A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century

by Henry A. Beers

To illustrate Pope's inferiority in the poetry of nature and passion, Warton quotes freely by way of contrast, not only from Spenser and Milton, but from such contemporaries of his own as Thomson, Akenside, Gray, Collins, Dyer, Mason, West, Shenstone, and Bedingfield. He complains that Pope's "Pastorals" contains no new image of nature, and his "Windsor Forest" no local color; while "the scenes of Thomson are frequently as wild and romantic as those of Salvator Rosa, varied with precipices and torrents and 'castled cliffs' and deep valleys, with piny mountains and the gloomiest caverns." "When Gray published his exquisite ode on Eton College . . . little notice was taken of it; but I suppose no critic can be found that will not place it far above Pope's 'Pastorals.'"

A few additional passages will serve to show that this critic's literary principles, in general, were consciously and polemically romantic. Thus he pleads for the mot précis—that shibboleth of the nineteenth-century romanticists—for "natural, little circumstances" against "those who are fond of generalities"; for the "lively painting of Spenser and Shakspere," as contrasted with the lack of picturesqueness and imagery in Voltaire's "Henriade." He praises "the fashion that has lately obtained, in all the nations of Europe, of republishing and illustrating their old poets."[15] Again, commenting upon Pope's well-known triplet,

"Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full-resounding line,
The long majestic march and energy divine!"

he exclaims: "What! Did Milton contribute nothing to the harmony and extent of our language?. . . Surely his verses vary and resound as much, and display as much majesty and energy, as any that can be found in Dryden. And we will venture to say that he that studies Milton attentively, will gain a truer taste for genuine poetry than he that forms himself on French writers and their followers." Elsewhere he expresses a preference for blank verse over rhyme, in long poems on subjects of a dignified kind.[16]

"It is perpetually the nauseous cant of the French critics, and of their advocates and pupils, that the English writers are generally incorrect. If correctness implies an absence of petty faults, this perhaps may be granted; if it means that, because their tragedians have avoided the irregularities of Shakspere, and have observed a juster economy in their fables, therefore the 'Athalia,' for instance, is preferable to 'Lear,' the notion is groundless and absurd. Though the 'Henriade' should be allowed to be free from any very gross absurdities, yet who will dare to rank it with the 'Paradise Lost'?. . . In our own country the rules of the drama were never more completely understood than at present; yet what uninteresting, though faultless, tragedies have we lately seen!. . . Whether or no the natural powers be not confined and debilitated by that timidity and caution which is occasioned by a rigid regard to the dictates of art; or whether that philosophical, that geometrical and systematical spirit so much in vogue, which has spread itself from the sciences even into polite literature, by consulting only reason, has not diminished and destroyed sentiment, and made our poets write from and to the head rather than the heart; or whether, lastly, when just models, from which the rules have necessarily been drawn, have once appeared, succeeding writers, by vainly and ambitiously striving to surpass those . . . do not become stiff and forced." One of these uninteresting, though faultless tragedies was "Cato," which Warton pronounces a "sententious and declamatory drama" filled with "pompous Roman sentiments," but wanting action and pathos. He censures the tameness of Addison's "Letter from Italy."[17] "With what flatness and unfeelingness has he spoken of statuary and painting! Raphael never received a more phlegmatic eulogy." He refers on the other hand to Gray's account of his journey to the Grande Chartreuse,[18] as worthy of comparison with one of the finest passages in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard."

This mention of Addison recalls a very instructive letter of Gray on the subject of poetic style.[19] The romanticists loved a rich diction, and the passage might be taken as an anticipatory defense of himself against Wordsworth's strictures in the preface to the "Lyrical Ballads." "The language of the age," wrote Gray, "is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse . . . differs in nothing from prose. Our poetry has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost everyone that has written has added something, by enriching it with foreign idioms and derivatives; nay, sometimes words of their own composition or invention. Shakspere and Milton have been great creators in this way . . . our language has an undoubted right to words of an hundred years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them unintelligible. In truth Shakspere's language is one of his principal beauties; and he has no less advantage over your Addisons and Rowes in this, than in those other great excellencies you mention. Every word in him is a picture." He then quotes a passage from "Richard III.," and continues, "Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern dramatics. To me they appear untranslatable, and if this be the case, our language is greatly degenerated."

Warton further protests against the view which ascribed the introduction of true taste in literature to the French. "Shakspere and Milton imitated the Italians and not the French." He recommends also the reintroduction of the preternatural into poetry. There are some, he says, who think that poetry has suffered by becoming too rational, deserting fairyland, and laying aside "descriptions of magic and enchantment," and he quotes, à propos of this the famous stanza about the Hebrides in "The Castle of Indolence."[20] The false refinement of the French has made them incapable of enjoying "the terrible graces of our irregular Shakspere, especially in his scenes of magic and incantations. These Gothic charms are in truth more striking to the imagination than the classical. The magicians of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser have more powerful spells than those of Apollonius, Seneca, and Lucan. The enchanted forest of Ismeni is more awfully and tremendously poetical than even the grove which Caesar orders to be cut down in Lucan (i. iii. 400), which was so full of terrors that, at noonday or midnight, the priest himself dared not approach it—

"'Dreading the demon of the grove to meet.'

"Who that sees the sable plumes waving on the prodigious helmet in the
Castle of Otranto, and the gigantic arm on the top of the great
staircase, is not more affected than with the paintings of Ovid and
Apuleius? What a group of dreadful images do we meet with in the Edda!
The Runic poetry abounds in them. Such is Gray's thrilling Ode on the
'Descent of Odin.'"

Warton predicts that Pope's fame as a poet will ultimately rest on his "Windsor Forest," his "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard," and "The Rape of the Lock." To this prophecy time has already, in part, given the lie. Warton preferred "Windsor Forest" and "Eloisa" to the "Moral Essays" because they belonged to a higher kind of poetry. Posterity likes the "Moral Essays" better because they are better of their kind. They were the natural fruit of Pope's genius and of his time, while the others were artificial. We can go to Wordsworth for nature, to Byron for passion, and to a score of poets for both, but Pope remains unrivaled in his peculiar field. In other words, we value what is characteristic in the artist; the one thing which he does best, the precise thing which he can do and no one else can. But Warton's mistake is significant of the changing literary standards of his age; and his essay is one proof out of many that the English romantic movement was not entirely without self-conscious aims, but had its critical formulas and its programme, just as Queen Anne classicism had.