The picture of the embarrassed courtiers promenading slowly after this royal phenomenon, and of the lovely inconsiderates proffering their vain allurements, is so ludicrous as to be painful. Even Miss Seward, who held that the “Botanic Garden” combined “the sublimity of Michael Angelo, the correctness and elegance of Raphael, with the glow of Titian,” was shocked by Nebuchadnezzar’s pendant ears, and admitted that the passage was likely to provoke inconsiderate laughter.
The first part of Dr. Darwin’s poem, “The Economy of Vegetation,” was warmly praised by critics and reviewers. Its name alone secured for it esteem. A few steadfast souls, like Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, refused to accept even vegetation from a sceptic’s hands; but it was generally conceded that the poet had “entwined the Parnassian laurel with the balm of Pharmacy” in a very creditable manner. The last four cantos, however,—indiscreetly entitled “The Loves of the Plants,”—awakened grave concern. They were held unfit for female youth, which, being then taught driblets of science in a guarded and muffled fashion, was not supposed to know that flowers had any sex, much less that they practised polygamy. The glaring indiscretion of their behaviour in the “Botanic Garden,” their seraglios, their amorous embraces and involuntary libertinism, offended British decorum, and, what was worse, exposed the poem to Canning’s pungent ridicule. When the “Loves of the Triangles” appeared in the “Anti-Jacobin,” all England—except Whigs and patriots who never laughed at Canning’s jokes—was moved to inextinguishable mirth. The mock seriousness of the introduction and argument, the “horrid industry” of the notes, the contrast between the pensiveness of the Cycloid and the innocent playfulness of the Pendulum, the solemn headshake over the licentious disposition of Optics, and the description of the three Curves that requite the passion of the Rectangle, all burlesque with unfeeling delight Dr. Darwin’s ornate pedantry.
Let shrill Acoustics tune the tiny lyre,
With Euclid sage fair Algebra conspire;
Let Hydrostatics, simpering as they go,
Lead the light Naiads on fantastic toe.
The indignant poet, frigidly vain, and immaculately free from any taint of humour, was as much scandalized as hurt by this light-hearted mockery. Being a dictator in his own little circle at Derby, he was naturally disposed to consider the “Anti-Jacobin” a menace to genius and to patriotism. His criticisms and his prescriptions had hitherto been received with equal submission. When he told his friends that Akenside was a better poet than Milton,—“more polished, pure, and dignified,” they listened with respect. When he told his patients to eat acid fruits with plenty of sugar and cream, they obeyed with alacrity. He had a taste for inventions, and first made Mr. Edgeworth’s acquaintance by showing him an ingenious carriage of his own contrivance, which was designed to facilitate the movements of the horse, and enable it to turn with ease. The fact that Dr. Darwin was three times thrown from this vehicle, and that the third accident lamed him for life, in no way disconcerted the inventor or his friends, who loved mechanism for its own sake, and apart from any given results. Dr. Darwin defined a fool as one who never in his life tried an experiment. So did Mr. Day, of “Sandford and Merton” fame, who experimented in the training of animals, and was killed by an active young colt that had failed to grasp the system.
The “Botanic Garden” was translated into French, Italian, and Portuguese, to the great relief of Miss Seward, who hated to think that the immortality of such a work depended upon the preservation of a single tongue. “Should that tongue perish,” she wrote proudly, “translations would at least retain all the host of beauties which do not depend upon felicities of verbal expression.”
If the interminable epics which were so popular in these halcyon days had condescended to the telling of stories, we might believe that they were read, or at least occasionally read, as a substitute for prose fiction. But the truth is that most of them are solid treatises on morality, or agriculture, or therapeutics, cast into the blankest of blank verse, and valued, presumably, for the sake of the information they conveyed. Their very titles savour of statement rather than of inspiration. Nobody in search of romance would take up Dr. Grainger’s “Sugar Cane,” or Dyer’s “Fleece,” or the Rev. Richard Polwhele’s “English Orator.” Nobody desiring to be idly amused would read the “Vales of Weaver,” or a long didactic poem on “The Influence of Local Attachment.” It was not because he felt himself to be a poet that Dr. Grainger wrote the “Sugar Cane” in verse, but because that was the form most acceptable to the public. The ever famous line,
“Now Muse, let’s sing of rats!”