neglect, in analysing the character and causes of poetic pleasure
experienced by any sincere and enthusiastic reader, at any epoch of
history. We are far too much in the habit of supposing that what
we--that is the most instructed and sensitive of us--admire now must
always have been admired by people of a like condition. This has been
one of the fallacies of Romantic criticism, and has led people as
illustrious as Keats into blaming the taste of foregoing generations as
if it were not only heretical, but despicable as well. Young men to-day
speak of those who fifty years ago expatiated in admiration of Tennyson
as though they were not merely stupid, but vulgar and almost wicked,
neglectful of the fact that it was by persons exactly analogous to
themselves that those portions of Tennyson were adored which the young
repudiate to-day. Not to expand too largely this question of the
oscillation of taste--which, however, demands more careful examination
than it has hitherto received--it is always important to discover what
was honestly admired at a given date by the most enthusiastic and
intelligent, in other words by the most poetic, students of poetry. But
to do this we must cultivate a little of that catholicity of heart which
perceives technical merit wherever it has been recognised at an earlier
date, and not merely where the current generation finds it.
Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of an Oxford professor of poetry,
an old Jacobite of no observable merit beyond that of surrounding his
family with an atmosphere of the study of verse. The elder brother was
born in 1722, the younger in 1728. I must be forgiven if I dwell a
little tediously on dates, for our inquiry depends upon the use of them.
Without dates the whole point of that precedency of the Wartons, which I
desire to bring out, is lost. The brothers began very early to devote
themselves to the study of poetry, and in spite of the six years which
divided them, they appear to have meditated in unison. Their writings
bear a close resemblance to one another, and their merits and their
failures are alike identical. We have to form what broken impression we
can of their early habits. Joseph is presented to us as wandering in the
woodlands, lost in a melancholy fit, or waking out of it to note with
ecstasy all the effects of light and colour around him, the flight of
birds, the flutter of foliage, the panorama of cloudland. He and Thomas
were alike in their "extreme thirst after ancient things." They avoided,
with a certain disdain, the affectation of vague and conventional
reference to definite objects.
Above all they read the poets who were out of fashion, and no doubt the
library of their father, the Professor of Poetry, was at their disposal
from a very early hour. The result of their studies was a remarkable
one, and the discovery was unquestionably first made by Joseph. He was,
so far as we can gather, the earliest person in the modern world of
Europe to observe what vain sacrifices had been made by the classicists,
and in particular by the English classicists, and as he walked
enthusiastically in the forest he formed a determination to reconquer
the realm of lost beauty. The moment that this instinct became a
purpose, we may say that the great Romantic Movement, such as it has
enlarged and dwindled down to our own day, took its start. The Wartons
were not men of creative genius, and their works, whether in prose or
verse, have not taken hold of the national memory. But the advance of a
great army is not announced by a charge of field-marshals. In the
present war, the advance of the enemy upon open cities has generally
been announced by two or three patrols on bicycles, who are the heralds
of the body. Joseph and Thomas Warton were the bicyclist-scouts who
prophesied of an advance which was nearly fifty years delayed.
The general history of English literature in the eighteenth century
offers us little opportunity for realising what the environment could be
of two such lads as the Wartons, with their enthusiasm, their
independence, and their revolutionary instinct. But I will take the year
1750, which is the year of Rousseau's first _Discours_ and therefore the
definite starting-point of European Romanticism. You will perhaps find
it convenient to compare the situation of the Wartons with what is the
situation to-day of some very modern or revolutionary young poet. In
1750, then, Joseph was twenty-eight years of age and Thomas twenty-two.
Pope had died six years before, and this was equivalent to the death of
Swinburne in the experience of our young man of to-day. Addison's death
was as distant as is from us that of Matthew Arnold; and Thomson, who
had been dead two years, had left The _Castle of Indolence_ as an
equivalent to Mr. Hardy's _Dynasts_. All the leading writers of the age
of Anne--except Young, who hardly belonged to it--were dead, but the
Wartons were divided from them only as we are from those of the age of
Victoria. I have said that Pope was not more distant from them than
Swinburne is from us, but really a more just parallel is with Tennyson.
The Wartons, wandering in their woodlands, were confronted with a
problem such as would be involved, to a couple of youths to-day, in
considering the reputation of Tennyson and Browning.
There remains no doubt in my mind, after a close examination of such
documents as remain to us, that Joseph Warton, whose attitude has
hitherto been strangely neglected, was in fact the active force in this
remarkable revolt against existing conventions in the world of
imaginative art. His six years of priority would naturally give him an
advantage over his now better-known and more celebrated brother.
Moreover, we have positive evidence of the firmness of his opinions at a
time when his brother Thomas was still a child. The preface to Joseph's
_Odes_ of 1746 remains as a dated document, a manifesto, which admits of
no question. But the most remarkable of his poems, "The Enthusiast," was
stated to have been written in 1740, when he was eighteen and his
brother only twelve years of age. It is, of course, possible that these
verses, which bear no sign of juvenile mentality, were touched up at a
later date. But this could only be a matter of diction, of revision, and
we are bound to accept the definite and repeated statement of Joseph,
that they were essentially composed in 1740. If we accept this as a
fact, "The Enthusiast" is seen to be a document of extraordinary
importance. I do not speak of the positive merit of the poem, which it
would be easy to exaggerate. Gray, in a phrase which has been much
discussed, dismissed the poetry of Joseph Warton by saying that he had
"no choice at all." It is evident to me that Gray meant by this to
stigmatise the diction of Joseph Warton, which is jejune, verbose, and
poor. He had little magic in writing; he fails to express himself with
creative charm. But this is not what constitutes his interest for us,
which is moreover obscured by the tameness of his Miltonic-Thomsonian
versification. What should arrest our attention is the fact that here,
for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasised and repeated what
was entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria. "The
Enthusiast" is the earliest expression of full revolt against the
classical attitude which had been sovereign in all European literature
for nearly a century. So completely is this expressed by Joseph Warton
that it is extremely difficult to realise that he could not have come
under the fascination of Rousseau, whose apprenticeship to love and
idleness was now drawing to a close at Les Charmettes, and who was not
to write anything characteristic until ten years later.
But these sentiments were in the air. Some of them had vaguely occurred
to Young, to Dyer, and to Shenstone, all of whom received from Joseph
Warton the ardent sympathy which a young man renders to his immediate
contemporaries. The Scotch resumption of ballad-poetry held the same
relation to the Wartons as the so-called Celtic Revival would to a young
poet to-day; the _Tea-Table Miscellany_ dates from 1724, and Allan
Ramsay was to the author of "The Enthusiast" what Mr. Yeats is to us.
But all these were glimmerings or flashes; they followed no system, they
were accompanied by no principles of selection or rejection. These we
find for the first time in Joseph Warton. He not merely repudiates the
old formulas and aspirations, but he defines new ones. What is very
interesting to observe in his attitude to the accepted laws of poetical
practice is his solicitude for the sensations of the individual. These
had been reduced to silence by the neo-classic school in its
determination to insist on broad Palladian effects of light and line.
The didactic and moral aim of the poets had broken the springs of
lyrical expression, and had replaced those bursts of enthusiasm, those
indiscretions, those rudenesses which are characteristic of a romantic
spirit in literature, by eloquence, by caution, by reticence and
vagueness.
It is not necessary to indicate more than very briefly what the
principles of the classic poetry had been. The time had passed when
readers and writers in England gave much attention to the sources of the
popular poetry of their day. Malherbe had never been known here, and the
vigorous _Art poetique_ of Boileau, which had been eagerly studied at
the close of the seventeenth century, was forgotten. Even the Prefaces
of Dryden had ceased to be read, and the sources of authority were now
the prose of Addison and the verse of Pope. To very young readers these
stood in the same relation as the writings of the post-Tennysonian
critics stand now. To reject them, to question their authority, was
like eschewing the essays of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. In
particular, the _Essay on Criticism_ was still immensely admired and
read; it had crystallised around cultivated opinion very much as the
_Studies in the Renaissance_ did from 1875 onwards. It was the last
brilliant word on the aims and experiences of poetical art, and how
brilliant it was can be judged by the pleasure with which we read it
to-day, in spite of our total repudiation of every aesthetic dogma which
it conveys. It is immortal, like every supreme literary expression, and
it stands before us in the history of poetry as an enduring landmark.
This was the apparently impregnable fortress which the Wartons had the
temerity to bombard.
Pope had said that Nature was the best guide to judgment, but what did
he mean by nature? He had meant the "rules," which he declared were
"Nature methodis'd" or, as we should say, systematised. The "rules" were
the maxims, rather than laws, expressed by Aristotle in a famous
treatise. The poet was to follow the Stagirite, "led"--as Pope says in
one of those rare lines in which he catches, in spite of himself, the
Romantic accent--"led by the light of the Maeonian Star." Aristotle
illustrated by Homer--that was to be the standard of all poetic
expression. But literature had wandered far from Homer, and we have to
think of what rules the _Essay on Criticism_ laid down. The poet was to
be cautious, "to avoid extremes": he must be conventional, never
"singular"; there was constant reference to "Wit," "Nature," and "The
Muse," and these were convertible terms. A single instance is luminous.
We have the positive authority of Warburton for saying that Pope
regarded as the finest effort of his skill and art as a poet the
insertion of the machinery of the Sylphs into the revised edition of
_The Rape of the Lock_ (1714). Now this insertion was ingenious,
brilliant, and in strict accordance with the practice of Vida and of
Boileau, both of whom it excelled. But the whole conception of it was as
unlike that of Romanticism as possible.
In particular, the tendency of the classic school, in its later
development, had been towards the exclusion of all but didactic and
ethical considerations from treatment in verse. Pope had given great and
ever-increasing emphasis to the importance of making "morals" prominent
in poetry. All that he wrote after he retired to Twickenham, still a
young man, in 1718, was essentially an attempt to gather together "moral
wisdom" clothed in consummate language. He inculcated a moderation of
feeling, a broad and general study of mankind, an acceptance of the
benefits of civilisation, and a suppression of individuality. Even in so
violent and so personal a work as the _Dunciad_ he expends all the
resources of his genius to make his anger seem moral and his indignation
a public duty. This conception of the ethical responsibility of verse
was universal, and even so late as 1745, long after the composition of
Warton's "Enthusiast," we find Blacklock declaring, with general
acceptance, that "poetical genius depends entirely on the quickness of
moral feeling," and that not to "feel poetry" was the result of having
"the affections and internal senses depraved by vice."
The most important innovation suggested by Joseph Warton was an
outspoken assertion that this was by no means the object or the proper
theme of poetry. His verses and those of his brother, the _Essay on
Pope_ of the elder, the critical and historical writings of the younger,
may be searched in vain for the slightest evidence of moral or didactic
sentiment. The instructive and ethical mannerisms of the later
classicists had produced some beautiful and more accomplished verse,
especially of a descriptive order, but its very essence had excluded
self-revelation. Dennis, at whom Pope taught the world to laugh, but
who was in several respects a better critic than either Addison or
himself, had come close to the truth sometimes, but was for ever edged
away from it by the intrusion of the moral consideration. Dennis feels
things aesthetically, but he blunders into ethical definition. The result
was that the range of poetry was narrowed to the sphere of didactic
reflection, a blunt description of scenery or objects being the only
relief, since
"who could take offence
While pure description held the place of sense?"
To have perceived the bankruptcy of the didactic poem is Joseph Warton's
most remarkable innovation. The lawlessness of the Romantic Movement, or
rather its instinct for insisting that genius is a law unto itself, is
first foreshadowed in "The Enthusiast," and when the history of the
school comes to be written there will be a piquancy in tracing an
antinomianism down from the blameless Wartons to the hedonist essays of,
Oscar Wilde and the frenzied anarchism of the Futurists. Not less
remarkable, or less characteristic, was the revolt against the quietism
of the classical school. "Avoid extremes," Pope had said, and
moderation, calmness, discretion, absence of excitement had been laid
down as capital injunctions. Joseph Warton's very title, "The
Enthusiast," was a challenge, for "enthusiasm" was a term of reproach.
He was himself a scandal to classical reserve. Mant, in the course of
some excellent lines addressed to Joseph Warton, remarks
"Thou didst seek
Ecstatic vision by the haunted stream
Or grove of fairy: then thy nightly ear,
As from the wild notes of some airy harp,
Thrilled with strange music."
The same excess of sensibility is still more clearly divulged in
Joseph's own earliest verses:--
"All beauteous Nature! by thy boundless charms
Oppress'd, O where shall I begin thy praise,
Where turn the ecstatic eye, _how ease my breast
That pants with wild astonishment and love_?"
The Nature here addressed is a very different thing from the "Nature
methodis'd" of the _Essay on Criticism_. It is not to be distinguished
from the object of pantheistic worship long afterwards to be celebrated
in widely differing language, but with identical devotion, by Wordsworth
and Senancour, by Chateaubriand and Shelley.
Closely connected with this attitude towards physical nature is the
determination to deepen the human interest in poetry, to concentrate
individuality in passion. At the moment when the Wartons put forth their
ideas, a change was taking place in English poetry, but not in the
direction of earnest emotion. The instrument of verse had reached an
extraordinary smoothness, and no instance of its capability could be
more interesting than the poetry of Shenstone, with his perfect
utterance of things essentially not worth saying. In the most important
writers of that very exhausted moment, technical skill seems the only
quality calling for remark, and when we have said all that sympathy can
say for Whitehead and Akenside, the truth remains that the one is vapid,
the other empty. The Wartons saw that more liberty of imagination was
wanted, and that the Muse was not born to skim the meadows, in short low
flights, like a wagtail. They used expressions which reveal their
ambition. The poet was to be "bold, without confine," and "imagination's
chartered libertine"; like a sort of Alastor, he was
"in venturous bark to ride
Down turbulent Delight's tempestuous tide."
These are aspirations somewhat absurdly expressed, but the aim of them
is undeniable and noteworthy.
A passion for solitude always precedes the romantic obsession, and in
examining the claim of the Wartons to be pioneers, we naturally look for
this element. We find it abundantly in their early verses. When Thomas
was only seventeen--the precocity of the brothers was remarkable--he
wrote a "Pleasures of Melancholy," in which he expresses his wish to
retire to "solemn glooms, congenial to the soul." In the early odes of
his brother Joseph we find still more clearly indicated the intention to
withdraw from the world, in order to indulge the susceptibilities of the
spirit in solitary reflection. A curious air of foreshadowing the
theories of Rousseau, to which I have already referred, produces an
effect which is faintly indicated, but in its phantom way unique in
English literature up to that date, 1740. There had been a tendency to
the sepulchral in the work of several writers, in particular in the
powerful and preposterous religious verse of Isaac Watts, but nothing
had been suggested in the pure Romantic style.
In Joseph Warton, first, we meet with the individualist attitude to
nature; a slightly hysterical exaggeration of feeling which was to be
characteristic of romance; an intention of escaping from the vanity of
mankind by an adventure into the wilds; a purpose of recovering
primitive manners by withdrawing into primitive conditions; a passion
for what we now consider the drawing-master's theory of the
picturesque--the thatched cottage, the ruined castle with the moon
behind it, the unfettered rivulet, the wilderness of
"the pine-topped precipice
Abrupt and shaggy."
There was already the fallacy, to become so irresistibly attractive to
the next generation, that man in a state of civilisation was in a
decayed and fallen condition, and that to achieve happiness he must
wander back into a Golden Age. Pope, in verses which had profoundly
impressed two generations, had taken the opposite view, and had proved
to the satisfaction of theologian and free-thinker alike that
"God and Nature link'd the general frame,
And bade Self-love and Social be the same."
Joseph Warton would have nothing to say to Social Love. He designed, or
pretended to design, to emigrate to the backwoods of America, to live
"With simple Indian swains, that I may hunt
The boar and tiger through savannahs wild,
Through fragrant deserts and through citron groves,"
indulging, without the slightest admixture of any active moral principle
in social life, all the ecstasies, all the ravishing emotions, of an
abandonment to excessive sensibility. The soul was to be, no longer the
"little bark attendant" that "pursues the triumph and partakes the gale"
in Pope's complacent _Fourth Epistle_, but an aeolian harp hung in some
cave of a primeval forest for the winds to rave across in solitude.
"Happy the first of men, ere yet confin'd
To smoky cities."
Already the voice is that of Obermann, of Rene, of Byron.
Another point in which the recommendations of the Wartons far outran the
mediocrity of their execution was their theory of description. To
comprehend the state of mind in which such pieces of stately verse as
Parnell's _Hermit_ or Addison's _Campaign_ could be regarded as
satisfactory in the setting of their descriptive ornament we must
realise the aim which those poets put before them. Nothing was to be
mentioned by its technical--or even by its exact name; no clear picture
was to be raised before the inner eye; nothing was to be left definite
or vivid. We shall make a very great mistake if we suppose this
conventional vagueness to have been accidental, and a still greater if
we attribute it to a lack of cleverness. When Pope referred to the
sudden advent of a heavy shower at a funeral in these terms--
"'Tis done, and nature's various charms decay;
See gloomy clouds obscure the cheerful day!
Now hung with pearls the dropping trees appear,
Their faded honours scatter'd on her bier,"
it was not because he had not the skill to come into closer touch with
reality, but that he did not wish to do so. It had been plainly laid
down by Malherbe and confirmed by Boileau that objects should be named
in general, not in precise terms. We are really, in studying the
descriptive parts of the Classicist poets, very close to the theories of
Mallarme and the Symbolists which occupied us twenty years ago. The
object of the poet was not to present a vivid picture to the reader, but
to start in him a state of mind.
We must recollect, in considering what may seem to us the sterility and
stiffness of the English poets from 1660 to 1740, that they were
addressing a public which, after the irregular violence and anarchical
fancy of the middle of the seventeenth century, had begun to yearn for
regularity, common sense, and a moderation in relative variety. The
simplest ideas should be chosen, and should depend for their poetical
effect, not upon a redundant and gorgeous ornament, but solely upon
elegance of language. There were certain references, certain channels of
imagery, which were purely symbolical, and these could be defended only
on the understanding that they produced on the mind of the reader,
instantly and without effort, the illustrative effect required. For
instance, with all these neo-classicists, the mythological allusions,
which seem vapid and ridiculous to us, were simplified metaphor and a
question of style. In short, it rested the jaded imagination of Europe,
after Gongora and Marini, Donne and D'Aubigne, to sink back on a poetry
which had taken a vow to remain scrupulous, elegant, and selected.
But the imagination of England was now beginning to be impatient of
these bonds. It was getting tired of a rest-cure so prolonged. It asked
for more colour, more exuberance, more precise reproduction of visual
impressions. Thomson had summed up and had carried to greater lengths
the instinct for scenery which had never entirely died out in England,
except for a few years after the Restoration. It was left to Joseph
Warton, however, to rebel against the whole mode in which the cabbage of
landscape was shredded into the classical _pot-au-feu_. He proposes
that, in place of the mention of "Idalia's groves," when Windsor Forest
is intended, and of milk-white bulls sacrificed to Phoebus at
Twickenham, the poets should boldly mention in their verses English
"places remarkably romantic, the supposed habitation of druids, bards,
and wizards," and he vigorously recommends Theocritus as a model far
superior to Pope because of the greater exactitude of his references to
objects, and because of his more realistic appeal to the imagination.
Description, Warton says, should be uncommon, exact, not symbolic and
allusive, but referring to objects clearly, by their real names. He very
pertinently points out that Pope, in a set piece of extraordinary
cleverness--which was to be read, more than half a century later, even
by Wordsworth, with pleasure--confines himself to rural beauty in
general, and declines to call up before us the peculiar beauties which
characterise the Forest of Windsor.
A specimen of Joseph Warton's descriptive poetry may here be given, not
for its great inherent excellence, but because it shows his resistance
to the obstinate classic mannerism:--
"Tell me the path, sweet wanderer, tell,
To thy unknown sequestered cell,
Where woodbines cluster round the door,
Where shells and moss o'erlay the floor,
And on whose top an hawthorn blows,
Amid whose thickly-woven boughs
Some nightingale still builds her nest,
Each evening warbling thee to rest;
Then lay me by the haunted stream,
Rapt in some wild poetic dream,
In converse while methinks I rove
With Spenser through a fairy grove."
To show how identical were the methods of the two brothers we may
compare the foregoing lines with the following from Thomas Warton's "Ode
on the Approach of Summer" (published when he was twenty-five, and
possibly written much earlier):--