When these unlucky productions were republished by Dr. Parr, the Dedications were not forgotten; they were both addressed to the same opulent baronet, not omitting “the virtues” of his lady the Countess of Sunderland, whose marriage he calls “so divine a union.” Warburton had shown no want of judgment in the choice of his patrons; for they had more than one living in their gift—and perhaps, knowing his patrons, none in the dedications themselves. They had, however, this absurdity, that in freely exposing the servile practices of dedicators, the writer was himself indulging in that luxurious sin, which he so forcibly terms “Public Prostitution.” This early management betrays no equivocal symptoms of that traffic in Dedications, of which he has been 242 so severely accused,[152] and of that paradoxical turn and hardy effrontery which distinguished his after-life. These dedications led to preferment, and thus hardily was laid the foundation-stone of his aspiring fortunes.
Till his thirtieth year, Warburton evinced a depraved taste, but a craving appetite for knowledge. His mind was constituted to be more struck by the Monstrous than the Beautiful, much like that Sicilian prince who furnished his villa with the most hideous figures imaginable:[153] the delight resulting from harmonious and delicate forms raised emotions of too weak a nature to move his obliquity of taste; roused, however, by the surprise excited by colossal ugliness. The discovery of his intellectual tastes, at this obscure period of his life, besides in those works we have noticed, is confirmed by one of the most untoward accidents which ever happened to a literary man; it was the chance-discovery of a letter he had written to one of the heroes of the Dunciad, forty years before. 244 At the time that letter was written, his literary connexions were formed with second-rate authors; he was in strict intimacy with Concanen and Theobald, and other “ingenious gentlemen who made up our last night’s conversation,” as he expresses himself.[154] This letter is full of the heresies of taste: one of the most anomalous is the comment on that well-known passage in Shakspeare, on “the genius and the mortal instruments;” Warburton’s is a miraculous specimen of fantastical sagacity and critical delirium, or the art of discovering meanings never meant, and of illustrations the author could never have known. Warburton declares to “the ingenious gentlemen,” (whom afterwards with a Pharaoh’s heart he hanged by dozens to posterity in the “Dunciad,”) that “Pope borrowed for want of genius;” that poet, who, when the day arrived, he was to comment on as the first of poets! His insulting criticisms on the popular writings of Addison,—his contempt for what Young calls “sweet elegant Virgilian prose,”—show how utterly insensible he was to that classical taste in which Addison had constructed his materials. But he who could not taste the delicacy of Addison, it may be imagined might be in raptures with the rant of Lee. There is an unerring principle in the false sublime: it seems to be governed by laws, though they 245 are not ours; and we know what it will like, that is, we know what it will mistake for what ought not to be liked, as surely as we can anticipate what will delight correct taste. Warburton has pronounced one of the raving passages of poor Nat “to contain not only the most sublime, but the most judicious imagery that poetry could conceive or paint.” Joseph Warton, who indignantly rejects it from his edition of Pope, asserts that “we have not in our language a more striking example of true turgid expression, and genuine fustian and bombast.”[155] Yet such was the man whom ill-fortune (for the public at least) had chosen to become the commentator of our greater poets! Again Churchill throws light on our character:—
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He, with an all-sufficient air Places himself in the critic’s chair, And wrote, to advance his Maker’s praise, Comments on rhymes, and notes on plays— A judge of genius, though, confest, With not one spark of genius blest: Among the first of critics placed, Though free from every taint of taste. |
Not encouraged by the reception his first literary efforts received, but having obtained some preferment from his patron, we now come to a critical point in his life. He retreated from the world, and, during a seclusion of near twenty years, persevered in uninterrupted studies. The force of his character placed him in the first order of thinking beings. This resolution no more to court the world for literary favours, but to command it by hardy preparation for mighty labours, displays a noble retention of the appetite for fame; Warburton scorned to be a scribbler!
Had this great man journalised his readings, as Gibbon has 246 done, we should perhaps be more astonished at his miscellaneous pursuits. He read everything, and, I suspect, with little distinction, and equal delight.[156] Curiosity, even to its delirium, was his first passion; which produced those new systems of hypothetical reasoning by which he startled the world; and his efforts to save his most ingenious theories from absurdity resembled, to use his own emphatic words applied to the philosophy of Leibnitz, “a contrivance against Fatalism,” for though his genius has given a value to the wildest paradoxes, paradoxes they remain.
But if Warburton read so much, it was not to enforce opinions already furnished to his hands, or with cold scepticism to reject them, leaving the reader in despair. He read that he might write what no one else had written, and which at least required to be refuted before it was condemned. He hit upon a SECRET PRINCIPLE, which prevails through all his works, and this was Invention; a talent, indeed, somewhat dangerous to introduce in researches where Truth, and not Fancy, was to be addressed. But even with all this originality he was not free from imitation, and has even been accused of borrowing largely without hinting at his obligations. He had certainly one favourite model before him: Warburton has delineated the portrait of a certain author with inimitable minuteness, while he caught its general effect; we feel that the artist, in tracing the resemblance of another, is inspired by all the flattery of a self-painter—he perceived the kindred features, and he loved them!
This author was Bayle! And I am unfolding the character of Warburton, in copying the very original portrait:—
“Mr. Bayle is of a quite different character from these Italian sophists: a writer, whose strength and clearness of reasoning can be equalled only by the gaiety, easiness, and delicacy of his wit; who, pervading human nature with a glance, struck into the province of Paradox, as an exercise for the restless vigour of his mind: who, with a soul superior to the sharpest attacks of fortune, and a heart practised to the best philosophy, had not yet enough of real greatness to overcome that last foible of superior geniuses, the temptation of honour, which the Academic Exercise of Wit is conceived to bring to its professors.”[157]