Chapter I: The Treatment of Nature in English Classical Poetry (2)

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.