Throughout the eighteenth century, despite the dominance of Pope and his followers, and the poetry of the Town; despite the sturdy resistance of Johnson; despite Goldsmith's complaints against Odes and "anapests" and "blank verse" and "happy negligence," there were streams of tendency making for literary freedom. Addison had lovingly praised both the blank verse of Milton, and the purely popular art of the ancient ballads. Men were beginning to look back with personal interest at antiquity; not only at Spenser, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, but at all the art and poetry of times past. As early as 1706-1711 Watson's "Choice Collection" of old Scottish poems was published: and Allan Ramsay gave old things mixed with new in his "Evergreen," and "Tea Table Miscellany" between 1724 and 1727; others appeared in d'Urfey's "Pills to Purge Melancholy" (1719), others in "Old Ballads" (1723).
We have seen the antiquarianism of Gray, in his translations from the Norse, and his interest in Macpherson's so-called "Ossian" (1760-1763). Though there was no written Highland epic in existence, there were, and are, "Ossianic ballads" in Gaelic, late popular survivals of Irish poetry. Working in his own way on these, and on prose legends, apparently, Macpherson led men's fancies back to the racing "sounds" of the north; back to the Highland beliefs that had already fascinated Collins; and emancipated poetry from the chatter of the coffee-house and the tavern. The charlatanism of Macpherson disgusted Johnson; any one could write Ossianisms, he said, who abandoned his mind to it, but Macpherson, at least, pleased thousands, including so enthusiastic a student of Homer as Napoleon Bonaparte, and stimulated Gaelic researches.
In 1765 the publication of an old and famous manuscript folio by Bishop Percy ("The Reliques") not only gave a new and popular source of pleasure in ballads and old relics, but caused a noisy controversy, which, again, led to close research. Percy "restored," altered, added to, and omitted from his materials as taste and fancy prompted; arousing the wrath of the crabbed antiquary, Joseph Ritson, who denied that the manuscript folio existed. Had Percy published it as it stood (which Furnivall and Hales at last succeeded in doing) the book would have been unread except by a few antiquaries. Arranged by Percy, the ballads became truly popular. They were followed, from 1774, by Thomas Warton's "History of English Poetry," the work of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (1757-1767) who, in a lazy University, was a serious student.
Nothing is more ruinous to literature than ignorance, excitedly absorbed in the momentary present. In the manner briefly described, men's minds became awake to the merits of the English literature of many remote ages, and even to the interest of chivalry and chivalrous romance, to the beauty of all art that had been discredited as "Gothic" and "barbarous".
Horace Walpole.
A man who, if in an amateur and dandified way, assisted the advance in literature, was the son of the famous and far from literary Whig Minister of George I. and George II., Sir Robert Walpole. Born at the end of September, 1717, Horace Walpole went to Eton in 1727, where he won the friendship of Gray and prided himself on avoiding cricket and fights with bargees. For Conway (Marshal Conway) and George Selwyn, famous later as an eccentric wit, he had a life-long affection. From Eton, Walpole went to King's College, Cambridge, where he studied French, Italian, and painting, being congenitally incapable of the mathematics, like Tennyson and Macaulay. His letters were already witty and amusing. He began his tour with Gray in 1739, and, at Rome, was "far gone in medals, lamps, idols, prints, etc. ... I would buy the Coliseum if I could". Though he wrote fleeringly of his own tastes, he was, in fact, far in advance of his age in appreciation of the best old art, whether of classical Greece and Rome or of the early Italians. To collect, to study society, to write his famous correspondence with Horace Mann and many others—an informal social, political, and literary history of his time,—was the business of Walpole's long life. He gave himself dandified airs; he knew that he was not in the strict sense a scholar, but he had an eagerly inquiring mind, and we owe more to him than to Mr. Pepys. He practically began neo-Gothic architecture—with all its faults he meant well,—by the building of his Villa, Strawberry Hill, and "in a concatenation accordingly" wrote the earliest pseudo-historic novel of supernatural terror, "The Castle of Otranto" (1764). Like stories of R. L. Stevenson, and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," the tale is based on a dream. The author found himself in a Gothic castle, and "on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour". The rest, with its odd horrors and comic interludes of the servants, Walpole wrote without plan: making his characters natural, not "heroic," his events as much "supernatural" as he could.
From this fantasy came the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe (whose habit of explaining the supernatural away Walpole derided), and, from Mrs. Radcliffe, in part, came the impulse of Scott, and the moody heroes of Byron. From the mustard seed of "Otranto" grew "a tree with birds in all its boughs".
Walpole's play "The Mysterious Mother," was even morbidly romantic in conception (1768). His "Historic Doubts" on Richard III. show a new spirit of historic scepticism, and a desire to trace accepted historical ideas to their ultimate sources of evidence. Such minute inquiry was not common, when Hume and Smollett were our historians. Walpole, who had succeeded to the Earldom of Orford, died on 2 March, 1797.
His "Anecdotes of Painting" and "Royal and Noble Authors" are all they aimed at being; his Letters, in extent, observation, inner knowledge of society, and wit, have no rivals in English, but his real position in literature and taste is that of a pioneer. The true, the essential Horace was very unlike Macaulay's splenetic portrait of him, and did not deserve Thackeray's nickname "Horace Waddlepoodle".
Under his many affectations he was a true friend and a good patriot, a delightful wit and an agency in the advance of literature and taste. Between him and Dr. Johnson, of course, there was a gulf that neither man dreamed of trying to cross.