Some Diversions of a Man of Letters. Edmund Gosse
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