Beneath her elm the milkmaid chats;
The woodman, speeding home, awhile
Rests him at a shady stile;
Nor wants there fragrance to dispense
Refreshment o'er my soothed sense;
Nor tangled woodbine's balmy bloom,
Nor grass besprent to breathe perfume,
Nor lurking wild-thyme's spicy sweet
To bathe in dew my roving feet;
Nor wants there note of Philomel,
Nor sound of distant-tinkling bell,
Nor lowings faint of herds remote,
Nor mastiff's bark from bosom'd cot;
Rustle the breezes lightly borne
O'er deep embattled ears of corn;
Round ancient elms, with humming noise,
Full loud the chafer-swarms rejoice."
The youthful poet is in full revolt against the law which forbade his
elders to mention objects by their plain names. Here we notice at once,
as we do in similar early effusions of both the Wartons, the direct
influence of Milton's lyrics. To examine the effect of the rediscovery
of Milton upon the poets of the middle of the eighteenth century would
lead us too far from the special subject of our inquiry to-day. But it
must be pointed out that _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ had been
entirely neglected, and practically unknown, until a date long after the
rehabilitation of _Paradise Lost_. The date at which Handel set them to
music, 1740, is that of the revived or discovered popularity of these
two odes, which then began to be fashionable, at all events among the
younger poets. They formed a bridge, which linked the new writers with
the early seventeenth century across the Augustan Age, and their
versification as well as their method of description were as much
resisted by the traditional Classicists as they were attractive, and
directly preferred above those of Pope, by the innovators. Joseph
Warton, who attributed many of the faults of modern lyrical writing to
the example of Petrarch, sets Milton vehemently over against him, and
entreats the poets "to accustom themselves to contemplate fully every
object before they attempt to describe it." They were above all to avoid
nauseous repetition of commonplaces, and what Warton excellently calls
"hereditary images."
We must not, however, confine ourselves to a consideration of "The
Enthusiast" of 1740 and the preface to the _Odes_ of 1746. Certain of
the expressions, indeed, already quoted, are taken from the two very
important critical works which the brothers published while they were
still quite young. We must now turn particularly to Joseph Warton's
_Essay on the Genius of Pope_ of 1756, and to Thomas Warton's
_Observations on the Faerie Queene_ of 1754. Of these the former is the
more important and the more readable. Joseph's _Essay on Pope_ is an
extraordinary production for the time at which it was produced. Let me
suggest that we make a great mistake in treating the works of old
writers as if they had been always written by old men. I am trying to
present the Wartons to you as I see them, and that is as enthusiastic
youths, flushed with a kind of intellectual felicity, and dreaming how
poetry shall be produced as musicians make airs, by inspiration, not by
rote. Remember that when they took their walks in the forest at
Hackwood, the whole world of culture held that true genius had expired
with Pope, and this view was oracularly supported by Warburton and
such-like pundits. I have already pointed out to you that Pope was
divided from them not more than Swinburne is divided from us. Conceive
two very young men to-day putting their heads together to devise a
scheme of poetry which should entirely supersede that, not of Swinburne
only, but of Tennyson and Browning also, and you have the original
attitude of the Wartons.
It is difficult for us to realise what was the nature of the spell which
Pope threw over the literary conscience of the eighteenth century. Forty
years after the revolt of the Wartons, Pope was still looked upon by the
average critic as "the most distinguished and the most interesting Poet
of the nation." Joseph Warton was styled "the Winton Pedant" for
suggesting that Pope paid too dearly for his lucidity and lightness, and
for desiring to break up with odes and sonnets the oratorical mould
which gave a monotony of form to early eighteenth-century verse. His
_Essay on Pope_, though written with such studied moderation that we
may, in a hasty reading, regard it almost as a eulogy, was so shocking
to the prejudices of the hour that it was received with universal
disfavour, and twenty-six years passed before the author had the moral
courage to pursue it to a conclusion. He dedicated it to Young, who,
alone of the Augustans, had admitted that charm in a melancholy
solitude, that beauty of funereal and mysterious effects, which was to
be one of the leading characteristics of the Romantic School, and who
dimly perceived the sublime and the pathetic to be "the two chief nerves
of all genuine poetry."
Warton's _Essay on the Genius of Pope_ is not well arranged, and, in
spite of eloquent passages, as literature it does not offer much
attraction to the reader of the present day. But its thesis is one which
is very interesting to us, and was of startling novelty when it was
advanced. In the author's own words it was to prove that "a clear head
and acute understanding are not sufficient, alone, to make a poet." The
custom of critics had been to say that, when supported by a profound
moral sense, they were sufficient, and Pope was pointed to as the
overwhelming exemplar of the truth of this statement. Pope had taken
this position himself and, as life advanced, the well of pure poetry in
him had dried up more and more completely, until it had turned into a
sort of fountain of bright, dry sand, of which the _Epilogue to the
Satires_, written in 1738, when Joseph Warton was sixteen years of age,
may be taken as the extreme instance. The young author of the _Essay_
made the earliest attempt which any one made to put Pope in his right
place, that is to say, not to deny him genius or to deprecate the
extreme pleasure readers found in his writings, but to insist that, by
the very nature of his gifts, his was genius of a lower rank than that
of the supreme poets, with whom he was commonly paralleled when he was
not preferred to them all.
Warton admitted but three supreme English poets--Spenser, Shakespeare,
Milton--and he vehemently insisted that moral, didactic and panegyrical
poetry could never rise above the second class in importance. To assert
this was not merely to offend against the undoubted supremacy of Pope,
but it was to flout the claims of all those others to whom the age gave
allegiance. Joseph Warton does not shrink from doing this, and he gives
reason for abating the claims of all the classic favourites--Cowley,
Waller, Dryden, Addison. When it was advanced against him that he showed
arrogance in placing his opinion against that of a multitude of highly
trained judges, he replied that a real "relish and enjoyment of poetry"
is a rare quality, and "a creative and glowing imagination" possessed by
few. When the _dicta_ of Boileau were quoted against him, he repudiated
their authority with scarcely less vivacity than Keats was to display
half a century later.
Joseph Warton's _Essay_ wanders about, and we may acknowledge ourselves
more interested in the mental attitude which it displays than in the
detail of its criticism. The author insists, with much force, on the
value of a grandiose melancholy and a romantic horror in creating a
poetical impression, and he allows himself to deplore that Pope was so
ready to forget that "wit and satire are transitory and perishable, but
nature and passion are eternal." We need not then be surprised when
Joseph Warton boldly protests that no other part of the writings of Pope
approaches _Eloisa to Abelard_ in the quality of being "truly poetical."
He was perhaps led to some indulgence by the fact that this is the one
composition in which Pope appears to be indebted to Milton's lyrics, but
there was much more than that. So far as I am aware, _Eloisa to Abelard_
had never taken a high place with Pope's extreme admirers, doubtless
because of its obsession with horror and passion. But when we read how
"o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves,
Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves,
Black melancholy sits, and round her throws
A death-like silence and a dead repose,"
and still more when we reflect on the perpetual and powerful appeals
which the poem makes to emotion unbridled by moral scruple, we have no
difficulty in perceiving why _Eloisa to Abelard_ exercised so powerful
an attraction on Joseph Warton. The absence of ethical reservation, the
licence, in short, was highly attractive to him, and he rejoiced in
finding Pope, even so slightly, even so briefly, faithless to his
formula. It is worth while to note that Joseph Warton's sympathy with
the sentimental malady of the soul which lies at the core of Romanticism
permitted him to be, perhaps, the first man since the Renaissance who
recognised with pleasure the tumult of the _Atys_ of Catullus and the
febrile sensibility of Sappho.
Both brothers urged that more liberty of imagination was what English
poetry needed; that the lark had been shut up long enough in a gilded
cage. We have a glimpse of Thomas Warton introducing the study of the
great Italian classics into Oxford at a very early age, and we see him
crowned with laurel in the common-room of Trinity College at the age of
nineteen. This was in the year before the death of Thomson. No doubt he
was already preparing his _Observations on the Faerie Queene_, which
came out a little later. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford before he
was thirty. Both the brothers took great pleasure in the study of
Spenser, and they both desired that the supernatural "machinery" of
Ariosto, in common with the romance of _The Faerie Queene_, should be
combined with a description of nature as untrimmed and unshackled as
possible. Thomas Warton, in his remarkable Oxford poem, "The Painted
Window," describes himself as
"A faithless truant to the classic page,
Long have I loved to catch the simple chime
Of minstrel-harps, and spell the fabling rhyme,"
and again he says:--
"I soothed my sorrows with the dulcet lore
Which Fancy fabled in her elfin age,"
that is to say when Spenser was writing "upon Mulla's shore."
After all this, the Observations on the Faerie Queene of 1754 is rather
disappointing. Thomas was probably much more learned as a historian of
literature than Joseph, but he is not so interesting a critic. Still, he
followed exactly the same lines, with the addition of a wider knowledge.
His reading is seen to be already immense, but he is tempted to make too
tiresome a display of it. Nevertheless, he is as thorough as his brother
in his insistence upon qualities which we have now learned to call
Romantic, and he praises all sorts of old books which no one then spoke
of with respect. He warmly recommends the _Morte d'Arthur_, which had
probably not found a single admirer since 1634. When he mentions Ben
Jonson, it is characteristic that it is to quote the line about "the
charmed boats and the enchanted wharves," which sounds like a foretaste
of Keats's "magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas." The
public of Warton's day had relegated all tales about knights, dragons,
and enchanters to the nursery, and Thomas Warton shows courage in
insisting that they are excellent subjects for serious and adult
literature. He certainly would have thoroughly enjoyed the romances of
Mrs. Radcliffe, whom a later generation was to welcome as "the mighty
magician bred and nourished by the Muses in their sacred solitary
caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition," and he despised
the neo-classic make-believe of grottoes. He says, with firmness, that
epic poetry--and he is thinking of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser--would
never have been written if the critical judgments current in 1754 had
been in vogue.
Thomas Warton closely studied the influence of Ariosto on Spenser, and
no other part of the _Observations_ is so valuable as the pages in which
those two poets are contrasted. He remarked the polish of the former
poet with approval, and he did not shrink from what is violently
fantastic in the plot of the _Orlando Furioso_. On that point he says,
"The present age is too fond of manner'd poetry to relish fiction and
fable," but perhaps he did not observe that although there is no
chivalry in _The Schoolmistress_, that accomplished piece was the
indirect outcome of the Italian mock-heroic epics. The Classicists had
fought for lucidity and common sense, whereas to be tenebrous and vague
was a merit with the precursors of Romanticism, or at least, without
unfairness, we may say that they asserted the power of imagination to
make what was mysterious, and even fabulous, true to the fancy. This
tendency, which we first perceive in the Wartons, rapidly developed, and
it led to the blind enthusiasm with which the vapourings of Macpherson
were presently received. The earliest specimens of _Ossian_ were
revealed to a too-credulous public in 1760, but I find no evidence of
any welcome which they received from either Joseph or Thomas. The
brothers personally preferred a livelier and more dramatic presentation,
and when Dr. Johnson laughed at Collins because "he loved fairies,
genii, giants, and monsters," the laugh was really at the expense of his
school-fellow Joseph Warton, to whom Collins seems to have owed his
boyish inspiration, although he was by a few months the senior.
Johnson was a resolute opponent of the principles of the Wartons, though
he held Thomas, at least, in great personal regard. He objected to the
brothers that they "affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of
revival," and his boutade about their own poetry is well known:--
"Phrase that time hath flung away,
Uncouth words in disarray,
Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode and elegy and sonnet."
This conservatism was not peculiar to Johnson; there was a general
tendency to resist the reintroduction into language and literature of
words and forms which had been allowed to disappear. A generation later,
a careful and thoughtful grammarian like Gilpin was in danger of being
dismissed as "a cockscomb" because he tried to enlarge our national
vocabulary. The Wartons were accused of searching old libraries for
glossaries of disused terms in order to display them in their own
writings. This was not quite an idle charge; it is to be noted as one of
the symptoms of active Romanticism that it is always dissatisfied with
the diction commonly in use, and desires to dazzle and mystify by
embroidering its texture with archaic and far-fetched words. Chatterton,
who was not yet born when the Wartons formed and expressed their ideas,
was to carry this instinct to a preposterous extreme in his Rowley
forgeries, where he tries to obtain a mediaeval colouring by transferring
words out of an imperfect Anglo-Saxon lexicon, often without discerning
the actual meaning of those words.
Both the Wartons continued, in successive disquisitions, to repeat their
definition of poetry, but it cannot be said that either of them
advanced. So far as Joseph is concerned, he seems early to have
succumbed to the pressure of the age and of his surroundings. In 1766 he
became head master of Winchester, and settled down after curious
escapades which had nothing poetical about them. In the head master of a
great public school, reiterated murmurs against bondage to the Classical
Greeks and Romans would have been unbecoming, and Joseph Warton was a
man of the world. Perhaps in the solitude of his study he murmured, as
disenchanted enthusiasts often murmur, "Say, are the days of blest
delusion fled?" Yet traces of the old fire were occasionally manifest;
still each brother woke up at intervals to censure the criticism of
those who did not see that imagination must be paramount in poetry, and
who made the mistake of putting "discernment" in the place of
"enthusiasm." I hardly know why it gives me great pleasure to learn that
"the manner in which the Rev. Mr. Joseph Warton read the Communion
Service was remarkably awful," but it must be as an evidence that he
carried a "Gothick" manner into daily life.
The spirit of pedantry, so amicably mocked by the Wartons, took its
revenge upon Thomas in the form of a barren demon named Joseph Ritson,
who addressed to him in 1782 what he aptly called _A Familiar Letter_.
There is hardly a more ferocious pamphlet in the whole history of
literature. Ritson, who had the virulence of a hornet and the same
insect's inability to produce honey of his own, was considered by the
reactionaries to have "punched Tom Warton's historick body full of
deadly holes." But his strictures were not really important. In
marshalling some thousands of facts, Warton had made perhaps a couple of
dozen mistakes, and Ritson advances these with a reiteration and a
violence worthy of a maniac. Moreover, and this is the fate of angry
pedants, he himself is often found to be as dustily incorrect as Warton
when examined by modern lights. Ritson, who accuses Warton of "never
having consulted or even seen" the books he quotes from, and of
intentionally swindling the public, was in private life a vegetarian who
is said to have turned his orphan nephew on to the streets because he
caught him eating a mutton-chop. Ritson flung his arrows far and wide,
for he called Dr. Samuel Johnson himself "that great luminary, or rather
dark lantern of literature."
If we turn over Ritson's distasteful pages, it is only to obtain from
them further proof of the perception of Warton's Romanticism by an
adversary whom hatred made perspicacious. Ritson abuses the _History of
English Poetry_ for presuming to have "rescued from oblivion irregular
beauties" of which no one desired to be reminded. He charges Warton with
recommending the poetry of "our Pagan fathers" because it is untouched
by Christianity, and of saying that "religion and poetry are
incompatible." He accuses him of "constantly busying himself with
passages which he does not understand, because they appeal to his ear
or his fancy." "Old poetry," Ritson says to Warton, "is the same thing
to you, sense or nonsense." He dwells on Warton's marked attraction to
whatever is prodigious and impossible. The manner in which these
accusations are made is insolent and detestable; but Ritson had
penetration, and without knowing what he reached, in some of these
diatribes he pierced to the heart of the Romanticist fallacy.
It is needful that I should bring these observations to a close. I hope
I have made good my claim that it was the Wartons who introduced into
the discussion of English poetry the principle of Romanticism. To use a
metaphor of which both of them would have approved, that principle was
to them like the mystical bowl of ichor, the _ampolla_, which Astolpho
was expected to bring down from heaven in the _Orlando Furioso_. If I
have given you an exaggerated idea of the extent to which they foresaw
the momentous change in English literature, I am to blame. No doubt by
extracting a great number of slight and minute remarks, and by putting
them together, the critic may produce an effect which is too emphatic.
But you will be on your guard against such misdirection. It is enough
for me if you will admit the priority of the intuition of the brothers,
and I do not think that it can be contested.
Thomas Warton said, "I have rejected the ideas of men who are the most
distinguished ornaments" of the history of English poetry, and he
appealed against a "mechanical" attitude towards the art of poetry. The
brothers did more in rebelling against the Classic formulas than in
starting new poetic methods. There was an absence in them of "the pomps
and prodigality" of genius of which Gray spoke in a noble stanza. They
began with enthusiasm, but they had no native richness of expression, no
store of energy. It needed a nature as unfettered as Blake's, as wide
as Wordsworth's, as opulent as Keats's, to push the Romantic attack on
to victory. The instinct for ecstasy, ravishment, the caprices and
vagaries of emotion, was there; there was present in both brothers,
while they were still young, an extreme sensibility. The instinct was
present in them, but the sacred fire died out in the vacuum of their
social experience, and neither Warton had the energy to build up a style
in prose or verse. They struggled for a little while, and then they
succumbed to the worn verbiage of their age, from which it is sometimes
no light task to disengage their thought. In their later days they made
some sad defections, and I can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving
at Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_ and failing to observe its beauties. We
are told that as Camden Professor he "suffered the rostrum to grow
cold," and he was an ineffective poet laureate. His brother Joseph felt
the necessity or the craving for lyrical expression, without attaining
more than a muffled and a second-rate effect.
All this has to be sadly admitted. But the fact remains that between
1740 and 1750, while even the voice of Rousseau had not begun to make
itself heard in Europe, the Wartons had discovered the fallacy of the
poetic theories admitted in their day, and had formed some faint
conception of a mode of escape from them. The Abbe Du Bos had laid down
in his celebrated _Reflexions_ (1719) that the poet's art consists of
making a general moral representation of incidents and scenes, and
embellishing it with elegant images. This had been accepted and acted
upon by Pope and by all his followers. To have been the first to
perceive the inadequacy and the falsity of a law which excluded all
imagination, all enthusiasm, and all mystery, is to demand respectful
attention from the historian of Romanticism, and this attention is due
to Joseph and Thomas Warton.
[Footnote 4: Delivered, as the Warton Lecture, before the British
Academy, October 27th, 1915.]
THE CHARM OF STERNE[5]
It is exactly two hundred years to-night since there was born, at
Clonmel, in Ireland, a son to a subaltern in an English regiment just
home from the Low Countries. "My birthday," Laurence Sterne tells us,
"was ominous to my poor father, who was, the day after our arrival, with
many other brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide world
with a wife and two children." The life of the new baby was one of
perpetual hurry and scurry; his mother, who had been an old campaigner,
daughter of what her son calls "a noted suttler" called Nuttle, had been
the widow of a soldier before she married Roger Sterne. In the
extraordinary fashion of the army of those days, the regiment was
hurried from place to place--as was that of the father of the infant
Borrow a century later--and with it hastened the unhappy Mrs. Sterne,
for ever bearing and for ever losing children, "most rueful journeys,"
marked by a long succession of little tombstones left behind. Finally,
at Gibraltar, the weary father, pugnacious to the last, picked a quarrel
about a goose and was pinked through the body, surviving in a thoroughly
damaged condition, to die, poor exhausted pilgrim of Bellona, in
barracks in Jamaica.
It would be difficult to imagine a childhood better calculated than this
to encourage pathos in a humorist and fun in a sentimentalist. His
account, in his brief autobiography, of the appearance and
disappearance of his hapless brothers and sisters is a proof of how
early life appealed to Laurence Sterne in the dappled colours of an
April day. We read there of how at Wicklow "we lost poor Joram, a pretty
boy"; how "Anne, that pretty blossom, fell in the barracks of Dublin";
how little Devijehar was "left behind" in Carrickfergus. We know not
whether to sob or to giggle, so tragic is the rapid catalogue of dying
babies, so ridiculous are their names and fates. Here, then, I think, we
have revealed to us the prime characteristic of Sterne, from which all
his other characteristics branch away, for evil or for good. As no other
writer since Shakespeare, and in a different and perhaps more intimate
way than even Shakespeare, he possessed the key of those tears that
succeed the hysteria of laughter, and of that laughter which succeeds
the passion of tears. From early childhood, and all through youth and
manhood, he had been collecting observations upon human nature in these
rapidly alternating moods.