he cries, inviting others to share his favourite occupation. And after all, the world he loved to complain of was one which never treated him with harshness. When not writing verse or planning new ornamentation for his beloved gardens, Shenstone sent out despairing invitations to his friends, begging them to come and lighten the burden of solitude. Gray might jestingly describe the poet as "hopping along his own gravel walks," but for Shenstone himself those same walks were haunted by the melancholy thoughts of his own introspective nature. What bands of black ideas spread their wings! With noisome vapour blast the verdant shade! This may be true enough, but we feel that the poet finds considerable satisfaction in his self-made sorrows, that he regards all this travail of his soul as highly poetical, draws from it a secret joy. But when this man who consistently turned his back upon life, this sentimental eremite from his impregnable rampart of books, groves, walks, streams, and fish-ponds, exclaims, I stand aghast; and chill'd with fear survey How far I've tempted life's deceitful stream!" the reader stands aghast also, but for a different reason. Shenstone always retained a copious supply of pity for his own hard lot : Ev'n me, by shady oak or limpid spring, Ev'n me, the scenes of polish'd life allure; Straitened means, rendered yet more inadequate by excessive expenditure upon his gardens, reinforced his natural tendency to a retired, thoughtful, sentimental existence. But the constantly repeated complaints, the querulous spirit of the poet, although he was not without considerable gifts and personal 1 Gray's Letters, ed. Tovey, II, 25. • Elegy XVII. * Elegy XVII. charm, weary the present-day reader. The retirement of Shenstone is not to be confused with that of Wordsworth and other romantic poets. Shenstone was fundamentally an egoist. "Poor man!" Walpole wrote after the poet's death, "he wanted to have all the world talk of him for the pretty place he had made; and which he seems to have made only that it might be talked of." And Walpole, whose character was in some respects similar to Shenstone's, had taken the poet's measure. Great poets do not live in a world of pure egoism. Their emotions transcend the purely personal and have a world-wide significance; they write not only to their own heart-beats, but to the pulse of humanity. The poems of Shenstone are merely himself, or what he imagined was himself, "writ large." This it is which gives even to his most genuine emotions a strain of insincerity. He always writes with an eye to his audience; in heightening his values, in deepening his shadows, in straining after effect, he spoils the picture. Just as he spoiled his love of nature, which was at bottom sincere, by tricking out natural beauty in all the frippery of his artificial adornments, so he weakened his attempts to express real emotion by decking it in sham toys and conventional trinkets. Such a dabbler in "poetic" emotions naturally suffered in love, though Johnson bluntly tells us that he "might have obtained the lady, whoever she was, to whom his Pastoral Ballad was addressed.": But," Johnson might have added, the poet preferred a celibate existence to penurious domesticity." The love Shenstone sings is but another of the pleasing, vain illusions among which he passed his days. In real life success would hardly crown the suit of the milk-and-water lover who sings: Still in my breast one soft desire remains, Pure as that star, from guilt, from int'rest free, And need I, Florio, name that wish to thee? 3 1 Letters, ed. Toynbee, VII, 285-6: letter to Cole, June 14, 1769. Lives of the Poets, ed. Hill, III, 353. 3 Elegy XII. The The man plays at everything he undertakes-the I chas'd the guileless daughters of the plain, he informs us in one stanza. The unfortunate Jessy falls into disrepute, and seeks her lover in a spirit of the deepest humility, praying him: Raise me from earth; the pains of want remove, My weeping virtue shall relapse no more. Damon, apparently marvelling at his own magnanimity, sends her oversea, but the ship is wrecked and the poem concludes with Damon piously pointing the moral of her fate: Brief let me be; the fatal storm arose ; The billows rag'd, the pilot's art was vain; And-see my youth's impetuous fires decay; Such were the productions of the sentimentalists before true romance took the field. It was not from such as these that poetry learned a new, a higher 1 Elegy XXVI. song. The tragedy and pathos of deserted love was to be sung by no secluded egoist, but by a simple peasant who knew the harsh realities of a ploughman's life: Aft hae I rov'd by bonnie Doon, To see the rose and woodbine twine; And fondly sae did I o' mine; But ah! he left the thorn wi' me. That is the measure of Shenstone's failure. Shenstone's poetic theory was indeed far better than his practice. He aimed, though without success, at emotion. I think nothing truly poetic," he wrote, "at least no poetry worth composing, that does not strongly affect one's passions." But he failed adequately to express the emotions he so sedulously cultivated. Despite its limitations and obvious defects, probably his best work was that inspired by his real if perverted love of nature. His was not the kind of temperament to love nature's vastness and immensity. What he prefers is nature within a very limited domain, tamed and conventionalised. Oft too I pray'd, 'twas nature form'd the pray'r, But imperfect Such was the poet's love of nature. Fair in my garden buds the damask rose, He sings of the nightingale in language of no great 1 Works, II, 157. we feel there is a certain fossilised emotion, just as there is a real affection for nature behind such stilted lines as these: Lord of my time, my devious path I bend, Thro' fringy woodland, or smooth-shaven lawn ; And hail the scene by nature's pencil drawn.1 The characteristics of his age, reflective thought, a brooding melancholy, the desire for the peace of indifference as a refuge from the sorrows so inextricably mingled with the joys of active human life and emotion, are prominent in Shenstone's verse. Ah! why for ever on the wing Persists my wearied soul to roam ? For why should lingering thought invade, And give me peace, debarr'd of joy. These verses from his Ode to Indolence were written in 1750, and they are representative of the spirit which animated the first half of the century. But the spirit which inspired them was fast running out. Cowper, even Crabbe, rebels against it, and to Blake, filled as he was with the insistent urge of the new age of revolt, such a spirit was anathema. Twelve years earlier, Shenstone (perhaps with excessive complacency) had pictured himself as one who had scaled the heights of wisdom and emerged on the summit, only to find that contentment has been left far below in the valley. He knows too the all-pervading sorrow that springs from an everpresent sense of the transitory nature of existence : Through these soft shades delighted let me stray, 3 |