that description, as Boileau conceived it, was cultivated as a distinct art. The Cooper’s Hill (1642) of Sir John Denham may be contrasted with the less ambitious Penshurst of Ben Jonson, and the one represents the new no less completely than the other does the old generation. If, however, we examine Cooper’s Hill carefully, we perceive that its aim is after all rather philosophical than topographical. The Thames is described indeed, but not very minutely, and the poet is mainly absorbed in moral reflections. Marvell’s long poem on the beauties of Nunappleton comes nearer to the type. But it is hardly until we reach the 18th century that we arrive, in English literature, at what is properly known as descriptive poetry. This was the age in which poets, often of no mean capacity, began to take such definite themes as a small country estate (Pomfret’s Choice, 1700), the cultivation of the grape (Gay’s Wine, 1708), a landscape (Pope’s Windsor Forest, 1713), a military manœuvre (Addison’s Campaign, 1704), the industry of an apple-orchard (Philip’s Cyder, 1708) or a piece of topography (Tickell’s Kensington Gardens, 1722), as the sole subject of a lengthy poem, generally written in heroic or blank verse. These tours de force were supported by minute efforts in miniature-painting, by touch applied to touch, and were often monuments of industry, but they were apt to lack personal interest, and to suffer from a general and deplorable frigidity. They were infected with the faults which accompany an artificial style; they were monotonous, rhetorical and symmetrical, while the uniformity of treatment which was inevitable to their plan rendered them hopelessly tedious, if they were prolonged to any great extent.
This species of writing had been cultivated to a considerable degree through the preceding century, in Italy and (as the remarks of Boileau testify) in France, but it was in England that it reached its highest importance. The classic of descriptive poetry, in fact, the specimen which the literature of the world presents which must be considered as the most important and the most successful, is The Seasons (1726–1730) of James Thomson (q.v.). In Thomson, for the first time, a poet of considerable eminence appeared, to whom external nature was all sufficient, and who succeeded in conducting a long poem to its close by a single appeal to landscape, and to the emotions which it directly evokes. Coleridge, somewhat severely, described The Seasons as the work of a good rather than of a great poet, and it is an indisputable fact that, at its very best, descriptive poetry fails to awaken the highest powers of the imagination. A great part of Thomson’s poem is nothing more nor less than a skilfully varied catalogue of natural phenomena. The famous description of twilight in “the fading many-coloured woods” of autumn may be taken as an example of the highest art to which purely descriptive poetry has ever attained. It is obvious, even here, that the effect of these rich and sonorous lines, in spite of the splendid effort of the artist, is monotonous, and leads us up to no final crisis of passion or rapture. Yet Thomson succeeds, as few other poets of his class have succeeded, in producing nobly-massed effects and comprehensive beauties such as were utterly unknown to his predecessors. He was widely imitated in England, especially by Armstrong, by Akenside, by Shenstone (in The Schoolmistress, 1742), by the anonymous author of Albania, 1737, and by Goldsmith (in The Deserted Village, 1770). No better example of the more pedestrian class of descriptive poetry could be found than the last-mentioned poem, with its minute and Dutch-like painting:—
“How often have I paused on every charm:
The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm;
The never-failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topped the neighbouring hill:
The hawthorn-bush, with seats beneath the shade.
For talking age and whispering lovers made.”
On the continent of Europe the example of Thomson was almost immediately fruitful. Four several translations of The Seasons into French contended for the suffrages of the public, and J. F. de Saint-Lambert (1716–1803) imitated Thomson in Les Saisons (1769), a poem which enjoyed popularity for half a century, and of which Voltaire said that it was the only one of its generation which would reach posterity. Nevertheless, as Madame du Deffand told Walpole, Saint-Lambert is “froid, fade et faux,” and the same may be said of J. A. Roucher (1745–1794), who wrote Les Mois in 1779, a descriptive poem famous in its day. The Abbé Jacques Delille (1738–1813), perhaps the most ambitious descriptive poet who has ever lived, was treated as a Virgil by his contemporaries; he published Les Géorgiques in 1769, Les Jardins in 1782, and L’Homme des champs in 1803, but he went furthest in his brilliant, though artificial, Trois règnes de la nature (1809), which French critics have called the masterpiece of this whole school of descriptive poetry. Delille, however, like Thomson before him, was unable to avoid monotony and want of coherency. Picture follows picture, and no progress is made. The satire of Marie Joseph Chénier, in his famous and witty Discours sur les poèmes descriptifs, brought the vogue of this species of poetry to an end.
In England, again, Wordsworth, who treated the genius of Thomson with unmerited severity, revived descriptive poetry in a form which owed more than Wordsworth realized to the model of The Seasons. In The Excursion and The Prelude, as well as in many of his minor pieces, Wordsworth’s philosophical and moral intentions cannot prevent us from perceiving the large part which pure description takes; and the same may be said of much of the early blank verse of S. T. Coleridge. Since their day, however, purely descriptive poetry has gone more and more completely out of fashion, and its place has been taken by the richer and directer effects of such prose as that of Ruskin in English, or of Fromentin and Pierre Loti in French. It is almost impossible in descriptive verse to obtain those vivid and impassioned appeals to the imagination which are of the very essence of genuine poetry, and it is unlikely that descriptive poetry, as such, will again take a prominent place in living literature. (E. G.)
DESERT, a term somewhat loosely employed to describe those parts of the land surface of the earth which do not produce sufficient vegetation to support a human population. Few areas of large extent in any part of the world are absolutely devoid of vegetation, and the transition from typical desert conditions is often very gradual and ill-defined. (“Desert” comes from Lat. deserere, to abandon; distinguish “desert,” merit, and “dessert,” fruit eaten after dinner, from de and servier, to serve.)
Deserts are conveniently divided into two classes according to the causes which give rise to the desert conditions. In “cold deserts” the want of vegetation is wholly due to the prevailing low temperature, while in “hot deserts” the surface is unproductive because, on account of high temperature and deficient rainfall, evaporation is largely in excess of precipitation. Cold deserts accordingly occur in high latitudes (see Tundra and Polar Regions). Hot desert conditions are primarily found along the tropical belts of high atmospheric pressure in which the conditions of warmth and dryness are most fully realized, and on their equatorial sides, but the zonal arrangement is considerably modified in some regions by the monsoonal influence of elevated land. Thus we have in the northern hemisphere the Sahara desert, the deserts of Arabia, Iran, Turan, Takla Makan and Gobi, and the desert regions of the Great Basin in North America; and in the southern hemisphere the Kalahari desert in Africa, the desert of Australia, and the desert of Atacama in South America. Where the line of elevated land runs east and west, as in Asia, the desert belt tends to be displaced into higher latitudes, and where the line runs north and south, as in Africa, America and Australia, the desert zone is cut through on the windward side of the elevation and the arid conditions intensified on the lee side. Desert conditions also arise from local causes, as in the case of the Indian desert situated in a region inaccessible to either of the two main branches of the south-west monsoon.
Although rivers rising in more favoured regions may traverse deserts on their way to the sea, as in the case of the Nile and the Colorado, the fundamental physical condition of an arid area is that it contributes nothing to the waters of the ocean. The rainfall chiefly occurs in violent cloud-bursts, and the soluble matter in the soil is carried down by intermittent streams to salt lakes
