The same play activity expressed itself in literature, where an orgy of imitation ushered in the real movement. The antiquarian beginnings of Romantic poetry may be well illustrated
by the life and works of Thomas Warton. He passed his life as a resident Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and devoted his leisure, which was considerable, to the study of English poetry and Gothic architecture. He was not yet thirty when, in 1757, he was elected Professor of Poetry, a post which he held for ten years. During this time he planned a complete History of English Poetry, a task which Pope and Gray in turn had contemplated and abandoned. The historical interest which is so conspicuous in early Romanticism owed not a little, it may be remarked in passing, to the initiative of Pope, who must therefore be given a place in any full genealogy of the Romantic family. Warton’s History, so far as it was completed, was published between 1774 and 1781, when he relaxed his efforts, and took up lesser tasks. In 1785 he was made Poet Laureate on the strength of his early poems and later scholarship. He died in 1790.
Warton’s poems are a curious study. Spenser and Milton are his masters, and he is a docile pupil. His poetry is all derivative, and might be best described as imitation poetry. Christopher
North said of him that “the gods had made him poetical, but not a poet,” a saying which contains the whole truth. He puts together a mosaic of phrases borrowed from his teachers, and frames them in a sentimental setting of his own. Here are some passages from The Pleasures of Melancholy, which, though he wrote it at the age of seventeen, does not differ in method or inspiration from the rest of his poetical work:
Beneath yon ruin’d abbey’s moss-grown piles
Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve,
Where thro’ some western window the pale moon
Pours her long-levell’d rule of streaming light;
While sullen sacred silence reigns around,
Save the lone screech-owl’s note, who builds his bow’r
Amid the mould’ring caverns dark and damp,
Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves
Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green
Invests some wasted tow’r. . . .
Then, when the sullen shades of ev’ning close,
Where thro’ the room a blindly-glimm’ring gleam
The dying embers scatter, far remote
From Mirth’s mad shouts, that thro’ th’ illumin’d roof
Resound with festive echo, let me sit,
Blest with the lowly cricket’s drowsy dirge. . . .
O come then, Melancholy, queen of thought!
O come with saintly look, and steadfast step,
From forth thy cave embower’d with mournful yew,
Where ever to the curfeu’s solemn sound
List’ning thou sitt’st, and with thy cypress bind
Thy votary’s hair, and seal him for thy son.
Melancholy seems not to have answered these advances. In later life Warton was a short, squat, red-faced man, fond of ale, and a cheerful talker, with a thick utterance, so that he gobbled like a turkey-cock. Some of his verses are cheerful. This is from the Ode on the Approach of Summer:
Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand
With thee lead a buxom band;
Bring fantastic-footed Joy,
With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy:
Leisure, that through the balmy sky
Chases a crimson butterfly.
Bring Health, that loves in early dawn
To meet the milk-maid on the lawn;
Bring Pleasure, rural nymph, and Peace,
Meek, cottage-loving shepherdess!
It is all like this, fluent and unnecessary. Perhaps no verses in English were ever made so exactly in the approved fashion of modern Latin verses. Warton writes pleasantly, his
cento of reminiscences is skilful, and his own epithets are sometimes happy, yet nothing comes of it. His work suggests the doubt whether any modern Latin verse, even the best, would deceive an intelligent citizen of ancient Rome.
The strange thing about the Romantic Revival is that an epidemic of this sort of imitation at last produced real poetry and real romance. The industrious simulation of the emotions begot the emotions simulated. Is there not a story told of a young officer who, having dressed himself in a sheet to frighten his fellows, was embarrassed by the company of a real ghost, bent on the same errand; and retired from the enterprise, leaving it wholly to the professional? That, at any rate, is very much what happened to the Romantic impersonators.