CHAPTER XII. RETURN TO NATURE BEGUN BY ALLAN RAMSAY AND THOMSON. THE divorce from Nature and country life which marked the Poetry of the closing seventeenth and opening eighteenth centuries, has often been subject of comment, and need not detain us now. Whatever the causes of this divorce may have been, it is beside our present purpose to inquire into them. Enough to note the fact that during the latter part of Charles II.'s reign, and during the succeeding reigns of William, Queen Anne, and the first George, poetry retired from the fields, and confined herself to the streets of London. If she ever ventured into the country at all, she did not wander beyond the Twickenham villa or Richmond Hill. While first Dryden and then Pope were in the ascendant, the subjects of poetry were those to be found in city life and in social man. Nature, Passion, Imagination, as has been said, were dismissed; politics, party-spirit and argument, wit and satire, criticism and scientific inquiry, took their place. When after this long absence Poetry once more left the suburbs and wandered back to the fields, she took with her this great gain,-the power to describe the things of Nature in a correcter diction and more beautiful style than England had before known, save only in Milton's descriptive lyrics. It was in the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay that the sense of natural beauty first reappeared. Since his day Nature, which, even when felt and described in earlier English poetry, had held a place altogether subordinate to man, has more and more claimed to be regarded in poetry as almost co-equal with man. Ramsay, whose Gentle Shepherd was first published in 1725, drew his inspiration in large measure from rustic life and the songs and ballads of his native country, which, while full of the pathos of human incident and affection, are hardly less sensitive to the looks of earth and sky, whether stern or lovely. It was from his knowledge of rustic life and his love of the popular song that his inspiration was drawn. But his own natural instincts were overlaid by some knowledge and relish of the artificial literature of his age. The result is a kind of composite poetry, in which Scotch manners, feeling, and language are strangely covered with a sort of Arcadian veneer, brought from the Eclogues of Virgil, or from English imitations of these. This is most seen in Ramsay's songs, where, instead of preserving the precious old melodies, he has replaced them by insipid counterfeits of his own, in which Jock and Jenny are displaced by Damon and Chloe. Though some traces of false taste do crop out here and there, even in the dialogue of The Gentle Shepherd, yet these are far fewer than in the songs. The feelings of our age may be now and then offended by a freedom of speech that borders on coarseness, but that the texture of the poem is stirring and human-hearted is proved by the hold it still retains on the Scottish peasantry. If here and there a false note mars the truth of the human manners, as when Scotch Lowland shepherds talk of playing on reeds and flutes, the scenery of The Gentle Shepherd is true to Nature as it is among the Pentland Hills:'Gae farder up the burn to Habbie's How, Where a' the sweets o' spring and summer grow: Between twa birks, out o'er a little linn The water fa's an' mak's a singin' din ; A pool breast-deep, beneath as clear as glass, A pool in a burn among the Lowland hills could hardly be more naturally described. Again, one of the shepherds thus invites his love 'To where the saugh-tree shades the mennin-pool, The willow-tree shading the minnow pool-there is a real piece of Lowland scenery brought from the outer world for the first time into poetry. These are but a few samples of the touches of Scottish rural life with which The Gentle Shepherd abounds. Burns, who lived in the generation that followed Ramsay, and always looks back to him as one of his chief forerunners and masters in the poetic art, fixes on Ramsay's delineations of Nature as one of his chief characteristics. He asks, Is there none of the moderns who will rival the Greeks in pastoral poetry?— "Yes! there is ane; a Scottish callan— The teeth o' Time may gnaw Tantallan, Thou paints auld Nature to the nines, Nae gowden stream thro' myrtles twines, While nightly breezes sweep the vines, In gowany glens thy burnie strays, Wi' hawthorns gray, Where black birds join the shepherd's lays It may well be that when we turn to Scottish poetry the burns and braes should sing and shine through almost every song. For there is no feature in which Scottish scenery more differs from English than in the clear and living northern burns, compared with the dead drumlie ditches called brooks in the Midland Counties. THOMSON. The return to Nature, begun by Ramsay in his Gentle Shepherd, was carried on by another Scot, though hardly a Scottish poet-Thomson, who a few years later (1728-30) published his poem of 'The Seasons.' In this work, descriptive of scenery and country life through the four seasons, Thomson, it is alleged, was but working in a vein which was native to Scottish poets from the earliest time. Two centuries before, Gawain Douglas, in the prologues to his translation of the Eneid, abounds in description of rural things. I should hardly venture to say it myself, in case it might seem national prejudice, but a writer who is not a Scot, Mr. S. Brooke, has remarked that there is a passionate, close, poetical observation and description of natural scenery in Scotland, from the earliest times, such as we do not possess in English poetry till the time of Wordsworth.' In choosing his subject, therefore, and in the minute loving way in which he dwells upon it, Thomson would seem to have been working in the spirit of his country. But there the Scottish element in him begins and ends. Neither in the kind of landscape he pictures, in the rural customs he selects, nor in the language or versification of his poem, is there much savour of Scottish habits or scenery. His blank verse cannot be said to be a garment that fits well to its subject. It is heavy, cumbrous, oratorical, over |