A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 17

"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 p.r.o.nounces 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 a.s.sists 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.surance 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 coa.r.s.eness 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 cla.s.sicists.

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 ill.u.s.trated 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage of Voltaire, which, in my opinion, as exactly characteristizes Pope as it does his model, Boileau, for whom it was originally designed. 'Incapable peut-etre du sublime qui eleve l'ame, et du sentiment qui l'attendrit, mais fait pour eclairer ceux a qui la nature accorda l'un et l'autre; laborieux, severe, precis, pur, harmonieux, il devint enfin le poete 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 pa.s.sion 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 n.i.g.g.ardly encomium to say, he is the great poet of Reason, the first of ethical authors in verse."

To ill.u.s.trate Pope's inferiority in the poetry of nature and pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sages will serve to show that this critic's literary principles, in general, were consciously and polemically romantic. Thus he pleads for the _mot precis_--that shibboleth of the nineteenth-century romanticists--for "_natural, little_ circ.u.mstances" 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 ill.u.s.trating 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 surpa.s.s those . . . do not become stiff and forced." One of these uninteresting, though faultless tragedies was "Cato," which Warton p.r.o.nounces 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage might be taken as an antic.i.p.atory 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 princ.i.p.al 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 pa.s.sage 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, _a 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 cla.s.sical. The magicians of Ariosto, Ta.s.so, 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 pa.s.sion, 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 cla.s.sicism had.

[1] Dr. Johnson had his laugh at this popular person:

"'Hermit h.o.a.r, 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 h.o.a.ry 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] "Ragnarok," or "Gotterdammerung," the twilight of the G.o.ds

[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 ill.u.s.trations 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 cla.s.sic 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 cla.s.sic poet's well-conned task?" etc.

Scott spoke of himself in Warton's exact language, as a "truant to the cla.s.sic 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."