Saxon Temple, the Temple of Bacchus, and Dido's cave. The craze for romantic gardening, with its illusions of distance, and its ruins and groves, persisted throughout the eighteenth century. Shenstone's garden at The Leasowes enjoyed a higher reputation even than his poetry, and it is well known how he strained his slender means in the effort to outshine his neighbors. "In time," says Johnson, "his expenses brought clamours about him that overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fauns and fairies."

The chief of Kent's successors was Launcelot Brown, commonly called "Capability Brown" from his habit of murmuring to himself, as he gazed on a tract of land submitted for his diagnosis--"It has capabilities; it has capabilities." He laid out Kew and Blenheim. Gazing one day on one of his own made rivers, he exclaimed, with an artist's rapture,--"Thames! Thames! Thou wilt never forgive me." He certainly imposed himself upon his own time, and, so far, was a great man. "Mr. Brown," said Richard Owen Cambridge, "I very earnestly wish that I may die before you." "Why so?" said Brown with some surprise. "Because," said he, "I should like to see Heaven before you had improved it." Among the romantic writers who were bitten by the mania for picturesque improvement were Horace Walpole and even Sir Walter Scott. Everyone knows how Walpole bought from Mrs. Chevenix, the toy-shop woman, a little house called "Chopp'd Straw Hall" which he converted into the baronial splendors of Strawberry Hill; and how Scott transmitted a mean Tweedside farm, called Clarty Hole, into the less pretentious glories of Abbotsford.

After the practice came the theory. The painters and landscape-gardeners were followed by a school of philosophers, who expounded Taste and the laws of the Picturesque. Some extracts from the work of one of these, Thomas Whately, whose _Observations on Modern Gardening_ appeared in 1770, will show to what excesses the whole nonsensical business had been carried. "In wild and romantic scenes," says Whately, "may be introduced a ruined stone bridge, of which some arches may be still standing, and the loss of those which are fallen may be supplied by a few planks, with a rail, thrown over the vacancy. It is a picturesque object: it suits the situation; and the antiquity of the passage, the care taken to keep it still open, though the original building is decayed, the apparent necessity which thence results for a communication, give it an imposing air of reality." The context of this passages shows that the bridge leads nowhither. On the management of rocks Whately is a connoisseur. "Their most distinguished characters," he says, "are _dignity_, _terror_, and _fancy_: the expressions of all are constantly wild; and sometimes a rocky scene is only wild, without pretensions to any particular character." But ruins are what he likes best, and he recommends that they shall be constructed on the model of Tintern Abbey. They must be obvious ruins, much dilapidated, or the visitors will examine them too closely. "An appendage evidently more modern than the principal structure will sometimes corroborate the effect; the shed of a cottager amidst the remains of a temple, is a contrast both to the former and the present state of the building." It seems almost impossible that this should have been offered as serious advice; but it was the admired usage of the time. Whately's book was a recognized authority, and ran through several editions. He is also known as a Shakespeare critic, of no particular mark.

A more influential writer than Whately was William Gilpin, an industrious clergyman and schoolmaster, who spent his holidays wandering and sketching in the most approved parts of England, Wales and Scotland. His books on the Picturesque were long held in esteem. The earliest of them was entitled _Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales . . . relative chiefly to picturesque beauty_ (1782). Others, which followed in steady succession, rendered a like service to the Lake district, the Highlands of Scotland, the New Forest, and the Isle of Wight. Those books taught the aesthetic appreciation of wild nature to a whole generation. It is a testimony to their influence that for a time they enslaved the youth of Wordsworth. In _The Prelude_ he tells how, in early life, he misunderstood the teaching of Nature, not from insensibility, but from the presumption which applied to the impassioned life of Nature the "rules of mimic art." He calls this habit "a strong infection of the age," and tells how he too, for a time, was wont to compare scene with scene, and to pamper himself "with meagre novelties of colour and proportion." In another passage he speaks of similar melodramatic errors, from conformity to book-notions, in his early study of poetry.

The dignities of plain occurrence then Were tasteless, and truth's golden mean, a point, Where no sufficient pleasure could be found.

But imaginative power, and the humility which had been his in childhood, returned to him--

I shook the habit off Entirely and for ever.

Yet in one curious respect Gilpin's amateur teaching did leave its mark on the history of English poetry. When Wordsworth and Coleridge chose the Wye and Tintern Abbey for their walking tour, they were probably determined in that direction by the fame of the scenery; and when they and Southey settled in the Lake district, it may be surmised that they felt other and stronger attractions than those that came from Wordsworth's early associations with the place. The Wye, Tintern Abbey, the English Lakes, the Scottish Highlands--these were the favored places of the apostles of the picturesque, and have now become memorial places in our poetic history.

All these gardeners and aesthetic critics who busied themselves with wild nature were aiming at an ideal which had been expressed in many painted landscapes, and had been held up as the top of admiration by one of the greatest English poets. The influence of Milton on the new landscape interest must be held to be not less than the influence of his contemporaries, Salvator Rosa and Claude. His descriptions of Paradise did more than any painting to alter the whole practice of gardening. They are often appealed to, even by the technical gardeners. In garden-lore Milton was a convinced Romantic. He has two descriptions of the Garden of Eden; the slighter of the two occurs on the occasion of Raphael's entry, and merely resumes the earlier and fuller account: