LANDSCAPE AND I,ITERATURE.
IT is one of the tritest of commonplaces that during the last century or two we have rediscovered fm• ourselves the beauties of wild Nature. A London citizen in Queen Anne's day going up Helvellyn was so affrighted by the spectacle that he fainted, and, being bled by a surgeon, promptly returned to town. Mr. Burt, who travelled in the North of Scotland early in the eighteenth century, could only speak of the Highland mountains as "a dirty purple, but most disagreeable when the heath is in bloom." For a hundred years we have gone to the other extreme, and rhapsodised about the wilderness till our phrases of description have become conventional. Every newspaper to-day contains passages telling of some natural beauty or other where the language is, apparently, the language of serious passion. Only the passion has become a mannerism, and instead of literature we get journalese. The mannerism, however, is a proof of the wide diffusion of a certain degree of appreciation of Nature; the mere fact that it has become a convention and is simulated by those who do not share it bears witness to the vigour of the growth. For the present we are not concerned with the psychology of the love of Nature, but with the way in which it expresses itself in literature. If the high passion be there, to be sure, the expression will correspond. No man in whose soul burns a pure love of naturalbeauty will fall into banalities. The great poets do not vary. When they have occasion to write of Nature, they never descend from the high level of clear, true observation and adequate speech. But the lesser people, the minor poets, the diarists, the novelists, must be to some extent under the bondage of their generation, and their descrip- tions are apt to be second-hand. They are faithful reproducers of fashionable mannerisms, and the study of such mannerisms sheds a curious light on the relations between Nature and the art of words.
To begin with our eighteenth-century citizen who disliked Helvellyn. It would be a great mistake to assume that be had no love of Nature. Like Izaak Walton, he may have rejoiced to seek the Lea meadows on a fresh May morning. He liked garden landscapes, trim lawns, and tidy hedgerows, and he wrote about them in a sensible, prosaic way, with just a tinge of grandiloquence. The Downs were "undulatory
forms of mountain," a wood was either a "vernal thicket," or, more properly, a "'grove," for there was a share classicalisin about the whole thing. We can imigine our citizen taking a whole-hearted delight in a fine landscape or a rich sunset. He may have returned of an evening, his bosom swelling with high imaginings. He differed from those of a later day, not in his capacity for feeling, but in his capacity for expressing it. It was when he came to write it down that be fell into bombast and banalities. John Gay, for example, a charming poet and a good angler, bas in his "Rural Sports" a passage on worm-fishing. He clearly was devoted to the sport and to all its attendant charms. He shows a power of close observation and a justness of appreciation which would do no discredit to Wordsworth. But when he comes to put it all down, how does he do it P- " Then, soon as vernal gales begin to rise, And drive the liquid burthen through the skies, The fisher to the neighbouring current speeds, Whose rapid surface purls, unknown to weeds."
It would be hard to write lines less fortunately inspired. Open. Thomson, a far better poet, almost anywhere, and you will find the same serious passion, the same gift of observation, mated with a style which is so full of warbling woodlands, and naiads, and watery stores, and similar " properties" that the breath of Athena blows faint indeed. A grim convention bad them in its clutches, and interposed the cotton-wool of bad art between the world they saw and the world they wrote of. What was needed was a return to impressionism, where the writer strives in all honesty to present things as he sees them.
The Romantic revival swept away the debris of this sham classicalism. Scott, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, in their different ways give us the Nature which they loved and saw with their own eyes. The result differs with the temperament of the observer, for, as Coleridge.wrote- " We receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live."
But in all cases it is honest and 'first-hand work, not the echoes of a tradition. Presently, however, the reaction tended to go too far and develop vices of its own. Impressionism, to be sound, demands a sound mind and complete candour in the observer. A man with a twist in his brain or a poseur will claim reality and merit for pictures which have no relation to truth. To call the sky yellow and the mountains pink is an offence not atoned for by the plea that they are yellow and pink to the observer. Art has no care for patho- logical products, and demands in her votaries an intelligence working in the same domain as the average man. Take any half-dozen second-rate poets or essayists of to-day, and you will find them describing Nature in strange, spasmodic language. That epithet is the best which seems to the normal mind most preposterous, and the mot juste in their eyes is the inapposite word. The result is arresting for the moment, but it is so obviously insincere and affected, so lacking in serious passion, that we soon impatiently discard it. Such writers in fleeing from one convention have found another, and the mere fact that the second is so amazingly different from the first does not make it better. In the natural history of con- ventions both stand in the same class. Readers of Mr. Lang's delightful "Essays in Little" will remember his version of Thomas Haynei Bayly's "Oh, no, we never mention her" in the style of a disciple of Mr. Rossetti
"Love snake to me and said: Oh, lips, be mute; Let that one name be dead, That memory flown and fled, Untouched that lute !' "
If the truth be the same in all ages, so at heart is the conventional.
The fount of all good descriptions of Nature is the visualising power of the writer. He must see keenly and clearly, and he most give the results of his survey their exact and adequate expression in words. Few, even of the best writers, have this gift of intense vision at all times. In some, such as Ruskin, it tends to be obscured by rhetoric and metaphor, and to stray in unpromising bypaths of specula- tion. In others, such as Mr. Meredith, the style falls short of the matter in clearness, and the result is a cloud. Of all the moderns, Stevenson seems to us to have been the most consistently successful. He has his cliches like the rest of na—"windy," "a sky of stars "—but it is rare indeed that he misses the vigour of intense first-hand realisation. His parsimony of epithets increases the effect of the carefully chosen few ; he never falls into a rhetorical cadence ; and his picture builds itself up in the mind in a series of broad and simple lines. If we had to choose the finest, because the least strained, piece of landscape description in modern English, we should take this passage from " Weir of Hermiston ":—
n You would scarcely be surprised at the inimitable smallness of the kirk, a dwarfish, ancient place seated for fifty, and standing in a green by the burn-side among two-score gravestones. The manse close by, although no more than a cottage, is surrounded by the brightness of a flower-garden and the straw roofs of bees ; and the whole colony, kirk and manse, garden and graveyard, finds harbourage in a grove of rowans, and is all the year round in a great silence broken only by the drone of the bees, the tinkle of the burn, and the bell on Sundays All beyond and about is the great field of the hills ; the plover, the curlew, and the lark cry there; the wind blows as it blows in a ship's rigging, hard and cold and pure ; and the hill-tops huddle one behind another like a herd of cattle into the sunset."
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