LECTURE XV.

IN my last lecture I spoke of the poetry of Man as found in Burns, and I dwelt especially on the way in which he in accordance with the new spirit which was stealing into the world-devoted his work to the interests of the poor among whom he lived, not of set purpose like a philanthropist, but because he could not help it like an artist.

It is his natural poetry of which I shall speak to-day, and we can connect it with the previous lecture by the thought that among the joys that God has given to the life of the poor one of the deepest is the beauty of Nature, and the heart to love it; such a heart as Burns himself possessed, who

"In his glory and his joy

"Followed the plough along the mountain side."

Things without money or without price, beauty not hid in galleries, but spread abroad a feast of delight on every mountain-side and stream-fed meadow-this was God's gift to the poor. And strange to say, Burns seems to think, and he should know something about it, that the poor were better able than the rich and cultured to enjoy the

loveliness of the world. That certainly would not be true of England now; for there are few things we have so attentively cultivated as the love of Nature. But it may have been true in his days that

The Laverock shuns the palace gay,
And o'er the cottage sings;

For Nature smiles as sweet, I ween,
To shepherds as to Kings.

Wordsworth, too, takes up the same thought; he himseli is formed by Nature, step by step; it never seems to occur to him that his companions-dalesmen, shepherds, pedlers, even the little children-can be otherwise than lovers of Nature, and able to enjoy its beauty; and we must take his witness as true, for he lived among them all his life. But this is certainly not the case further south, and the lower one goes in England, the less one finds of it, except in the upper classes, among whom it has now become almost instinctive.

We have, then, this curious problem at the very outset of our lecture-that the poor of the north-western part of England on the border, and of the west border of Scotland, are lovers of Nature, while the poor of midland and southern England are not. I do not say that I can solve that problem; I cannot-but I can make a few conjectures about it, and it will lead me to speak of the Nature poetry of Scotland, a poetry so distinct from that of England that it is necessary to say something about it before we touch on it in Burns.

The higher appreciation of Nature among the men of the west border may partly be owing to the grandeur or wildness of the scenery they live amongst. The imagina

X

tion cannot help being awakened and impressed by desolation. Fear is easily stirred in boyhood by the storm on the moor, or the majesty of mountain loneliness, and fear awakes imagination. Afterwards, when with manhood comes courage, fear passes into a sense of the sublime, and terror has its beauty, since it stirs emotion. But when perception of the sublime exists, perception of the beautiful in the peace of nature soon follows: the one throws the perceiver into the arms of the other. That may be one explanation, but it is not a sufficient one. It does not account for this love of Nature among the dwellers in the quiet scenery of Ayr and Lanark.

Therefore I cannot help conjecturing that a great deal of the intense perception of Nature's beauty which we find in early Scottish poetry-especially the wild love of colour— the descriptions of Gawin Douglas blaze like an Oriental monarch-may be due to some far-off admixture of Celtic blood. All the Scotch poets of early date possess it, and it seems to spring out of nothing. There is no cause for it in the influence which Chaucer and his school had on poetry in Scotland, for it does not exist among them; nor in the French, for there it does not exist at this early time of which I speak, except, indeed, where one gets a touch of Celtic influence. In the absence of any real cause that I can absolutely point to, I am forced to conjecture that this love of nature was a legacy left by the Celtic blood among the English of the Lowlands. The old Kingdom of Strathclyde ran up from our present Wales to the Clyde, taking in the half of the Lowlands and the more western parts of Northern England. The Celtic Poets had this intimate desire to look at Nature, this

passion for colour, this wish to glorify the woods and streams, which is so remarkable in Douglas and the rest. They take, as the Scottish Poets do, isolated natural objects—a rock, a tree, a glade-fall in love with them, and bring them with one magical touch into the domain of Fairyland. Their early literature, their romances, their songs are full of this. There is nothing of it in early English poetry. A few distant echoes of it are heard in Shakespeare, but scarcely any true notes of it in England, till Keats and Shelley and Tennyson. In Scotland, we find it at once, not at all in its perfection, but sufficiently distinct to sever Scotch poetry from all others of the time, and to make it of a different race from English.

Now my conjecture is, that this Celtic element of natural love of the beauty of the world, this special power of seeing Nature, and delight in observing her-which came so early to Scotland, and so late to England-crept in from Strathclyde, mingled in the blood of the English of the Lowlands, and left behind it, when the Celtic race died away, its peculiar note in the Lowland mind. Any way, this is true, that Scotland has always been a land where Poets loved Nature, and that she first sent that love down to England.

The original impulse of the Lowland poetry came, as we have seen, from Chaucer through James the First. We might then expect that its natural description, with which we have now to do, would retain some of the peculiarities of Chaucer's landscape. That is not the case. The intense nationality of the Scotch of which I have already spoken, seized on this element in poetry, and at once and for ever put aside the conventional landscape of Chaucer. The Scottish poets could not realize smooth

and soft meadows and fair gardens, and trees standing so many feet apart. There was nothing of the kind in Scotland. Their own scenery forced itself on their notice, and they loved it well. In all the poems, the trees, rocks, rivers, and valleys, are distinctly Scotch; the sun rises in Scotland, the months and seasons as described by Douglas have the character of his own country. We may say that the law which bids a poet describe what lies before him, and write with his eye on the object, in distinction from that which insists on the landscape being always made up of certain stock properties, is due to the Scottish Poets. In England it did not prevail till Cowper's time-in Scotland, it was carried out, owing to the love of her people for their own country, before the seventeenth century. It is a curious anticipation by many years of the love of Nature for her own sake which was first rooted in our literature by Wordsworth.

With regard to the description of nature itself, it is absolutely unique at the time. It is perfectly amazing to find, in the sixteenth century, in Scotland, elaborate natural description full of close touches of reality, overladen with colour, minute, enthusiastic, at a time when nothing of the kind existed, or had existed in England. Here and there it is touched by the convention of Chaucer, as in the use of Latin names for the sun-a survival which we find in Burns-but the feeling for Nature of Douglas and Dunbar, and their natural description, are not only unlike anything that had ever been in England, they remain unlike anything which prevailed in England down to the very end of the eighteenth century. The only man in whom we miss this minute, observant, patient effort