A breath revived him—but a breath o’erthrew.
Even “The Judgment of Hercules” between Indolence and Industry, or Pleasure and Virtue, was a picture of his own feelings; an argument drawn from his own reasonings; indicating the uncertainty of the poet’s dubious disposition; who finally by siding with Indolence, lost that triumph which his hero obtained by a directly opposite course.
In the following year begins that melancholy strain in his correspondence which marks the disappointment of the man who had staked too great a quantity of his happiness on the poetical die. This is the critical moment of life when our character is formed by habit, and our fate is decided by choice. Was Shenstone to become an active or contemplative being? He yielded to nature![56]
It was now that he entered into another species of poetry, working with too costly materials, in the magical composition of plants, water, and earth; with these he created those emotions which his more strictly poetical ones failed to excite. He planned a paradise amidst his solitude. When we consider that Shenstone, in developing his fine pastoral ideas in the Leasowes, educated the nation into that taste for landscape-gardening, which has become the model of all Europe, this itself constitutes a claim on the gratitude of posterity.[57] Thus the private pleasures of a man of genius may become at length those of a whole people. The creator of this new taste appears to have received far less notice than he merited. The name of Shenstone does not appear in the Essay on Gardening by Lord Orford: even the supercilious Gray only bestowed a ludicrous image on these pastoral scenes, which, however, his friend Mason has celebrated; and the genius of Johnson, incapacitated by nature to touch on objects of rural fancy, after describing some of the offices of the landscape designer, adds, that “he will not inquire whether they demand any great powers of mind.” Johnson, however, conveys to us his own feelings, when he immediately expresses them under the character of a “sullen and surly speculator.” The anxious life of Shenstone would, indeed, have been remunerated, could he have read the enchanting eulogium of Wheatley on the Leasowes; which, said he, “is a perfect picture of his mind—simple, elegant, and amiable; and will always suggest a doubt whether the spot inspired his verse, or whether in the scenes which he formed, he only realized the pastoral images which abound in his songs.” Yes! Shenstone would have been delighted, could he have heard that Montesquieu, on his return home, adorned his “Château gothique, mais orné de bois charmans, dont j’ai pris l’idée en Angleterre;” and Shenstone, even with his modest and timid nature, had been proud to have witnessed a noble foreigner, amidst memorials dedicated to Theocritus and Virgil, to Thomson and Gesner, raising in his grounds an inscription, in bad English, but in pure taste, to Shenstone himself for having displayed in his writings “a mind natural,” and in his Leasowes “laid Arcadian greens rural.” Recently Pindemonte has traced the taste of English gardening to Shenstone. A man of genius sometimes receives from foreigners, who are placed out of the prejudices of his compatriots, the tribute of posterity!
Amidst these rural elegancies which Shenstone was raising about him, his muse has pathetically sung his melancholy feelings—
| But did the Muses haunt his cell, Or in his dome did Venus dwell?— When all the structures shone complete, Ah, me! ’twas Damon’s own confession, Came Poverty, and took possession. The Progress of Taste. |
The poet observes, that the wants of philosophy are contracted, satisfied with “cheap contentment,” but
| Taste alone requires Entire profusion! days and nights, and hours Thy voice, hydropic Fancy! calls aloud For costly draughts.—— Economy. |
An original image illustrates that fatal want of economy which conceals itself amidst the beautiful appearances of taste:—
| Some graceless mark, Some symptom ill-conceal’d, shall soon or late Burst like a pimple from the vicious tide Of acid blood, proclaiming want’s disease Amidst the bloom of show. Economy. |