"'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.