Two Pioneers Of Romanticism: Joseph And Thomas Warton

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Title:     Two Pioneers Of Romanticism: Joseph And Thomas Warton
Author: Edmund Gosse [More Titles by Gosse]

The origins of the Romantic Movement in literature have been examined so closely and so often that it might be supposed that the subject must be by this time exhausted. But no subject of any importance in literature is ever exhausted, because the products of literature grow or decay, burgeon or wither, as the generations of men apply their ever-varying organs of perception to them. I intend, with your permission, to present to you a familiar phase of the literary life of the eighteenth century from a fresh point of view, and in relation to two men whose surname warrants a peculiar emphasis of respect in the mouth of a Warton Lecturer. It is well, perhaps, to indicate exactly what it is which a lecturer proposes to himself to achieve during the brief hour in which you indulge him with your attention; it certainly makes his task the easier if he does so. I propose, therefore, to endeavour to divine for you, by scanty signs and indications, what it was in poetry, as it existed up to the period of their childhood, which was stimulating to the Wartons, and what they disapproved of in the verse which was fashionable and popular among the best readers in their day.

There is an advantage, which I think that our critics are apt to 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 poétique 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 æsthetic 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 Mæonian 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 æsthetically, 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 æolian 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 René, 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 Mallarmé 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'Aubigné, 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):--

"His wattled cotes the shepherd plaits;
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 soothèd 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 mediæval 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 Abbé Du Bos had laid down in his celebrated Réflexions (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.

[The end]
Edmund Gosse's essay: Two Pioneers Of Romanticism: Joseph And Thomas Warton

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