on its homely realistic side, and by Gainsborough on its refined side. There are frequent attempts to represent the evanescent beauties of sunrise and sunset, of twilight, and moonlight. There is much enthusiasm for wild scenery. No one characteristic of the painting is more marked than its devotion to mountains and lakes, especially those of northern England. There is a strong personal delight in nature for her own sake, and sometimes not merely a sensuous pleasure in color and form, but a deeper poetic conception of the significance and power of nature.

:

CHAPTER VII.

GENERAL SUMMARY.

During the period from Waller to Pope the general feeling towards nature was one of indifference. The whole emphasis was on man in his higher social relations, and only Feeling toward nature in early such parts of nature as were easily subordinated to 18th century man were looked upon with pleasure. The facts compared with of nature were little known. They were stated in feeling in early terms merely imitative and conventional. The 19th century new feeling towards nature, as exemplified in the early nineteenth century poets, especially Wordsworth, on the contrary, is marked by full and first-hand observation, by a rich, sensuous delight in form, color, sound, and motion; by a strong preference for the wilder, freer forms of nature's life, by an enthusiasm for nature passionate in its intensity, by a recognition of the divine life in nature, and finally by a consciousness of the interpenetration of that life and the life of man. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in poetry, travels, fiction, painting, and gardens, it was the classical feeling toward nature that predominated. By the end of the century the new feeling had found abundant, varied, and original statement. The change is a great one. From Pope to Wordsworth, from Le Notre to Repton, from Kneller to Turner, from Richardson to Mrs. Radcliffe, from Brand to Gilpin, the pendulum swings. Whether men painted pictures or made gardens, or went on journeys, or told tales of love and adventure, or wrote poems, the new spirit was at work within them, sending them forth into the world of nature and bidding them bear witness to her power and loveliness.

Early manifestations of the new spirit did not, however, find exactly contemporaneous expression in these various art-forms.

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4

Thomson's Seasons and Pope's Fourth Epistle are in 1726-31.
Gainsborough and Wilson do not bring out their work until
Thomas Amory's John Buncle is in

The dates of
development of
love of nature

forms

after 1755.

1756–66, and Brown's Keswick Letter comes within the same period. Thus the decisive beginnings of in different art the new spirit in painting, fiction, and travels are about contemporary, but are thirty years behind poetry and gardening. Furthermore, the time between the decisive beginnings and the final full expression is greatly varied. In poetry it is seventy-three years, in gardening about sixty-five, in painting about fifty, in fiction not over twenty-five, and in travels only about fifteen years.

development

In spite of these variations in date there seems to be in each
art the same general order of development. First there is a dim
period of tentative, unconscious, or apologetic
General order of:
indications of a new spirit. Then some original
mind seizes upon the new idea and gives it con-
sistency and at least partially adequate expression. After this
there follows a period of less vigorous but widespread and varied
efforts to find a statement for some portions of the new thought.
Then a master mind seems to feel all these diffused, struggling,
half-expressed conceptions and sums them up in the final perfect
form. In the poetry of nature these stages are clearly marked in
the work before Thomson, in Thomson, in the period from
Thomson to Wordsworth, and in Wordsworth. In painting are
Wilson and Gainsborough on the one hand and Turner on the
other. In gardening, travels, and fiction we find the periods
marked respectively by Kent and Repton, Brown and Gilpin,
Amory and Mrs. Radcliffe. In these three art-forms, especially
in the last two, we do not find the period of development ending
in the work of consummate genius. We go rather from a meager
statement to a statement that is full, many-sided, enthusiastic.
The progress is in the love of nature rather than in the power of
adequate, final expression. The development in gardening is
more in the nature of a series of experiments open to wide dis-
cussion, and the final outcome takes the form given it by the
man whose study of past failures and successes has led him to

?

the surest comprehension of the artistic and mechanical laws involved. A glance at the accompanying table will make the general statement clear, the main point being that in at least five of the ways in which men express their ideas it is possible to trace the growth of a complete change of attitude towards nature. The poets who helped to bring about this change have already. been studied in detail, but some further general statements may not be out of place here.

As a rule, such significant poetry of nature as appeared during the transition period was the work of men who had spent much of their youth in the country or in country villages; During the tran-it was practically their earliest poetic venture, and sition period the significant poeusually the work of their youth; and, in most cases try of nature where there was an extended literary career, the the early work poetry of nature speedily gave way to work of a of men brought didactic or dramatic sort, in which nature played up in the country but a small part. To any such general statement there would be of course important exceptions. Blake, for instance, was a town-bred poet. So was Collins, and his Ode to Evening is not his earliest work. Cowper was town-bred. He was old when he began to write, and his poetry of nature is his latest rather than his earliest work. But, taken as a whole, the poetry of nature during the eighteenth century bears out the statement as made. It is well illustrated by Armstrong, who was born and who apparently spent his youth in Castleton, a little village in the wildest part of the mountainous country around the Derbyshire peaks, wrote his Winter before he was fifteen, went to Edinburgh and then to London to study, and wrote as the work of his mature years a didactic poem on the Art of Preserving Health. Or by Dyer, who was brought up in South Wales, wrote Grongar Hill and The Country Walk at twenty-five, went up to London, and wrote as his mature work The Ruins of Rome and The Fleece. Or by Thomson, who lived until he was fifteen in Southdean, a little hamlet at the foot of the Cheviot Hills, the last of whose Seasons appeared when he was thirty and whose later work was a succession of dreary tragedies. Or by Akenside, who, though brought up in Newcastle-on-Tyne, made