The treatment of nature in English poetry between Pope and Wordsworth

The eighteenth century is a period of transition and as such its literature holds two elements, a vital impulse past its prime but still dominant, and a new conception gradually emerging into dominance. It is the interweaving of these elements, the slow fading of the old, the slow gain of the new in fulness, definiteness, and ardor of statement, that make this period peculiarly interesting for detailed study. The interest persists even when the transition to be studied is limited to so narrow a section of human experience as the attitude toward Nature.

The investigation, the results of which are embodied in this book, was primarily undertaken to determine the place of Nature in the poetry before Wordsworth. Every genius is, to be sure, more or less of a miracle, and certainly not to be accounted for by any conditions of literary heredity or even environment. But he cannot, on the other hand, be justly thought of as an isolated phenomenon. Though not the direct heir of any particular predecessors, he is, nevertheless, in a vital and inescapable way, the heir of the general tone and temper of his own and preceding times. In that fact lies the justification of a study along historical lines of any recognized tendency in thought. The pleasure of the biologist in the lower forms of life is paralleled by the delight of the student of literature in tracing out the first vague, ineffective attempts to express ideas that are afterward regnant. In the present study the final effect is one of surprise to discover not only how early the new thought of Nature finds expression, but how completely the ideas of the period of Wordsworth were represented in the germ in the eighteenth century. The whole impression is that before the work of such men as Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, there was a great stir of getting ready. It may fairly be said that before Wordsworth most of his characteristic thoughts on Nature had received explicit statement.

In the pursuance of this study it soon became apparent that to confine it to poetry was to limit the investigation unwarrantably. The interest of the work was many times increased, and the deductions were rendered much more certain, when the same transitions, the same periods of change, the same tastes, the same emotions, revealed themselves side by side in poetry, painting, fiction, travels, and gardens. Furthermore, the vitality of the new impulse toward Nature is shown by the number of directions in which it insistently demanded expression. Almost independently of each other the various arts seem to have been pushed forward from within to some sort of recognition of the growing interest in the external world. In each art there seemed to be an unconscious preparation for the master that was to come. Notably does this appear from the chapter on painting. Constable and Turner were foreshadowed and prepared for as evidently as was Wordsworth. When at the end of such a period of preparation the great poet or artist comes, he is great by virtue of his power to penetrate beneath literary conventions and to give final literary form to the half-articulate thoughts and feelings out of which the thoughts and feelings of his own epoch grow. He has his natural place in the development. The significance of his work rests in the fact that while it directs the future it also sums up the past.

The first edition of this book has long been out of print. The natural impulse, after an interval of ten years, is to subject a new edition to a complete revision, with the rewriting of many portions. Revision as drastic as might be desirable has not, however, proved practicable. Various studies of special authors have been brought up to date in the light of new material concerning them, as, notably, in the sketch of Lady Winchilsea. Two chapters, the one on “Painting” and the one on “Gardening,” are entirely new, and it has, fortunately, proved possible to add a number of interesting illustrations of these chapters, mainly from old prints. With these exceptions the book remains substantially as it was ten years ago. In no case has further study made it necessary to modify any of the general conclusions on the basis of the earlier work. More intensive work in the different realms has happily but reinforced these conclusions.