adual reflux of town
into country; and the growing sense already expressed by Cowley and
Marvell, that overcrowded centres of population have their
inconveniences, and that the citizen should have his periods of
communion with unsophisticated nature. Squire and Wit are each learning
to appreciate each other's tastes. The tourist is developed, and begins,
as Gibbon tells us, to 'view the glaciers' now that he can view them
without personal inconvenience. This, again, suggests that there is
nothing radically new in the so-called love of nature. Any number of
poets from Chaucer downwards may be cited to show that men were never
insensible to natural beauty of scenery; to the outburst of spring, or
the bloom of flowers, or the splendours of storms and sunsets. The
indifference to nature of the Pope school was, so far, the temporary
complacency of the new population focused in the metropolitan area in
their own enlightenment and their contempt for the outside rustic. The
love of field-sports was as strong as ever in the squire, and as soon as
he began to receive some of the intellectual irradiation from the town
Wit, he began to express the emotions which never found clearer
utterance than in Walton's _Compleat Angler_. But there is a
characteristic difference. With the old poets nature is in the
background; it supplies the scenery for human action and is not itself
consciously the object; they deal with concrete facts, with the delight
of sport or rustic amusements: and they embody their feelings in the old
conventions; they converse with imaginary shepherds: with Robin Hood or
allegorical knights in romantic forests, who represent a love of nature
but introduce description only as a set-off to the actors in masques or
festivals. In Pope's time we have the abstract or metaphysical deity
Nature, who can be worshipped with a distinct appreciation. The
conventions have become obsolete, and if used at all, the poet himself
is laughing in his sleeve. The serious aim of the poet is to give a
philosophy of human nature; and the mere description of natural objects
strikes him as silly unless tacked to a moral. Who could take offence,
asks Pope, referring to his earlier poems, 'when pure description held
the place of sense'? The poet, that is, who wishes to be 'sensible'
above all, cannot condescend to give mere catalogues of trees and
rivers and mountains. Nature, however, is beginning to put in a claim
for attention, even in the se