The School of Warton
In the progress of our inquiries, hitherto, we have met with little that
can be called romantic in the narrowest sense. Though the literary
movement had already begun to take a retrospective turn, few distinctly
mediaeval elements were yet in evidence. Neither the literature of the
monk nor the literature of the knight had suffered resurrection. It was
not until about 1760 that writers began to gravitate decidedly toward the
Middle Ages. The first peculiarly mediaeval type that contrived to
secure a foothold in eighteenth-century literature was the hermit, a
figure which seems to have had a natural attraction, not only for
romanticizing poets like Shenstone and Collins, but for the whole
generation of verse writers from Parnell to Goldsmith, Percy and
Beattie--each of whom composed a "Hermit"--and even for the authors of
"Rasselas" and "Tom Jones," in whose fictions he becomes a stock
character, as a fountain of wisdom and of moral precepts.[1]
A literary movement which reverts to the past for its inspiration is
necessarily also a learned movement. Antiquarian scholarship must lead
the way. The picture of an extinct society has to be pieced together
from the fragments at hand, and this involves special research. So long
as this special knowledge remains the exclusive possession of
professional antiquaries like Gough, Hearne, Bentham, Perry, Grose,[2] it
bears no fruit in creative literature. It produces only local histories,
surveys of cathedrals and of sepulchral monuments, books about Druidic
remains, Roman walls and coins, etc., etc. It was only when men of
imagination and of elegant tastes were enlisted in such pursuits that the
dry stick of antiquarianism put forth blossoms. The poets, of course,
had to make studies of their own, to decipher manuscripts, learn Old
English, visit ruins, collect ballads and ancient armor, familiarize
themselves with terms of heraldry, architecture, chivalry, ecclesiology
and feudal law, and in other such ways inform and stimulate their
imaginations. It was many years before the joint labors of scholars and
poets had reconstructed an image of medieval society, sharp enough in
outline and brilliant enough in color to impress itself upon the general
public. Scott, indeed, was the first to popularize romance; mainly, no
doubt, because of the greater power and fervor of his imagination; but
also, in part, because an ampler store of materials had been already
accumulated when he began work. He had fed on Percy's "Reliques" in
boyhood; through Coleridge, his verse derives from Chatterton; and the
line of Gothic romances which starts with "The Castle of Otranto" is
remotely responsible for "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." But Scott too
was, like Percy and Walpole, a virtuoso and collector; and the vast
apparatus of notes and introductory matter in his metrical tales, and in
the Waverley novels, shows how necessary it was for the romantic poet to
be his own antiquary.
As was to be expected, the zeal of the first romanticists was not always
a zeal according to knowledge, and the picture of the Middle Age which
they painted was more of a caricature than a portrait. A large share of
medieval literature was inaccessible to the general reader. Much of it
was still in manuscript. Much more of it was in old and rare printed
copies, broadsides and black-letter folios, the treasure of great
libraries and of jealously hoarded private collections. Much was in
dialects little understood-forgotten forms of speech-Old French, Middle
High German, Old Norse, medieval Latin, the ancient Erse and Cymric
tongues, Anglo-Saxon. There was an almost total lack of apparatus for
the study of this literature. Helps were needed in the shape of modern
reprints of scarce texts, bibliographies, critical editions,
translations, literary histories and manuals, glossaries of archaic
words, dictionaries and grammars of obsolete languages. These were
gradually supplied by working specialists in different fields of
investigation. Every side of medieval life has received illustration in
its turn. Works like Tyrwhitt's edition of Chaucer (1775-78); the
collections of mediaeval romances by Ellis (1805), Ritson (1802), and
Weber (1810); Nares' and Halliwell's "Archaic Glossary" (1822-46),
Carter's "Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Paintings" (1780-94),
Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), Hallam's "Middle Ages"
(1818), Meyrick's "Ancient Armour" (1824), Lady Guest's "Mabinogion"
(1838), the publications of numberless individual scholars and of learned
societies like the Camden, the Spenser, the Percy, the Chaucer, the Early
English Text, the Roxburgh Club,--to mention only English examples, taken
at random and separated from each other by wide intervals of time,--are
instances of the labors by which mediaeval life has been made familiar to
all who might choose to make acquaintance with it.
The history of romanticism, after the impulse had once been given, is
little else than a record or the steps by which, one after another, new
features of that vast and complicated scheme of things which we loosely
call the Middle Ages were brought to light and made available as literary
material. The picture was constantly having fresh details added to it,
nor is there any reason to believe that it is finished yet. Some of the
finest pieces of mediaeval work have only within the last few years been
brought to the attention of the general reader; _e.g._, the charming old
French story in prose and verse, "Aucassin et Nicolete," and the
fourteenth-century English poem, "The Perle." The future holds still
other phases of romanticism in reserve; the Middle Age seems likely to be
as inexhaustible in novel sources of inspiration as classical antiquity
has already proved to be. The past belongs to the poet no less than the
present, and a great part of the literature of every generation will
always be retrospective. The tastes and preferences of the individual
artist will continue to find a wide field for selection in the rich
quarry of Christian and feudal Europe.
It is not a little odd that the book which first aroused, in modern
Europe, an interest in Norse mythology should have been written by a
Frenchman. This was the "Introduction à l'Histoire de Dannemarc,"
published in 1755 by Paul Henri Mallet, a native of Geneva and sometime
professor of Belles Lettres in the Royal University at Copenhagen. The
work included also a translation of the first part of the Younger Edda,
with an abstract of the second part and of the Elder Edda, and versions
of several Runic poems. It was translated into English, in 1770, by
Thomas Percy, the editor of the "Reliques," under the title, "Northern
Antiquities; or a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion, and Laws
of the ancient Danes." A German translation had appeared a few years
earlier and had inspired the Schleswig-Holsteiner, Heinrich Wilhem von
Gerstenberg, to compose his "Gedicht eines Skalden," which introduced the
old Icelandic mythology into German poetry in 1766. Percy had published
independently in 1763 "Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, translated from the
Icelandic Language."
Gray did not wait for the English translation of Mallet's book. In a
letter to Mason, dated in 1758, and inclosing some criticisims on the
latter's "Caractacus" (then in MS.), he wrote, "I am pleased with the
Gothic Elysium. Do you think I am ignorant about either that, or the
_hell_ before, or the _twilight_.[3] I have been there and have seen it
all in Mallet's 'Introduction to the History of Denmark' (it is in
French), and many other places." It is a far cry from Mallet's "System
of Runic Mythology" to William Morris' "Sigurd the Volsung" (1877), but
to Mallet belongs the credit of first exciting that interest in
Scandinavian antiquity which has enriched the prose and poetry not only
of England but of Europe in general. Gray refers to him in his notes on
"The Descent of Odin," and his work continued to be popular authority on
its subject for at least half a century. Scott cites it in his
annotations on "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805).
Gray's studies in Runic literature took shape in "The Fatal Sisters" and
"The Descent of Odin," written in 1761, published in 1768. These were
paraphrases of two poems which Gray found in the "De Causis Contemnendae
Mortis" (Copenhagen, 1689) of Thomas Bartholin, a Danish physician of the
seventeenth century. The first of them describes the Valkyrie weaving
the fates of the Danish and Irish warriors in the battle of Clontarf,
fought in the eleventh century between Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, and Brian,
King of Dublin; the second narrates the descent of Odin to Niflheimer, to
inquire of Hela concerning the doom of Balder.[4] Gray had designed
these for the introductory chapter of his projected history of English
poetry. He calls them imitations, which in fact they are, rather than
literal renderings. In spite of a tinge of eighteenth-century diction,
and of one or two Shaksperian and Miltonic phrases, the translator
succeeded fairly well in reproducing the wild air of his originals. His
biographer, Mr. Gosse, promises that "the student will not fail . . . in
the Gothic picturesqueness of 'The Descent of Odin,' to detect notes and
phrases of a more delicate originality than are to be found even in his
more famous writings; and will dwell with peculiar pleasure on those
passages in which Gray freed himself of the trammels of an artificial and
conventional taste, and prophesied of the new romantic age that was
coming."
Celtic antiquity shared with Gothic in this newly around interest. Here
too, as in the phrase about "the stormy Hebrides," "Lycidas" seems to
have furnished the spark that kindled the imaginations of the poets.
"Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep
Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?
For neither were ye playing on the steep
Where your old bards, the famous Druids lie,
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,
Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream."
Joseph Warton quotes this passage twice in his "Essay on Pope" (Vol I.,
pp. 7 and 356, 5th ed.), once to assert its superiority to a passage in
Pope's "Pastorals": "The mention of places remarkably romantic, the
supposed habitation of Druids, bards and wizards, is far more pleasing to
the imagination, than the obvious introduction of Cam and Isis." Another
time, to illustrate the following suggestion: "I have frequently wondered
that our modern writers have made so little use of the druidical times
and the traditions of the old bards. . . Milton, we see, was sensible of
the force of such imagery, as we may gather from this short but exquisite
passage." As further illustrations of the poetic capabilities of similar
themes, Warton gives a stanza from Gray's "Bard" and some lines from
Gilbert West's "Institution of the Order of the Garter" which describe
the ghosts of the Druids hovering about their ruined altars at Stonehenge:
"--Mysterious rows
Of rude enormous obelisks, that rise
Orb within orb, stupendous monuments
Of artless architecture, such as now
Oft-times amaze the wandering traveler,
By the pale moon discerned on Sarum's plain."
He then inserts two stanzas, in the Latin of Hickes' "Thesaurus," of an
old Runic ode preserved by Olaus Wormius (Ole Worm) and adds an
observation upon the Scandinavian heroes and their contempt of death.
Druids and bards now begin to abound. Collins' "Ode on the Death of Mr.
Thomson," _e.g._, commences with the line
"In yonder grave a Druid lies."
In his "Ode to Liberty," he alludes to the tradition that Mona, the
druidic stronghold, was long covered with an enchantment of mist--work of
an angry mermaid:
"Mona, once hid from those who search the main,
Where thousand elfin shapes abide."
In Thomas Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy," Contemplation is fabled to
have been discovered, when a babe, by a Druid
"Far in a hollow glade of Mona's woods,"
and borne by him to his oaken bower, where she
"--loved to lie
Oft deeply listening to the rapid roar
Of wood-hung Menai, stream of druids old."
Mason's "Caractacus" (1759) was a dramatic poem on the Greek model, with
a chorus of British bards, and a principal Druid for choragus. The scene
is the sacred grove in Mona. Mason got up with much care the description
of druidic rites, such as the preparation of the adder-stone and the
cutting of the mistletoe with a gold sickle, from Latin authorities like
Pliny, Tacitus, Lucan, Strabo, and Suetonius. Joseph Warton commends
highly the chorus on "Death" in this piece, as well as the chorus of
bards at the end of West's "Institution of the Garter." For the
materials of his "Bard" Gray had to go no farther than historians and
chroniclers such as Camden, Higden, and Matthew of Westminster, to all of
whom he refers. Following a now discredited tradition, he represents the
last survivor of the Welsh poetic guild, seated, harp in hand, upon a
crag on the side of Snowdon, and denouncing judgment on Edward I, for the
murder of his brothers in song.
But in 1764 Gray was incited, by the publication of Dr. Evans'
"Specimens,"[5] to attempt a few translations from the Welsh. The most
considerable of these was "The Triumphs of Owen," published among Gray's
collected poems in 1768. This celebrates the victory over the
confederate fleets of Ireland, Denmark, and Normandy, won about 1160 by a
prince of North Wales, Owen Ap Griffin, "the dragon son on Mona." The
other fragments are brief but spirited versions of bardic songs in praise
of fallen heroes: "Caràdoc," "Conan," and "The Death of Hoel." They were
printed posthumously, though doubtless composed in 1764.
The scholarship of the day was not always accurate in discriminating
between ancient systems of religion, and Gray, in his letters to Mason in
1758, when "Caractacus" was still in the works, takes him to task for
mixing the Gothic and Celtic mythologies. He instructs him that Woden
and his Valhalla belong to "the doctrine of the Scalds, not of the
Bards"; but admits that, "in that scarcity of Celtic ideas we labor
under," it might be permissible to borrow from the Edda, "dropping,
however, all mention of Woden and his Valkyrian virgins," and "without
entering too minutely on particulars"; or "still better, to graft any
wild picturesque fable, absolutely of one's own invention, upon the Druid
stock." But Gray had not scrupled to mix mythologies in "The Bard,"
thereby incurring Dr. Johnson's censure. "The weaving of the winding
sheet he borrowed, as he owns, from the northern bards; but their
texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the art
of spinning the thread of life in another mythology. Theft is always
dangerous: Gray has made weavers of the slaughtered bards, by a fiction
outrageous and incongruous."[6] Indeed Mallet himself had a very
confused notion of the relation of the Celtic to the Teutonic race. He
speaks constantly of the old Scandinavians as Celts. Percy points out
the difference, in the preface to his translation, and makes the
necessary correction in the text, where the word Celtic occurs--usually
by substituting "Gothic and Celtic" for the "Celtic" of the original.
Mason made his contribution to Runic literature, "Song of Harold the
Valiant," a rather insipid versification of a passage from the "Knytlinga
Saga," which had been rendered by Bartholin into Latin, from him into
French by Mallet, and from Mallet into English prose by Percy. Mason
designed it for insertion in the introduction to Gray's abortive history
of English poetry.
The true pioneers of the mediaeval revival were the Warton brothers.
"The school of Warton" was a term employed, not without disparaging
implications, by critics who had no liking for antique minstrelsy.
Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of Thomas Warton, vicar of
Basingstoke, who had been a fellow of Magdalen and Professor of Poetry at
Oxford; which latter position was afterward filled by the younger of his
two sons. It is interesting to note that a volume of verse by Thomas
Warton, Sr., posthumously printed in 1748, includes a Spenserian
imitation and translations of two passages from the "Song of Ragner
Lodbrog," an eleventh-century Viking, after the Latin version quoted by
Sir Wm. Temple in his essay "Of Heroic Virtue";[7] so that the romantic
leanings of the Warton brothers seem to be an instance of heredity.
Joseph was educated at Winchester,--where Collins was his
schoolfellow--and both of the brothers at Oxford. Joseph afterward
became headmaster of Winchester, and lived till 1800, surviving his
younger brother ten years. Thomas was always identified with Oxford,
where he resided for forty-seven years. He was appointed, in 1785,
Camden Professor of History in the university, but gave no lectures. In
the same year he was chosen to succeed Whitehead, as Poet Laureate. Both
brothers were men of a genial, social temper. Joseph was a man of some
elegance; he was fond of the company of young ladies, went into general
society, and had a certain renown as a drawing-room wit and diner-out.
He used to spend his Christmas vacations in London, where he was a member
of Johnson's literary club. Thomas, on the contrary, who waxed fat and
indolent in college cloisters, until Johnson compared him to a turkey
cock, was careless in his personal habits and averse to polite society.
He was the life of a common room at Oxford, romped with the schoolboys
when he visited Dr. Warton at Winchester, and was said to have a
hankering after pipes and ale and the broad mirth of the taproom. Both
Wartons had an odd passion for military parades; and Thomas--who was a
believer in ghosts--used secretly to attend hangings. They were also
remarkably harmonious in their tastes and intellectual pursuits, eager
students of old English poetry, Gothic architecture, and British
antiquities. So far as enthusiasm, fine critical taste, and elegant
scholarship can make men poets, the Wartons were poets. But their work
was quite unoriginal. Many of their poems can be taken to pieces and
assigned, almost line by line and phrase by phrase, to Milton, Thomson,
Spenser, Shakspere, Gray. They had all of our romantic poet Longfellow's
dangerous gifts of sympathy and receptivity, without a tenth part of his
technical skill, or any of his real originality as an artist. Like
Longfellow, they loved the rich and mellow atmosphere of the historic
past:
"Tales that have the rime of age,
And chronicles of eld."
The closing lines of Thomas Warton's sonnet "Written in a Blank Leaf of
Dugdale's Monasticon"[8]--a favorite with Charles Lamb--might have been
written by Longfellow:
"Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways
Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers."
Joseph Warton's pretensions, as a poet, are much less than his younger
brother's. Much of Thomas Warton's poetry, such as his _facetiae_ in the
"Oxford Sausage" and his "Triumph of Isis," had an academic flavor.
These we may pass over, as foreign to our present inquiries. So, too,
with most of his annual laureate odes, "On his Majesty's Birthday," etc.
Yet even these official and rather perfunctory performances testify to
his fondness for what Scott calls "the memorials of our forefathers'
piety or splendor." Thus, in the birthday odes for 1787-88, and the New
Year ode for 1787, he pays a tribute to the ancient minstrels and to
early laureates like Chaucer and Spenser, and celebrates "the Druid harp"
sounding "through the gloom profound of forests hoar"; the fanes and
castles built by the Normans; and the
"--bright hall where Odin's Gothic throne
With the broad blaze of brandished falchions shone."
But the most purely romantic of Thomas Warton's poems are "The Crusade"
and "The Grave of King Arthur." The former is the song which
"The lion heart Plantagenet
Sang, looking through his prison-bars,"
when the minstrel Blondel came wandering in search of his captive king.
The latter describes how Henry II., on his way to Ireland, was feasted at
Cilgarran Castle, where the Welsh bards sang to him of the death of
Arthur and his burial in Glastonbury Abbey. The following passage
anticipates Scott:
"Illumining the vaulted roof,
A thousand torches flamed aloof;
From many cups, with golden gleam,
Sparkled the red metheglin's stream:
To grace the gorgeous festival,
Along the lofty-windowed hall
The storied tapestry was hung;
With minstrelsy the rafters rung
Of harps that with reflected light
From the proud gallery glittered bright:
While gifted bards, a rival throng,
From distant Mona, nurse of song,
From Teivi fringed with umbrage brown,
From Elvy's vale and Cader's crown,
From many a shaggy precipice
That shades Ierne's hoarse abyss,
And many a sunless solitude
Of Radnor's inmost mountains rude,
To crown the banquet's solemn close
Themes of British glory chose."
Here is much of Scott's skill in the poetic manipulation of place-names,
_e.g._,
"Day set on Norham's castled steep,
And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep,
And Cheviot's mountains lone"--
names which leave a far-resounding romantic rumble behind them. Another
passage in Warton's poem brings us a long way on toward Tennyson's "Wild
Tintagel by the Cornish sea" and his "island valley of Avilion."
"O'er Cornwall's cliffs the tempest roared:
High the screaming sea-mew soared:
In Tintaggel's topmost tower
Darkness fell the sleety shower:
Round the rough castle shrilly sung
The whirling blast, and wildly flung
On each tall rampart's thundering side
The surges of the tumbling tide,
When Arthur ranged his red-cross ranks
On conscious Camlan's crimsoned banks:
By Mordred's faithless guile decreed
Beneath a Saxon spear to bleed.
Yet in vain a Paynim foe
Armed with fate the mightly blow;
For when he fell, an elfin queen,
All in secret and unseen,
O'er the fainting hero threw
Her mantle of ambrosial blue,
And bade her spirits bear him far,
In Merlin's agate-axled car,
To her green isle's enameled steep
Far in the navel of the deep."
Other poems of Thomas Warton touching upon his favorite studies are the
"Ode Sent to Mr. Upton, on his Edition of the Faery Queene," the "Monody
Written near Stratford-upon-Avon," the sonnets, "Written at Stonehenge,"
"To Mr. Gray," and "On King Arthur's Round Table," and the humorous
epistle which he attributes to Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, denouncing
the bishops for their recent order that fast-prayers should be printed in
modern type instead of black letter, and pronouncing a curse upon the
author of "The Companion to the Oxford Guide Book" for his disrespectful
remarks about antiquaries.
"May'st thou pore in vain
For dubious doorways! May revengeful moths
Thy ledgers eat! May chronologic spouts
Retain no cipher legible! May crypts
Lurk undiscovered! Nor may'st thou spell the names
Of saints in storied windows, nor the dates
Of bells discover, nor the genuine site
Of abbots' pantries!"
Warton was a classical scholar and, like most of the forerunners of the
romantic school, was a trifle shame-faced over his Gothic heresies. Sir
Joshua Reynolds had supplied a painted window of classical design for New
College, Oxford; and Warton, in some complimentary verses, professes that
those "portraitures of Attic art" have won him back to the true taste;[9]
and prophesies that henceforth angels, apostles, saints, miracles,
martyrdoms, and tales of legendary lore shall--
"No more the sacred window's round disgrace,
But yield to Grecian groups the shining space. . .
Thy powerful hand has broke the Gothic chain,
And brought my bosom back to truth again. . .
For long, enamoured of a barbarous age,
A faithless truant to the classic page--
Long have I loved to catch the simple chime
Of minstrel harps, and spell the fabling rime;
To view the festive rites, the knightly play,
That decked heroic Albion's elder day;
To mark the mouldering halls of barons bold,
And the rough castle, cast in giant mould;
With Gothic manners, Gothic arts explore,
And muse on the magnificence of yore.
But chief, enraptured have I loved to roam,
A lingering votary, the vaulted dome,
Where the tall shafts, that mount in massy pride,
Their mingling branches shoot from side to side;
Where elfin sculptors, with fantastic clew,
O'er the long roof their wild embroidery drew;
Where Superstition, with capricious hand,
In many a maze, the wreathëd window planned,
With hues romantic tinged the gorgeous pane,
To fill with holy light the wondrous fane."[10]
The application of the word "romantic," in this passage, to the mediaeval
art of glass-staining is significant. The revival of the art in our own
day is due to the influence of the latest English school of romantic
poetry and painting, and especially to William Morris. Warton's
biographers track his passion for antiquity to the impression left upon
his mind by a visit to Windsor Castle, when he was a boy. He used to
spend his summers in wandering through abbeys and cathedrals. He kept
notes of his observations and is known to have begun a work on Gothic
architecture, no trace of which, however, was found among his
manuscripts. The Bodleian Library was one of his haunts, and he was
frequently seen "surveying with quiet and rapt earnestness the ancient
gateway of Magdalen College." He delighted in illuminated manuscripts
and black-letter folios. In his "Observations on the Faëry Queene"[11]
he introduces a digression of twenty pages on Gothic architecture, and
speaks lovingly of a "very curious and beautiful folio manuscript of the
history of Arthur and his knights in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford,
written on vellum, with illuminated initials and head-pieces, in which we
see the fashion of ancient armour, building, manner of tilting and other
particulars."
Another very characteristic poem of Warton's is the "Ode Written at
Vale-Royal Abbey in Cheshire," a monastery of Cistercian monks, founded
by Edward I. This piece is saturated with romantic feeling and written
in the stanza and manner of Gray's "Elegy," as will appear from a pair of
stanzas, taken at random:
"By the slow clock, in stately-measured chime,
That from the messy tower tremendous tolled,
No more the plowman counts the tedious time,
Nor distant shepherd pens the twilight fold.
"High o'er the trackless heath at midnight seen,
No more the windows, ranged in array
(Where the tall shaft and fretted nook between
Thick ivy twines), the tapered rites betray."
It is a note of Warton's period that, though Fancy and the Muse survey
the ruins of the abbey with pensive regret, "severer Reason"--the real
eighteenth-century divinity--"scans the scene with philosophic ken,"
and--being a Protestant--reflects that, after all, the monastic houses
were "Superstition's shrine" and their demolition was a good thing for
Science and Religion.
The greatest service, however, that Thomas Warton rendered to the studies
that he loved was his "History of English Poetry from the Twelfth to the
Close of the Sixteenth Century." This was in three volumes, published
respectively in 1774, 1777, and 1781. The fragment of a fourth volume
was issued in 1790. A revised edition in four volumes was published in
1824, under the editorship of Richard Price, corrected, augmented, and
annotated by Ritson, Douce, Park, Ashby, and the editor himself. In 1871
appeared a new revision (also in four volumes) edited by W. Carew
Hazlitt, with many additions, by the editor and by well-known English
scholars like Madden, Skeat, Furnivall, Morris, and Thomas and Aldis
Wright. It should never be forgotten, in estimating the value of
Warton's work, that he was a forerunner in this field. Much of his
learning is out of date, and the modern editors of his history--Price and
Hazlitt--seem to the discouraged reader to be chiefly engaged, in their
footnotes and bracketed interpellations, in taking back statements that
Warton had made in the text. The leading position, _e.g._, of his
preliminary dissertation, "Of the Origin of Romantic Fiction in
Europe"--deriving it from the Spanish Arabs--has long since been
discredited. But Warton's learning was wide, if not exact; and it was
not dry learning, but quickened by the spirit of a genuine man of
letters. Therefore, in spite of its obsoleteness in matters of fact, his
history remains readable, as a body of descriptive criticism, or a
continuous literary essay. The best way to read it is to read it as it
was written--in the original edition--disregarding the apparatus of
notes, which modern scholars have accumulated about it, but remembering
that it is no longer an authority and probably needs correcting on every
page. Read thus, it is a thoroughly delightful book, "a classic in its
way," as Lowell has said. Southey, too, affirmed that its publication
formed an epoch in literary history; and that, with Percy's "Reliques,"
it had promoted, beyond any other work, the "growth of a better taste
than had prevailed for the hundred years preceding."
Gray had schemed a history of English poetry, but relinquished the design
to Warton, to whom he communicated an outline of his own plan. The
"Observations on English Metre" and the essay on the poet Lydgate, among
Gray's prose remains, are apparently portions of this projected work.
Lowell, furthermore, pronounces Joseph Warton's "Essay on the Genius and
Writings of Pope" (1756) "the earliest public official declaration of war
against the reigning mode." The new school had its critics, as well as
its poets, and the Wartons were more effective in the former capacity.
The war thus opened was by no means as internecine as that waged by the
French classicists and romanticists of 1830. It has never been possible
to get up a very serious conflict in England, upon merely aesthetic
grounds. Yet the same opposition existed. Warton's biographer tells us
that the strictures made upon his essay were "powerful enough to damp the
ardor of the essayist, who left his work in an imperfect state for the
long space of twenty-six years," _i.e._, till 1782, when he published the
second volume.
Both Wartons were personal friends of Dr. Johnson; they were members of
the Literary Club and contributors to the _Idler_ and the _Adventurer_.
Thomas interested himself to get Johnson the Master's degree from Oxford,
where the doctor made him a visit. Some correspondence between them is
given in Boswell. Johnson maintained in public a respectful attitude
toward the critical and historical work of the Wartons; but he had no
sympathy with their antiquarian enthusiasm or their liking for old
English poetry. In private he ridiculed Thomas' verses, and summed them
up in the manner ensuing:
"Whereso'er I turn my view,
All is strange yet nothing new;
Endless labor all along,
Endless labor to be wrong;
Phrase that time has flung away,
Uncouth words in disarray,
Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode and elegy and sonnet."
And although he added, "Remember that I love the fellow dearly, for all I
laugh at him," this saving clause failed to soothe the poet's indignant
breast, when he heard that the doctor had ridiculed his lines. An
estrangement resulted which Johnson is said to have spoken of even with
tears, saying "that Tom Warton was the only man of genius he ever knew
who wanted a heart."
Goldsmith, too, belonged to the conservative party, though Mr. Perry[12]
detects romantic touches in "The Deserted Village," such as the line,
"Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe,"
or
"On Torno's cliffs or Pambamarca's side."
In his "Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning" (1759)
Goldsmith pronounces the age one of literary decay; he deplores the vogue
of blank verse--which he calls an "erroneous innovation"--and the
"disgusting solemnity of manner" that it has brought into fashion. He
complains of the revival of old plays upon the stage. "Old pieces are
revived, and scarcely any new ones admitted. . . The public are again
obliged to ruminate over those ashes of absurdity which were disgusting
to our ancestors even in an age of ignorance. . . What must be done?
Only sit down contented, cry up all that comes before us and advance even
the absurdities of Shakspere. Let the reader suspend his censure; I
admire the beauties of this great father of our stage as much as they
deserve, but could wish, for the honor of our country, and for his own
too, that many of his scenes were forgotten. A man blind of one eye
should always be painted in profile. Let the spectator who assists at
any of these new revived pieces only ask himself whether he would approve
such a performance, if written by a modern poet. I fear he will find
that much of his applause proceeds merely from the sound of a name and an
empty veneration for antiquity. In fact, the revival of those _pieces of
forced humor, far-fetched conceit and unnatural hyperbole which have been
ascribed to Shakspere_, is rather gibbeting than raising a statue to his
memory."
The words that I have italicized make it evident that what Goldsmith was
really finding fault with was the restoration of the original text of
Shakspere's plays, in place of the garbled versions that had hitherto
been acted. This restoration was largely due to Garrick, but Goldsmith's
language implies that the reform was demanded by public opinion and by
the increasing "veneration for antiquity." The next passage shows that
the new school had its _claque_, which rallied to the support of the old
British drama as the French romanticists did, nearly a century later, to
the support of Victor Hugo's _melodrames_.[13]
"What strange vamped comedies, farcical tragedies, or what shall I call
them--speaking pantomimes have we not of late seen?. . . The piece
pleases our critics because it talks Old English; and it pleases the
galleries because it has ribaldry. . . A prologue generally precedes the
piece, to inform us that it was composed by Shakspere or old Ben, or
somebody else who took them for his model. A face of iron could not have
the assurance to avow dislike; the theater has its partisans who
understand the force of combinations trained up to vociferation, clapping
of hands and clattering of sticks; and though a man might have strength
sufficient to overcome a lion in single combat, he may run the risk of
being devoured by an army of ants."
Goldsmith returned to the charge in "The Vicar of Wakefield" (1766),
where Dr. Primrose, inquiring of the two London dames, "who were the
present theatrical writers in vogue, who were the Drydens and Otways of
the day," is surprised to learn that Dryden and Rowe are quite out of
fashion, that taste has gone back a whole century, and that "Fletcher,
Ben Jonson and all the plays of Shakspere are the only things that go
down." "How," cries the good vicar, "is it possible the present age can
be pleased with that antiquated dialect, that obsolete humor, those
overcharged characters which abound in the works you mention?"
Goldsmith's disgust with this affectation finds further vent in his "Life
of Parnell" (1770). "He [Parnell] appears to me to be the last of that
great school that had modeled itself upon the ancients, and taught
English poetry to resemble what the generality of mankind have allowed to
excel. . . His productions bear no resemblance to those tawdry things
which it has, for some time, been the fashion to admire. . . His
poetical language is not less correct than his subjects are pleasing. He
found it at that period in which it was brought to its highest pitch of
refinement; and ever since his time, it has been gradually debasing. It
is, indeed, amazing, after what has been done by Dryden, Addison, and
Pope, to improve and harmonize our native tongue, that their successors
should have taken so much pains to involve it into pristine barbarity.
These misguided innovators have not been content with restoring
antiquated words and phrases, but have indulged themselves in the most
licentious transpositions and the harshest constructions; vainly
imagining that, the more their writings are unlike prose, the more they
resemble poetry. They have adopted a language of their own, and call
upon mankind for admiration. All those who do not understand them are
silent; and those who make out their meaning are willing to praise, to
show they understand." This last sentence is a hit at the alleged
obscurity of Gray's and Mason's odes.
To illustrate the growth of a retrospective habit in literature Mr.
Perry[14] quotes at length from an essay "On the Prevailing Taste for the
Old English Poets," by Vicesimus Knox, sometimes master of Tunbridge
school, editor of "Elegant Extracts" and honorary doctor of the
University of Pennsylvania. Knox's essays were written while he was an
Oxford undergraduate, and published collectively in 1777. By this time
the romantic movement was in full swing. "The Castle of Otranto" and
Percy's "Reliques" had been out more than ten years; many of the Rowley
poems were in print; and in this very year, Tyrwhitt issued a complete
edition of them, and Warton published the second volume of his "History
of English Poetry." Chatterton and Percy are both mentioned by Knox.
"The antiquarian spirit," he writes, "which was once confined to
inquiries concerning the manners, the buildings, the records, and the
coins of the ages that preceded us, has now extended itself to those
poetical compositions which were popular among our forefathers, but which
have gradually sunk into oblivion through the decay of language and the
prevalence of a correct and polished taste. Books printed in the black
letter are sought for with the same avidity with which the English
antiquary peruses a monumental inscription, or treasures up a Saxon piece
of money. The popular ballad, composed by some illiterate minstrel, and
which has been handed down by tradition for several centuries, is rescued
from the hands of the vulgar, to obtain a place in the collection of the
man of taste. Verses which, a few years past, were thought worthy the
attention of children only, or of the lowest and rudest orders, are now
admired for that artless simplicity which once obtained the name of
coarseness and vulgarity." Early English poetry, continues the essayist,
"has had its day, and the antiquary must not despise us if we cannot
peruse it with patience. He who delights in all such reading as is never
read, may derive some pleasure from the singularity of his taste, but he
ought still to respect the judgment of mankind, which has consigned to
oblivion the works which he admires. While he pores unmolested on
Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve, let him not censure our obstinacy
in adhering to Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Pope. . . Notwithstanding the
incontrovertible merit of many of our ancient relics of poetry, I believe
it may be doubted whether any one of them would be tolerated as the
production of a modern poet. As a good imitation of the ancient manner,
it would find its admirers; but, considered independently, as an
original, it would be thought a careless, vulgar, inartificial
composition. There are few who do not read Dr. Percy's own pieces, and
those of other late writers, with more pleasure than the oldest ballad in
the collection of that ingenious writer." Mr. Percy quotes another paper
of Knox in which he divides the admirers of English poetry into two
parties: "On one side are the lovers and imitators of Spenser and Milton;
and on the other, those of Dryden, Boileau, and Pope"; in modern phrase,
the romanticists and the classicists.
Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope" was an attempt to fix its subject's rank
among English poets. Following the discursive method of Thomas Warton's
"Observations on the Faerie Queen," it was likewise an elaborate
commentary on all of Pope's poems _seriatim_. Every point was
illustrated with abundant learning, and there were digressions amounting
to independent essays on collateral topics: one, _e.g._, on Chaucer, one
on early French Metrical romances; another on Gothic architecture:
another on the new school of landscape gardening, in which Walpole's
essay and Mason's poem are quoted with approval, and mention is made of
the Leasowes. The book was dedicated to Young; and when the second
volume was published in 1782, the first was reissued in a revised form
and introduced by a letter to the author from Tyrwhitt, who writes that,
under the shelter of Warton's authority, "one may perhaps venture to avow
an opinion that poetry is not confined to rhyming couplets, and that its
greatest powers are not displayed in prologues and epilogues."
The modern reader will be apt to think Warton's estimate of Pope quite
high enough. He places him, to be sure, in the second rank of poets,
below Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, yet next to Milton and above
Dryden; and he calls the reign of Queen Anne the great age of English
poetry. Yet if it be recollected that the essay was published only
twelve years after Pope's death, and at a time when he was still commonly
held to be, if not the greatest poet, at least the greatest artist in
verse, that England had ever produced, it will be seen that Warton's
opinions might well be thought revolutionary, and his challenge to the
critics a bold one. These opinions can be best exhibited by quoting a
few passages from his book, not consecutive, but taken here and there as
best suits the purpose.
"The sublime and the pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine
poesy. What is there transcendently sublime or pathetic in Pope?. . .
He early left the more poetical provinces of his art, to become a moral,
didactic, and satiric poet. . . And because I am, perhaps, unwilling to
speak out in plain English, I will adopt the following passage of
Voltaire, which, in my opinion, as exactly characteristizes Pope as it
does his model, Boileau, for whom it was originally designed. 'Incapable
peut-être du sublime qui élève l'áme, et du sentiment qui l'attendrit,
mais fait pour éclairer ceux à qui la nature accorda l'un et l'autre;
laborieux, sévère, précis, pur, harmonieux, il devint enfin le poëte de
la Raison.'. . . A clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient
alone to make a poet; the most solid observations on human life,
expressed with the utmost elegance and brevity, are morality and not
poetry. . . It is a creative and glowing imagination, _acer spiritus ac
vis_, and that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted and very
uncommon character."
Warton believes that Pope's projected epic on Brutus, the legendary found
of Britain, "would have more resembled the 'Henriade' than the 'Iliad,'
or even the 'Gierusalemme Liberata'; that it would have appeared (if this
scheme had been executed) how much, and for what reasons, the man that is
skillful in painting modern life, and the most secret foibles and follies
of his contemporaries, is, THEREFORE, disqualified for representing the
ages of heroism, and that simple life which alone epic poetry can
gracefully describe. . . Wit and satire are transitory and perishable,
but nature and passion are eternal." The largest portion of Pope's work,
says the author's closing summary, "is of the didactic, moral, and
satiric kind; and consequently not of the most poetic species of poetry;
when it is manifest that good sense and judgment were his
characteristical excellencies, rather than fancy and invention. . . He
stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are
familiar, uniform, artificial, and polished, are in their very nature,
unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. He gradually became one of the
most correct, even, and exact poets that ever wrote. . . Whatever
poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed, he withheld and stifled. The
perusal of him affects not our minds with such strong emotions as we feel
from Homer and Milton; so that no man of a true poetical spirit is master
of himself while he reads them. . . He who would think the 'Faerie
Queene,' 'Palamon and Arcite,' the 'Tempest' or 'Comus,' childish and
romantic might relish Pope. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly
encomium to say, he is the great poet of Reason, the first of ethical
authors in verse."
To illustrate Pope's inferiority in the poetry of nature and passion,
Warton quotes freely by way of contrast, not only from Spenser and
Milton, but from such contemporaries of his own as Thomson, Akenside,
Gray, Collins, Dyer, Mason, West, Shenstone, and Bedingfield. He
complains that Pope's "Pastorals" contains no new image of nature, and
his "Windsor Forest" no local color; while "the scenes of Thomson are
frequently as wild and romantic as those of Salvator Rosa, varied with
precipices and torrents and 'castled cliffs' and deep valleys, with piny
mountains and the gloomiest caverns." "When Gray published his exquisite
ode on Eton College . . . little notice was taken of it; but I suppose no
critic can be found that will not place it far above Pope's 'Pastorals.'"
A few additional passages will serve to show that this critic's literary
principles, in general, were consciously and polemically romantic. Thus
he pleads for the _mot précis_--that shibboleth of the nineteenth-century
romanticists--for "_natural, little_ circumstances" against "those who
are fond of _generalities_"; for the "lively painting of Spenser and
Shakspere," as contrasted with the lack of picturesqueness and imagery in
Voltaire's "Henriade." He praises "the fashion that has lately obtained,
in all the nations of Europe, of republishing and illustrating their old
poets."[15] Again, commenting upon Pope's well-known triplet,
"Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full-resounding line,
The long majestic march and energy divine!"
he exclaims: "What! Did Milton contribute nothing to the harmony and
extent of our language?. . . Surely his verses vary and resound as much,
and display as much majesty and energy, as any that can be found in
Dryden. And we will venture to say that he that studies Milton
attentively, will gain a truer taste for genuine poetry than he that
forms himself on French writers and their followers." Elsewhere he
expresses a preference for blank verse over rhyme, in long poems on
subjects of a dignified kind.[16]
"It is perpetually the nauseous cant of the French critics, and of their
advocates and pupils, that the English writers are generally incorrect.
If correctness implies an absence of petty faults, this perhaps may be
granted; if it means that, because their tragedians have avoided the
irregularities of Shakspere, and have observed a juster economy in their
fables, therefore the 'Athalia,' for instance, is preferable to 'Lear,'
the notion is groundless and absurd. Though the 'Henriade' should be
allowed to be free from any very gross absurdities, yet who will dare to
rank it with the 'Paradise Lost'?. . . In our own country the rules of
the drama were never more completely understood than at present; yet what
uninteresting, though faultless, tragedies have we lately seen!. . .
Whether or no the natural powers be not confined and debilitated by that
timidity and caution which is occasioned by a rigid regard to the
dictates of art; or whether that philosophical, that geometrical and
systematical spirit so much in vogue, which has spread itself from the
sciences even into polite literature, by consulting only reason, has not
diminished and destroyed sentiment, and made our poets write from and to
the head rather than the heart; or whether, lastly, when just models,
from which the rules have necessarily been drawn, have once appeared,
succeeding writers, by vainly and ambitiously striving to surpass
those . . . do not become stiff and forced." One of these uninteresting,
though faultless tragedies was "Cato," which Warton pronounces a
"sententious and declamatory drama" filled with "pompous Roman
sentiments," but wanting action and pathos. He censures the tameness of
Addison's "Letter from Italy."[17] "With what flatness and unfeelingness
has he spoken of statuary and painting! Raphael never received a more
phlegmatic eulogy." He refers on the other hand to Gray's account of his
journey to the Grande Chartreuse,[18] as worthy of comparison with one of
the finest passages in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard."
This mention of Addison recalls a very instructive letter of Gray on the
subject of poetic style.[19] The romanticists loved a rich diction, and
the passage might be taken as an anticipatory defense of himself against
Wordsworth's strictures in the preface to the "Lyrical Ballads." "The
language of the age," wrote Gray, "is never the language of poetry,
except among the French, whose verse . . . differs in nothing from prose.
Our poetry has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost everyone
that has written has added something, by enriching it with foreign idioms
and derivatives; nay, sometimes words of their own composition or
invention. Shakspere and Milton have been great creators in this
way . . . our language has an undoubted right to words of an hundred
years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them unintelligible. In
truth Shakspere's language is one of his principal beauties; and he has
no less advantage over your Addisons and Rowes in this, than in those
other great excellencies you mention. Every word in him is a picture."
He then quotes a passage from "Richard III.," and continues, "Pray put me
the following lines into the tongue of our modern dramatics. To me they
appear untranslatable, and if this be the case, our language is greatly
degenerated."
Warton further protests against the view which ascribed the introduction
of true taste in literature to the French. "Shakspere and Milton
imitated the Italians and not the French." He recommends also the
reintroduction of the preternatural into poetry. There are some, he
says, who think that poetry has suffered by becoming too rational,
deserting fairyland, and laying aside "descriptions of magic and
enchantment," and he quotes, _à propos_ of this the famous stanza about
the Hebrides in "The Castle of Indolence."[20] The false refinement of
the French has made them incapable of enjoying "the terrible graces of
our irregular Shakspere, especially in his scenes of magic and
incantations. These _Gothic_ charms are in truth more striking to the
imagination than the classical. The magicians of Ariosto, Tasso, and
Spenser have more powerful spells than those of Apollonius, Seneca, and
Lucan. The enchanted forest of Ismeni is more awfully and tremendously
poetical than even the grove which Caesar orders to be cut down in Lucan
(i. iii. 400), which was so full of terrors that, at noonday or midnight,
the priest himself dared not approach it--
"'Dreading the demon of the grove to meet.'
"Who that sees the sable plumes waving on the prodigious helmet in the
Castle of Otranto, and the gigantic arm on the top of the great
staircase, is not more affected than with the paintings of Ovid and
Apuleius? What a group of dreadful images do we meet with in the Edda!
The Runic poetry abounds in them. Such is Gray's thrilling Ode on the
'Descent of Odin.'"
Warton predicts that Pope's fame as a poet will ultimately rest on his
"Windsor Forest," his "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard," and "The Rape of
the Lock." To this prophecy time has already, in part, given the lie.
Warton preferred "Windsor Forest" and "Eloisa" to the "Moral Essays"
because they belonged to a higher kind of poetry. Posterity likes the
"Moral Essays" better because they are better of their kind. They were
the natural fruit of Pope's genius and of his time, while the others were
artificial. We can go to Wordsworth for nature, to Byron for passion,
and to a score of poets for both, but Pope remains unrivaled in his
peculiar field. In other words, we value what is characteristic in the
artist; the one thing which he does best, the precise thing which he can
do and no one else can. But Warton's mistake is significant of the
changing literary standards of his age; and his essay is one proof out of
many that the English romantic movement was not entirely without
self-conscious aims, but had its critical formulas and its programme,
just as Queen Anne classicism had.
[1] Dr. Johnson had his laugh at this popular person:
"'Hermit hoar, in solemn cell
Wearing out life's evening gray,
Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell
What is bliss, and which the way?'
"Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed,
Scarce suppressed the starting tear:
When the hoary sage replied,
'_Come, my lad, and drink some beer._'"
[2] "Grose's Antiquities of Scotland" was published in 1791, and Burns
wrote "Tam o'Shanter" to accompany the picture of Kirk Alloway in this
work. See his poem, "On the late Captain Grose's Peregrinations through
Scotland."
[3] "Ragnarök," or "Götterdämmerung," the twilight of the Gods
[4] For a full discussion of Gray's sources and of his knowledge of Old
Norse, the reader should consult the appendix by Professor G. L.
Kittredge to Professor W. L. Phelps' "Selections from Gray" (1894, pp.
xl-1.) Professor Kittredge concludes that Gray had but a slight
knowledge of Norse, that he followed the Latin of Bartholin in his
renderings; and that he probably also made use of such authorities as
Torfaeus' "Orcades" (1697), Ole Worm's "Literatura Runica" (Copenhagen,
1636), Dr. George Hickes' monumental "Thesaurus" (Oxford, 1705), and
Robert Sheringham's "De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio" (1716).
Dryden's "Miscellany Poems" (1716) has a verse translation, "The Waking
of Angantyr," from the English prose of Hickes, of a portion of the
"Hervarar Saga." Professor Kittredge refers to Sir William Temple's
essays "Of Poetry" and "Of Heroic Virtue." "Nichols' Anecdotes" (I. 116)
mentions, as published in 1715, "The Rudiments of Grammar for the English
Saxon Tongue; with an Apology for the study of Northern Antiquities."
This was by Mrs. Elizabeth Elstob, and was addressed to Hickes, the
compiler of the "Thesaurus."
[5] "Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards, translated
into English," by Rev. Evan Evans, 1764. The specimens were ten in
number. The translations were in English prose. The originals were
printed from a copy which Davies, the author of the Welsh dictionary, had
made of an ancient vellum MS. thought to be of the time of Edward II,
Edward III, and Henry V. The book included a Latin "Dissertatio de
Bardis," together with notes, appendices, etc. The preface makes mention
of Macpherson's recently published Ossianic poems.
[6] "Life of Gray."
[7] See Phelps' "English Romantic Movement," pp. 73, 141-42.
[8] Wm Dugdale published his "Monasticon Anglicanum," a history of English
religious houses, in three parts, in 1655-62-73. It was accompanied with
illustrations of the costumes worn by the ancient religious orders, and
with architectural views. The latter, says Eastlake, were rude and
unsatisfactory, but interesting to modern students, as "preserving
representations of buildings, or portions of buildings, no longer in
existence; as, for instance, the _campanile_, or detached belfry of
Salisbury, since removed, and the spire of Lincoln, destroyed in 1547."
[9] "Verses on Sir Joshua Reynolds' Painted Window." _Cf._ Poe, "To
Helen":
"On desperate seas long wont to roam
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome."
[10] This apology should be compared with Scott's verse epistle to Wm
Ereskine, prefixed to the third canto of "Marmion."
"For me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask
The classic poet's well-conned task?" etc.
Scott spoke of himself in Warton's exact language, as a "truant to the
classic page."
[11] See _ante_, pp. 99-101_._
[12] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 397.
[13] Lowell mentions the publication of Dodsley's "Old Plays," (1744) as,
like Percy's "Reliques," a symptom of the return of the past. Essay on
"Gray."
[14] "Eighteenth Century Literature," pp. 401-03.
[15] It is curious, however, to find Warton describing Villon as "a pert
and insipid ballad-monger, whose thoughts and diction were as low and
illiberal as his life," Vol. II. p. 338 (Fifth Edition, 1806).
[16] Warton quotes the follow bathetic opening of a "Poem in Praise of
Blank Verse" by Aaron Hill, "one of the very first persons who took
notice of Thomson, on the publication of 'Winter'":
"Up from Rhyme's poppied vale! And ride the storm
That thunders in blank verse!"
--Vol. II. p. 186.
[17] See _ante_, p. 57.
[18] See _ante_, p. 181.
[19] To Richard West, April, 1742.
[20] See _ante_, p. 94.