can find, of course, plenty of errors and shortcomings in the essays on the Minstrels and the Ancient Drama, the metre of Piers Plowman, and the Romances; and they are all unnecessarily adulterated with theories and fancies about origin, &c. But this last adulteration has scarcely ceased to be a favourite
“form of competition” among critics; while I am bound to say that the literary sense which is so active and pervading in Percy seems to have deserted our modern philologists only too frequently.
At any rate, whatever may be his errors and whatever his shortcomings, the enormous, the incalculable stimulus and reagency of the Reliques is not now matter of dispute; while it is equally undeniable that the poetical material supplied was reinforced by a method of historical and critical inquiry which, again with all faults, could not fail to have effects almost equally momentous on criticism if not quite so momentous on creation.
The Wartons.
The two Wartons and Hurd gave still more powerful assistance in this latter department, while Thomas Warton at least supplied a great deal of fresh actual material in his History. To none of the three has full justice, as it seems to me, been recently done; while to one of them it seems to me that there has been done very great injustice. The main documents which we have to consider in the case of the two brothers are for Joseph, his Essay on Pope (1756-71), and the numerous critical papers in The Adventurer; for Thomas, the Observations on The Faerie Queene (1754), and of course The History of English Poetry (1774-81).
Joseph’s Essay on Pope.
Warton’s Essay on Pope[[117]]—vaguely famous as a daring act of iconoclasm, and really important as a document in the Romantic Revolt—almost literally anticipates the jest of a hundred years later on another document, about “chalking up ‘No Popery!’ and then running away.” It also shows the uncertainty of stand-point which is quite pardonable and indeed inevitable in these early reformers. To us it is exceedingly unlucky that Warton should at page ii. of his Preface ask, “What traces has Donne of pure poetry?” Yet when we come immediately afterwards to the (for the time) bold and very nearly true statement that Boileau is no more poetical than La Bruyère, we see that Warton was thinking only of the satirist, not of the author of The Anniversaries and the “Bracelet” poems.
Further, Warton lays down, sans phrase and with no Addisonian limitations, that “a poet must have imagination.” He is sure (we may feel a little more doubtful) that Young, his dedicatee, would not insist on being called a poet on the strength of his own Satires. And he works himself up to the position that in Pope there is nothing transcendently sublime or pathetic, supporting this by a very curious and for its time instructive division of English poets into four classes. The first contains poets of the first rank on the sublime-pathetic-imaginative standard, and is limited to three—Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. The second company—headed by Dryden, but including, not a little to our surprise, Fenton—has less of this poetic intensity, but some, and excels in rhetorical and didactic vigour. The third is reserved for those—Butler, Swift, Donne, Dorset, &c.—who, with little poetry, have abundant wit; and the fourth “gulfs” the mere versifiers, among whom we grieve to find Sandys and even Fairfax herded with Pitt and Broome.