A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 6

It remains to notice one more doc.u.ment in the history of this Spenserian revival, Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faerie Queen," 1754.

Warton wrote with a genuine delight in his subject. His tastes were frankly romantic. But the apologetic air which antiquarian scholars a.s.sumed, when venturing to recommend their favorite studies to the attention of a cla.s.sically minded public, is not absent from Warton's commentary. He writes as if he felt the pressure of an unsympathetic atmosphere all about him. "We who live in the days of writing by rule are apt to try every composition by those laws which we have been taught to think the sole criterion of excellence. Critical taste is universally diffused, and we require the same order and design which every modern performance is expected to have, in poems where they never were regarded or intended. . . If there be any poem whose graces please because they are situated beyond the reach of art[37] . . . it is this. In reading Spenser, if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported."

"In a.n.a.lyzing the plan and conduct of this poem, I have so far tried it by epic rules, as to demonstrate the inconveniences and incongruities which the poet might have avoided, had he been more studious of design and uniformity. It is true that his romantic materials claim great liberties; but no materials exclude order and perspicacity." Warton a.s.sures the reader that Spenser's language is not "so difficult and obsolete as it is generally supposed to be;" and defends him against Hume's censure,[38] that "Homer copied true natural manners . . . but the pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations and conceits and fopperies of chivalry."

Yet he began his commentary with the stock denunciations of "Gothic ignorance and barbarity." "At the renaissance it might have been expected that, instead of the romantic manner of poetical composition . . . a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have succeeded. . . But it was a long time before such a change was effected.

We find Ariosto, many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth for magic, and preferring the ridiculous and incoherent excursions of Boiardo to the propriety and uniformity of the Grecian and Roman models.

Nor did the restoration of ancient learning produce any effectual or immediate improvement in the state of criticism. Beni, one of the most celebrated critics of the sixteenth century, was still so infatuated with a fondness for the old Provencal vein, that he ventured to write a regular dissertation, in which he compares Ariosto with Homer." Warton says again, of Ariosto and the Italian renaissance poets whom Spenser followed, "I have found no fault in general with their use of magical machinery; notwithstanding I have so far conformed to the reigning maxims of modern criticism as to recommend cla.s.sical propriety."

Notwithstanding this prudent determination to conform, the author takes heart in his second volume to speak out as follows about the pseudo-cla.s.sic poetry of his own age: "A poetry succeeded in which imagination gave way to correctness, sublimity of description to delicacy of sentiment, and majestic imagery to conceit and epigram. Poets began now to be more attentive to words than to things and objects. The nicer beauties of happy expression were preferred to the daring strokes of great conception. Satire, that bane of the sublime, was imported from France. The muses were debauched at court; and polite life and familiar manners became their only themes."

By the time these words were written Spenser had done his work. Color, music, fragrance were stealing back again into English song, and "golden-tongued romance with serene lute" stood at the door of the new age, waiting for it to open.

[1] A small portion of "The Canterbury Tales." Edited by Morell.

[2] The sixteenth [_sic. Quaere_, seventeenth?] century had an instinctive repugnance for the crude literature of the Middle Ages, the product of so strange and incoherent a civilization. Here cla.s.sicism finds nothing but grossness and barbarism, never suspecting that it might contain germs, which, with time and genius, might develop into a poetical growth, doubtless less pure, but certainly more complex in its harmonies, and of a more expressive form of beauty. The history of our ancient poetry, traced in a few lines by Boileau, clearly shows to what degree he either ignored or misrepresented it. The singular, confused architecture of Gothic cathedrals gave those who saw beauty in symmetry of line and purity of form but further evidence of the clumsiness and perverted taste of our ancestors. All remembrances of the great poetic works of the Middle Ages is completely effaced. No one supposes in those barbarous times the existence of ages cla.s.sical also in their way; no one imagines either their heroic songs or romances of adventure, either the rich bounty of lyrical styles or the nave, touching crudity of the Christian drama. The seventeenth century turned disdainfully away from the monuments of national genius discovered by it; finding them sometimes shocking in their rudeness, sometimes puerile in their refinements.

These unfortunate exhumations, indeed, only serve to strengthen its cult for a simple, correct beauty, the models of which are found in Greece and Rome. Why dream of penetrating the darkness of our origin? Contemporary society is far too self-satisfied to seek distraction in the study of a past which it does not comprehend. The subjects and heroes of domestic history are also prohibited. Corneille is Latin, Racine is Greek; the very name of Childebrande suffices to cover an epopee with ridicule.--_Pellissier_, pp. 7-8.

[3] "Epistle to Augustus."

[4] "Epistle of Augustus."

[5] _I.e._, learning.

[6] "Life of Dryden."

[7] "Epistle to Augustus."

[8] The tradition as to Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton is almost equally continuous. A course of what Lowell calls "penitential reading," in Restoration criticism, will convince anyone that these four names already stood out distinctly, as those of the four greatest English poets. See especially Winstanley, "Lives of the English Poets," 1687; Langbaine, "An Account of the English Dramatic Poets," 1691; Dennis, "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712; Gildon, "The Complete Art of Poetry," 1718. The fact mentioned by Macaulay, that Sir Wm. Temple's "Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning" names none of the four, is without importance. Temple refers by name to only three English "wits," Sidney, Bacon, and Selden. This very superficial performance of Temple's was a contribution to the futile controversy over the relative merits of the ancients and moderns, which is now only of interest as having given occasion to Bentley to display his great scholarship in his "Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris," (1698), and to Swift to show his powers of irony in "The Battle of the Books" (1704).

[9] Preface to the "Plays of Shakspere," 1765.

[10] Prologue, spoken by Garrick at the opening of Drury Lane Theater, 1747.

[11] "The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered and Examined," 1678.

[12] "Shakspere Ill.u.s.trated," 1753.

[13] See Dryden's "Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy" and "Defence of the Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada."

[14] "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712.

[15] "The Art of Poetry," pp. 63 and 99. _Cf_. Pope, "Epistle to Augustus":

"Shakspere (whom you and every play-house bill Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight, And grew immortal in his own despite."

[16] Pope's "Shakspere," 1725.

[17] For a fuller discussion of this subject, consult "A History of Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere," in the supplemental volume of Knight's Pictorial Edition. Editions of Shakspere issued within a century following the Restoration were the third Folio, 1664; the fourth Folio, 1685; Rowe's (the first critical edition, with a Life, etc.) 1709 (second edition, 1714); Pope's, 1725 (second edition, 1728); Theobald's, 1733; Hanmer's 1744; Warburton-Pope's, 1747; and Johnson's 1765.

Meanwhile, though Shakspere's plays continued to be acted, it was mostly in doctored versions. Tate changed "Lear" to a comedy. Davenant and Dryden made over "The Tempest" into "The Enchanted Island," turning blank verse into rhyme and introducing new characters, while Shadwell altered it into an opera. Dryden rewrote "Troilus and Cressida"; Davenant, "Macbeth." Davenant patched together a thing which he called "The Law against Lovers," from "Measure for Measure" and "Much Ado about Nothing."

Dennis remodeled the "Merry Wives of Windsor" as "The Comical Gallant"; Tate, "Richard II." as "The Sicilian Usurper"; and Otway, "Romeo and Juliet," as "Caius Marius." Lord Lansdowne converted "The Merchant of Venice" into "The Jew of Venice," wherein Shylock was played as a comic character down to the time of Macklin and Kean. Durfey tinkered "Cymbeline." Cibber metamorphosed "King John" into "Papal Tyranny," and his version was acted till Macready's time. Cibber's stage version of "Richard III." is played still. c.u.mberland "engrafted" new features upon "Timon of Athens" for Garrick's theater, about 1775. In his life of Mrs.

Siddons, Campbell says that "Coriola.n.u.s" "was never acted genuinely from the year 1660 till the year 1820" (Phillimore's "Life of Lyttelton," Vol.

I. p. 315). He mentions a revision by Tate, another by Dennis ("The Invader of his Country"), and a third brought out by the elder Sheridan in 1764, at Covent Garden, and put together from Shakspere's tragedy and an independent play of the same name by Thomson. "Then in 1789 came the Kemble edition in which . . . much of Thomson's absurdity is still preserved."

[18] "Faerie Queene," II. xii. 71

[19] "Essay on Satire." Philips says a good word for the Spenserian stanza: "How much more stately and majestic in epic poems, especially of heroic argument, Spenser's stanza . . . is above the way either of couplet or alternation of four verses only, I am persuaded, were it revived, would soon be acknowledged."--_Theatrum Poetatarum_, Preface, pp. 3-4.

[20] "Observations on the Faery Queene," Vol. II. p. 317.

[21] "The Faery Queene," Book I., Oxford, 1869. Introduction, p. xx.

[22] "Canto" ii. stanza i.

"Now had Bootes' team far pa.s.sed behind The northern star, when hours of night declined."

--_Person of Quality_

[23] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 139.

[24] For a full discussion of this subject the reader should consult Phelps' "Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement," chap. iv., "The Spenserian Revival." A partial list of Spenserian imitations is given in Todd's edition of Spenser, Vol. I. But the list in Prof. Phelps'

Appendix, if not exhaustive, is certainly the most complete yet published and may be here reproduced. 1706: Prior: "Ode to the Queen." 1713-21: Prior(?): "Colin's Mistakes." 1713 Croxall: "An Original Canto of Spenser." 1714: Croxall: "Another Original Canto." 1730 (_circa_): Whitehead: "Vision of Solomon," "Ode to the Honorable Charles Townsend,"

"Ode to the Same." 1736: Thompson: "Epithalamium." 1736: Cambridge: "Marriage of Frederick." 1736-37: Boyse: "The Olive," "Psalm XLII."

1737: Akenside: "The Virtuoso." 1739: West: "Abuse of Traveling." 1739: Anon.: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy Queen." 1740: Boyse: "Ode to the Marquis of Tavistock." 1741 (_circa_): Boyse: "Vision of Patience."

1742: Shenstone: "The Schoolmistress." 1742-50: Cambridge: "Archimage."

1742: Dodsley: "Pain and Patience." 1743: Anon.: "Albion's Triumph."

1744 (_circa_): Dodsley: "Death of Mr. Pope." 1744: Akenside: "Ode to Curio." 1746: Blacklock: "Hymn to Divine Love," "Philantheus." 1747: Mason: Stanzas in "Musaeus." 1747: Ridley: "Psyche." 1747: Lowth: "Choice of Hercules." 1747: Upton: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy Queen." 1747: Bedingfield: "Education of Achilles." 1747: Pitt: "The Jordan." 1748: T. Warton, Sr.: "Philander." 1748: Thomson: "The Castle of Indolence." 1749: Potter: "A Farewell Hymn to the Country." 1750: T.

Warton: "Morning." 1751: West: "Education." 1751: T. Warton: "Elegy on the Death of Prince Frederick." 1751: Mendes: "The Seasons," 1751: Lloyd: "Progress of Envy." 1751: Akenside: "Ode." 1751: Smith: "Thales." 1753: T. Warton: "A Pastoral in the Manner of Spenser." 1754: Denton: "Immortality." 1755: Arnold: "The Mirror." 1748-58: Mendez: "Squire of Dames." 1756: Smart: "Hymn to the Supreme Being." 1757: Thompson: "The Nativity," "Hymn to May." 1758: Akenside: "To Country Gentlemen of England." 1759: Wilkie: "A Dream" 1759: Poem in "Ralph's Miscellany." 1762: Denton: "House of Superst.i.tion." 1767: Mickle: "The Concubine." 1768: Downman: "Land of the Muses." 1771-74: Beattie: "The Ministrel." 1775: Anon.: "Land of Liberty." 1775: Mickle: Stanzas from "Introduction to the Lusiad."

[25] See Phelps, pp. 66-68.

[26] See the sumptuous edition of Cambridge's "Works," issued by his son in 1803.

[27] "Mr. Walpole and I have frequently wondered you should never mention a certain imitation of Spenser, published last year by a namesake of yours, with which we are all enraptured and enmarvelled."--_Letter form Gray to Richard West_, Florence, July 16, 1740. There was no relationship between Gilbert West and Gray's Eton friend, though it seems that the former was also an Etonian, and was afterwards at Oxford, "whence he was seduced to a more airy mode of life," says Dr. Johnson, "by a commission in a troop of horse, procured him by his uncle."

Cambridge, however, was an acquaintance of Gray, Walpole, and Richard West, at Eton. Gray's solitary sonnet was composed upon the death of Richard West in 1742; and it is worth noting that the introduction to Cambridge's works are a number of sonnets by his friend Thomas Edwards, himself a Spenser lover, whose "sugared sonnets among his private friends" begin about 1750 and reach the number of fifty.

[28] "Life of West."

[29] Lloyd, in "The Progress of Envy," defines _wimpled_ as "hung down"; and Akenside, in "The Virtuoso," employs the ending _en_ for the singular verb!

[30] Cf. "And as they looked, they found their horror grew."

--Shenstone.

"And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew."

--Goldsmith.

"The noises intermixed, which thence resound, Do learning's little tenement betray."

--Shenstone.

"There in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule." etc.