To have perceived the bankruptcy of the didactic poem is Joseph Warton's most remarkable innovation. The lawlessness of the Romantic Movement, or rather its instinct for insisting that genius is a law unto itself, is first foreshadowed in "The Enthusiast," and when the history of the school comes to be written there will be a piquancy in tracing an antinomianism down from the blameless Wartons to the hedonist essays of, Oscar Wilde and the frenzied anarchism of the Futurists. Not less remarkable, or less characteristic, was the revolt against the quietism of the classical school. "Avoid extremes," Pope had said, and moderation, calmness, discretion, absence of excitement had been laid down as capital injunctions. Joseph Warton's very title, "The Enthusiast," was a challenge, for "enthusiasm" was a term of reproach. He was himself a scandal to classical reserve. Mant, in the course of some excellent lines addressed to Joseph Warton, remarks
The same excess of sensibility is still more clearly divulged in Joseph's own earliest verses:—
The Nature here addressed is a very different thing from the "Nature methodis'd" of the Essay on Criticism. It is not to be distinguished from the object of pantheistic worship long afterwards to be celebrated in widely differing language, but with identical devotion, by Wordsworth and Senancour, by Chateaubriand and Shelley.
Closely connected with this attitude towards physical nature is the determination to deepen the human interest in poetry, to concentrate individuality in passion. At the moment when the Wartons put forth their ideas, a change was taking place in English poetry, but not in the direction of earnest emotion. The instrument of verse had reached an extraordinary smoothness, and no instance of its capability could be more interesting than the poetry of Shenstone, with his perfect utterance of things essentially not worth saying. In the most important writers of that very exhausted moment, technical skill seems the only quality calling for remark, and when we have said all that sympathy can say for Whitehead and Akenside, the truth remains that the one is vapid, the other empty. The Wartons saw that more liberty of imagination was wanted, and that the Muse was not born to skim the meadows, in short low flights, like a wagtail. They used expressions which reveal their ambition. The poet was to be "bold, without confine," and "imagination's chartered libertine"; like a sort of Alastor, he was
These are aspirations somewhat absurdly expressed, but the aim of them is undeniable and noteworthy.
A passion for solitude always precedes the romantic obsession, and in examining the claim of the Wartons to be pioneers, we naturally look for this element. We find it abundantly in their early verses. When Thomas was only seventeen—the precocity of the brothers was remarkable—he wrote a "Pleasures of Melancholy," in which he expresses his wish to retire to "solemn glooms, congenial to the soul." In the early odes of his brother Joseph we find still more clearly indicated the intention to withdraw from the world, in order to indulge the susceptibilities of the spirit in solitary reflection. A curious air of foreshadowing the theories of Rousseau, to which I have already referred, produces an effect which is faintly indicated, but in its phantom way unique in English literature up to that date, 1740. There had been a tendency to the sepulchral in the work of several writers, in particular in the powerful and preposterous religious verse of Isaac Watts, but nothing had been suggested in the pure Romantic style.
In Joseph Warton, first, we meet with the individualist attitude to nature; a slightly hysterical exaggeration of feeling which was to be characteristic of romance; an intention of escaping from the vanity of mankind by an adventure into the wilds; a purpose of recovering primitive manners by withdrawing into primitive conditions; a passion for what we now consider the drawing-master's theory of the picturesque—the thatched cottage, the ruined castle with the moon behind it, the unfettered rivulet, the wilderness of
There was already the fallacy, to become so irresistibly attractive to the next generation, that man in a state of civilisation was in a decayed and fallen condition, and that to achieve happiness he must wander back into a Golden Age. Pope, in verses which had profoundly impressed two generations, had taken the opposite view, and had proved to the satisfaction of theologian and free-thinker alike that
Joseph Warton would have nothing to say to Social Love. He designed, or pretended to design, to emigrate to the backwoods of America, to live
indulging, without the slightest admixture of any active moral principle in social life, all the ecstasies, all the ravishing emotions, of an abandonment to excessive sensibility. The soul was to be, no longer the "little bark attendant" that "pursues the triumph and partakes the gale" in Pope's complacent Fourth Epistle, but an æolian harp hung in some cave of a primeval forest for the winds to rave across in solitude.
Already the voice is that of Obermann, of René, of Byron.
Another point in which the recommendations of the Wartons far outran the mediocrity of their execution was their theory of description. To comprehend the state of mind in which such pieces of stately verse as Parnell's Hermit or Addison's Campaign could be regarded as satisfactory in the setting of their descriptive ornament we must realise the aim which those poets put before them. Nothing was to be mentioned by its technical—or even by its exact name; no clear picture was to be raised before the inner eye; nothing was to be left definite or vivid. We shall make a very great mistake if we suppose this conventional vagueness to have been accidental, and a still greater if we attribute it to a lack of cleverness. When Pope referred to the sudden advent of a heavy shower at a funeral in these terms—
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:—
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):—
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.
It is difficult for us to realise what was the nature of the spell which Pope threw over the literary conscience of the eighteenth century. Forty years after the revolt of the Wartons, Pope was still looked upon by the average critic as "the most distinguished and the most interesting Poet of the nation." Joseph Warton was styled "the Winton Pedant" for suggesting that Pope paid too dearly for his lucidity and lightness, and for desiring to break up with odes and sonnets the oratorical mould which gave a monotony of form to early eighteenth-century verse. His Essay on Pope, though written with such studied moderation that we may, in a hasty reading, regard it almost as a eulogy, was so shocking to the prejudices of the hour that it was received with universal disfavour, and twenty-six years passed before the author had the moral courage to pursue it to a conclusion. He dedicated it to Young, who, alone of the Augustans, had admitted that charm in a melancholy solitude, that beauty of funereal and mysterious effects, which was to be one of the leading characteristics of the Romantic School, and who dimly perceived the sublime and the pathetic to be "the two chief nerves of all genuine poetry."
Warton's Essay on the Genius of Pope is not well arranged, and, in spite of eloquent passages, as literature it does not offer much attraction to the reader of the present day. But its thesis is one which is very interesting to us, and was of startling novelty when it was advanced. In the author's own words it was to prove that "a clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient, alone, to make a poet." The custom of critics had been to say that, when supported by a profound moral sense, they were sufficient, and Pope was pointed to as the overwhelming exemplar of the truth of this statement. Pope had taken this position himself and, as life advanced, the well of pure poetry in him had dried up more and more completely, until it had turned into a sort of fountain of bright, dry sand, of which the Epilogue to the Satires, written in 1738, when Joseph Warton was sixteen years of age, may be taken as the extreme instance. The young author of the Essay made the earliest attempt which any one made to put Pope in his right place, that is to say, not to deny him genius or to deprecate the extreme pleasure readers found in his writings, but to insist that, by the very nature of his gifts, his was genius of a lower rank than that of the supreme poets, with whom he was commonly paralleled when he was not preferred to them all.
Warton admitted but three supreme English poets—Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton—and he vehemently insisted that moral, didactic and panegyrical poetry could never rise above the second class in importance. To assert this was not merely to offend against the undoubted supremacy of Pope, but it was to flout the claims of all those others to whom the age gave allegiance. Joseph Warton does not shrink from doing this, and he gives reason for abating the claims of all the classic favourites—Cowley, Waller, Dryden, Addison. When it was advanced against him that he showed arrogance in placing his opinion against that of a multitude of highly trained judges, he replied that a real "relish and enjoyment of poetry" is a rare quality, and "a creative and glowing imagination" possessed by few. When the dicta of Boileau were quoted against him, he repudiated their authority with scarcely less vivacity than Keats was to display half a century later.
Joseph Warton's Essay wanders about, and we may acknowledge ourselves more interested in the mental attitude which it displays than in the detail of its criticism. The author insists, with much force, on the value of a grandiose melancholy and a romantic horror in creating a poetical impression, and he allows himself to deplore that Pope was so ready to forget that "wit and satire are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal." We need not then be surprised when Joseph Warton boldly protests that no other part of the writings of Pope approaches Eloisa to Abelard in the quality of being "truly poetical." He was perhaps led to some indulgence by the fact that this is the one composition in which Pope appears to be indebted to Milton's lyrics, but there was much more than that. So far as I am aware, Eloisa to Abelard had never taken a high place with Pope's extreme admirers, doubtless because of its obsession with horror and passion. But when we read how
and still more when we reflect on the perpetual and powerful appeals which the poem makes to emotion unbridled by moral scruple, we have no difficulty in perceiving why Eloisa to Abelard exercised so powerful an attraction on Joseph Warton. The absence of ethical reservation, the licence, in short, was highly attractive to him, and he rejoiced in finding Pope, even so slightly, even so briefly, faithless to his formula. It is worth while to note that Joseph Warton's sympathy with the sentimental malady of the soul which lies at the core of Romanticism permitted him to be, perhaps, the first man since the Renaissance who recognised with pleasure the tumult of the Atys of Catullus and the febrile sensibility of Sappho.
Both brothers urged that more liberty of imagination was what English poetry needed; that the lark had been shut up long enough in a gilded cage. We have a glimpse of Thomas Warton introducing the study of the great Italian classics into Oxford at a very early age, and we see him crowned with laurel in the common-room of Trinity College at the age of nineteen. This was in the year before the death of Thomson. No doubt he was already preparing his Observations on the Faerie Queene, which came out a little later. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford before he was thirty. Both the brothers took great pleasure in the study of Spenser, and they both desired that the supernatural "machinery" of Ariosto, in common with the romance of The Faerie Queene, should be combined with a description of nature as untrimmed and unshackled as possible. Thomas Warton, in his remarkable Oxford poem, "The Painted Window," describes himself as
and again he says:—
that is to say when Spenser was writing "upon Mulla's shore."
After all this, the Observations on the Faerie Queene of 1754 is rather disappointing. Thomas was probably much more learned as a historian of literature than Joseph, but he is not so interesting a critic. Still, he followed exactly the same lines, with the addition of a wider knowledge. His reading is seen to be already immense, but he is tempted to make too tiresome a display of it. Nevertheless, he is as thorough as his brother in his insistence upon qualities which we have now learned to call Romantic, and he praises all sorts of old books which no one then spoke of with respect. He warmly recommends the Morte d'Arthur, which had probably not found a single admirer since 1634. When he mentions Ben Jonson, it is characteristic that it is to quote the line about "the charmed boats and the enchanted wharves," which sounds like a foretaste of Keats's "magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas." The public of Warton's day had relegated all tales about knights, dragons, and enchanters to the nursery, and Thomas Warton shows courage in insisting that they are excellent subjects for serious and adult literature. He certainly would have thoroughly enjoyed the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe, whom a later generation was to welcome as "the mighty magician bred and nourished by the Muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition," and he despised the neo-classic make-believe of grottoes. He says, with firmness, that epic poetry—and he is thinking of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser—would never have been written if the critical judgments current in 1754 had been in vogue.
Thomas Warton closely studied the influence of Ariosto on Spenser, and no other part of the Observations is so valuable as the pages in which those two poets are contrasted. He remarked the polish of the former poet with approval, and he did not shrink from what is violently fantastic in the plot of the Orlando Furioso. On that point he says, "The present age is too fond of manner'd poetry to relish fiction and fable," but perhaps he did not observe that although there is no chivalry in The Schoolmistress, that accomplished piece was the indirect outcome of the Italian mock-heroic epics. The Classicists had fought for lucidity and common sense, whereas to be tenebrous and vague was a merit with the precursors of Romanticism, or at least, without unfairness, we may say that they asserted the power of imagination to make what was mysterious, and even fabulous, true to the fancy. This tendency, which we first perceive in the Wartons, rapidly developed, and it led to the blind enthusiasm with which the vapourings of Macpherson were presently received. The earliest specimens of Ossian were revealed to a too-credulous public in 1760, but I find no evidence of any welcome which they received from either Joseph or Thomas. The brothers personally preferred a livelier and more dramatic presentation, and when Dr. Johnson laughed at Collins because "he loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters," the laugh was really at the expense of his school-fellow Joseph Warton, to whom Collins seems to have owed his boyish inspiration, although he was by a few months the senior.
Johnson was a resolute opponent of the principles of the Wartons, though he held Thomas, at least, in great personal regard. He objected to the brothers that they "affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival," and his boutade about their own poetry is well known:—
This conservatism was not peculiar to Johnson; there was a general tendency to resist the reintroduction into language and literature of words and forms which had been allowed to disappear. A generation later, a careful and thoughtful grammarian like Gilpin was in danger of being dismissed as "a cockscomb" because he tried to enlarge our national vocabulary. The Wartons were accused of searching old libraries for glossaries of disused terms in order to display them in their own writings. This was not quite an idle charge; it is to be noted as one of the symptoms of active Romanticism that it is always dissatisfied with the diction commonly in use, and desires to dazzle and mystify by embroidering its texture with archaic and far-fetched words. Chatterton, who was not yet born when the Wartons formed and expressed their ideas, was to carry this instinct to a preposterous extreme in his Rowley forgeries, where he tries to obtain a mediæval colouring by transferring words out of an imperfect Anglo-Saxon lexicon, often without discerning the actual meaning of those words.
Both the Wartons continued, in successive disquisitions, to repeat their definition of poetry, but it cannot be said that either of them advanced. So far as Joseph is concerned, he seems early to have succumbed to the pressure of the age and of his surroundings. In 1766 he became head master of Winchester, and settled down after curious escapades which had nothing poetical about them. In the head master of a great public school, reiterated murmurs against bondage to the Classical Greeks and Romans would have been unbecoming, and Joseph Warton was a man of the world. Perhaps in the solitude of his study he murmured, as disenchanted enthusiasts often murmur, "Say, are the days of blest delusion fled?" Yet traces of the old fire were occasionally manifest; still each brother woke up at intervals to censure the criticism of those who did not see that imagination must be paramount in poetry, and who made the mistake of putting "discernment" in the place of "enthusiasm." I hardly know why it gives me great pleasure to learn that "the manner in which the Rev. Mr. Joseph Warton read the Communion Service was remarkably awful," but it must be as an evidence that he carried a "Gothick" manner into daily life.
The spirit of pedantry, so amicably mocked by the Wartons, took its revenge upon Thomas in the form of a barren demon named Joseph Ritson, who addressed to him in 1782 what he aptly called A Familiar Letter. There is hardly a more ferocious pamphlet in the whole history of literature. Ritson, who had the virulence of a hornet and the same insect's inability to produce honey of his own, was considered by the reactionaries to have "punched Tom Warton's historick body full of deadly holes." But his strictures were not really important. In marshalling some thousands of facts, Warton had made perhaps a couple of dozen mistakes, and Ritson advances these with a reiteration and a violence worthy of a maniac. Moreover, and this is the fate of angry pedants, he himself is often found to be as dustily incorrect as Warton when examined by modern lights. Ritson, who accuses Warton of "never having consulted or even seen" the books he quotes from, and of intentionally swindling the public, was in private life a vegetarian who is said to have turned his orphan nephew on to the streets because he caught him eating a mutton-chop. Ritson flung his arrows far and wide, for he called Dr. Samuel Johnson himself "that great luminary, or rather dark lantern of literature."
If we turn over Ritson's distasteful pages, it is only to obtain from them further proof of the perception of Warton's Romanticism by an adversary whom hatred made perspicacious. Ritson abuses the History of English Poetry for presuming to have "rescued from oblivion irregular beauties" of which no one desired to be reminded. He charges Warton with recommending the poetry of "our Pagan fathers" because it is untouched by Christianity, and of saying that "religion and poetry are incompatible." He accuses him of "constantly busying himself with passages which he does not understand, because they appeal to his ear or his fancy." "Old poetry," Ritson says to Warton, "is the same thing to you, sense or nonsense." He dwells on Warton's marked attraction to whatever is prodigious and impossible. The manner in which these accusations are made is insolent and detestable; but Ritson had penetration, and without knowing what he reached, in some of these diatribes he pierced to the heart of the Romanticist fallacy.
It is needful that I should bring these observations to a close. I hope I have made good my claim that it was the Wartons who introduced into the discussion of English poetry the principle of Romanticism. To use a metaphor of which both of them would have approved, that principle was to them like the mystical bowl of ichor, the ampolla, which Astolpho was expected to bring down from heaven in the Orlando Furioso. If I have given you an exaggerated idea of the extent to which they foresaw the momentous change in English literature, I am to blame. No doubt by extracting a great number of slight and minute remarks, and by putting them together, the critic may produce an effect which is too emphatic. But you will be on your guard against such misdirection. It is enough for me if you will admit the priority of the intuition of the brothers, and I do not think that it can be contested.
Thomas Warton said, "I have rejected the ideas of men who are the most distinguished ornaments" of the history of English poetry, and he appealed against a "mechanical" attitude towards the art of poetry. The brothers did more in rebelling against the Classic formulas than in starting new poetic methods. There was an absence in them of "the pomps and prodigality" of genius of which Gray spoke in a noble stanza. They began with enthusiasm, but they had no native richness of expression, no store of energy. It needed a nature as unfettered as Blake's, as wide as Wordsworth's, as opulent as Keats's, to push the Romantic attack on to victory. The instinct for ecstasy, ravishment, the caprices and vagaries of emotion, was there; there was present in both brothers, while they were still young, an extreme sensibility. The instinct was present in them, but the sacred fire died out in the vacuum of their social experience, and neither Warton had the energy to build up a style in prose or verse. They struggled for a little while, and then they succumbed to the worn verbiage of their age, from which it is sometimes no light task to disengage their thought. In their later days they made some sad defections, and I can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving at Marlowe's Hero and Leander and failing to observe its beauties. We are told that as Camden Professor he "suffered the rostrum to grow cold," and he was an ineffective poet laureate. His brother Joseph felt the necessity or the craving for lyrical expression, without attaining more than a muffled and a second-rate effect.
All this has to be sadly admitted. But the fact remains that between 1740 and 1750, while even the voice of Rousseau had not begun to make itself heard in Europe, the Wartons had discovered the fallacy of the poetic theories admitted in their day, and had formed some faint conception of a mode of escape from them. The Abbé Du Bos had laid down in his celebrated Réflexions (1719) that the poet's art consists of making a general moral representation of incidents and scenes, and embellishing it with elegant images. This had been accepted and acted upon by Pope and by all his followers. To have been the first to perceive the inadequacy and the falsity of a law which excluded all imagination, all enthusiasm, and all mystery, is to demand respectful attention from the historian of Romanticism, and this attention is due to Joseph and Thomas Warton.
It is exactly two hundred years to-night since there was born, at Clonmel, in Ireland, a son to a subaltern in an English regiment just home from the Low Countries. "My birthday," Laurence Sterne tells us, "was ominous to my poor father, who was, the day after our arrival, with many other brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide world with a wife and two children." The life of the new baby was one of perpetual hurry and scurry; his mother, who had been an old campaigner, daughter of what her son calls "a noted suttler" called Nuttle, had been the widow of a soldier before she married Roger Sterne. In the extraordinary fashion of the army of those days, the regiment was hurried from place to place—as was that of the father of the infant Borrow a century later—and with it hastened the unhappy Mrs. Sterne, for ever bearing and for ever losing children, "most rueful journeys," marked by a long succession of little tombstones left behind. Finally, at Gibraltar, the weary father, pugnacious to the last, picked a quarrel about a goose and was pinked through the body, surviving in a thoroughly damaged condition, to die, poor exhausted pilgrim of Bellona, in barracks in Jamaica.
It would be difficult to imagine a childhood better calculated than this to encourage pathos in a humorist and fun in a sentimentalist. His account, in his brief autobiography, of the appearance and disappearance of his hapless brothers and sisters is a proof of how early life appealed to Laurence Sterne in the dappled colours of an April day. We read there of how at Wicklow "we lost poor Joram, a pretty boy"; how "Anne, that pretty blossom, fell in the barracks of Dublin"; how little Devijehar was "left behind" in Carrickfergus. We know not whether to sob or to giggle, so tragic is the rapid catalogue of dying babies, so ridiculous are their names and fates. Here, then, I think, we have revealed to us the prime characteristic of Sterne, from which all his other characteristics branch away, for evil or for good. As no other writer since Shakespeare, and in a different and perhaps more intimate way than even Shakespeare, he possessed the key of those tears that succeed the hysteria of laughter, and of that laughter which succeeds the passion of tears. From early childhood, and all through youth and manhood, he had been collecting observations upon human nature in these rapidly alternating moods.
He observed it in its frailty, but being exquisitely frail himself, he was no satirist. A breath of real satire would blow down the whole delicate fabric of Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey. Sterne pokes fun at people and things; he banters the extravagance of private humour; but it is always with a consciousness that he is himself more extravagant than any one. If we compare him for a moment with Richardson, who buttonholes the reader in a sermon; or with Smollett, who snarls and bites like an angry beast; we feel at once that Sterne could not breathe in the stuffiness of the one or in the tempest of the other. Sympathy is the breath of his nostrils, and he cannot exist except in a tender, merry relation with his readers. His own ideal, surely, is that which he attributed to the fantastic and gentle Yorick, who never could enter a village, but he caught the attention of old and young. "Labour stood still as he passed; the bucket hung suspended in the middle of the well; the spinning-wheel forgot its round, even chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap themselves stood gaping till he had got out of sight." Like Yorick, Sterne loved a jest in his heart.
There are, it seems to me, two distinct strains in the intellectual development of Sterne, and I should like to dwell upon them for a moment, because I think a lack of recognition of them has been apt to darken critical counsel in the consideration of his writings. You will remember that he was forty-six years of age before he took up the business of literature seriously. Until that time he had been a country parson in Yorkshire, carrying his body, that "cadaverous bale of goods," from Sutton to Stillington, and from Stillington to Skelton. He had spent his life in riding, shooting, preaching, joking, and philandering in company, and after a fashion, most truly reprehensible from a clerical point of view, yet admirably fitted to prepare such an artist for his destined labours as a painter of the oddities of average Englishmen. But by the side of this indolent search after the enjoyment of the hour, Sterne cultivated a formidable species of literature in which he had so few competitors that, in after years, his indolence prompted him to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human being would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous learning of those writers of the Renaissance in whom congested Latin is found tottering into colloquial French. He studied Rabelais perhaps more deeply than any other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde de Verville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of the sixteenth century were familiar to him and to him alone in England.
Hence, when Sterne began to write, there were two streams flowing in his brain, and these were, like everything else about him, inconsistent with one another. The faithful tender colour of modern life competed with the preposterous oddity of burlesque erudition. When he started the annals of Tristram Shandy, the Rabelais vein was in the ascendant, and there is plenty of evidence that it vastly dazzled and entertained readers of that day. But it no longer entertains us very much, and it is the source of considerable injustice done by modern criticism to the real merits of Sterne. When so acute a writer as Bagehot condemns much of Tristram Shandy as "a sort of antediluvian fun, in which uncouth saurian jokes play idly in an unintelligible world," he hits the nail on the head of why so many readers nowadays turn with impatience from that work. But they should persevere, for Sterne himself saw his error, and gradually dropped the "uncouth saurian jokes" which he had filched out of Burton and Beroalde, relying more and more exclusively on his own rich store of observations taken directly from human nature. In the adorable seventh volume of Tristram, and in The Sentimental Journey, there is nothing left of Rabelais except a certain rambling artifice of style.
The death of Sterne, at the age of fifty-four, is one of those events which must be continually regretted, because to the very end of his life he was growing in ease and ripeness, was discovering more perfect modes of self-expression, and was purging himself of his compromising intellectual frailties. It is true that from the very first his excellences were patent. The portrait of my Uncle Toby, which Hazlitt truly said is "one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature," occurs, or rather begins, in the second volume of Tristram Shandy. But the marvellous portraits which the early sections of that work contain are to some extent obscured, or diluted, by the author's determination to gain piquancy by applying old methods to new subjects. Frankly, much as I love Sterne, I find Kunastrockius and Lithopaedus a bore. I suspect they have driven more than one modern reader away from the enjoyment of Tristram Shandy.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century a leading Dissenting minister, the Rev. Joseph Fawcett, said in answer to a question: "Do I like Sterne? Yes, to be sure I should deserve to be hanged if I didn't!" That was the attitude of thoughtful and scrupulous people of cultivation more than one hundred years ago. But it was their attitude only on some occasions. There is no record of the fact, but I am ready to believe that Mr. Fawcett may, with equal sincerity, have said that Sterne was a godless wretch. We know that Bishop Warburton presented him with a purse of gold, in rapturous appreciation of his talents, and then in a different mood described him as "an irrevocable scoundrel." No one else has ever flourished in literature who has combined such alternating powers of attraction and repulsion. We like Sterne extremely at one moment, and we dislike him no less violently at another. He is attar of roses to-day and asafœtida to-morrow, and it is not by any means easy to define the elements which draw us towards him and away from him. Like Yorick, he had "a wild way of talking," and he wrote impetuously and impudently "in the naked temper which a merry heart discovered." As he "seldom shunned occasions of saying what came uppermost, and without much ceremony, he had but too many temptations in life of scattering his wit and his humour, his gibes and his jests, about him."
So that even if he had been merely Yorick, Sterne would have had manifold opportunities of giving offence and causing scandal. But lie was not only a humorist with "a thousand little sceptical notions to defend," but he was a sentimentalist as well. Those two characteristics he was constantly mingling, or trying to mingle, since sentimentality and humour are in reality like oil and wine. He would exasperate his readers by throwing his wig in their faces at the moment when they were weeping, or put them out of countenance by ending a farcical story on a melancholy note. A great majority of Englishmen like to be quite sure of the tone of what they read; they wish an author to be straightforward; they dread irony and they loathe impishness. Now Sterne is the most impish of all imaginative writers. He is what our grandmothers, in describing the vagaries of the nursery, used to call "a limb of Satan." Tristram Shandy, in his light-hearted way, declared that "there's not so much difference between good and evil as the world is apt to imagine." No doubt that is so, but the world does not like its preachers to play fast and loose with moral definitions.
The famous sensibility of Sterne was a reaction against the seriousness, the ponderosity, of previous prose literature in England. We talk of the heaviness of the eighteenth century, but the periods of even such masters of solid rhetoric as Johnson and Gibbon are light as thistledown in comparison with the academic prose of the seventeenth century. Before the eighteenth century is called lumbering, let us set a page of Hume against a page of Hobbes, or a passage out of Berkeley by a passage out of Selden. Common justice is seldom done to the steady clarification of English prose between 1660 and 1750, but it was kept within formal lines until the sensitive recklessness of Sterne broke up the mould, and gave it the flying forms of a cloud or a wave. He owed this beautiful inspiration to what Nietzsche calls his "squirrel-soul," which leaped from bough to bough, and responded without a trace of conventional restraint to every gust of emotion. Well might Goethe be inspired to declare that Sterne was the most emancipated spirit of his century.
His very emancipation gives us the reason why Sterne's admirers nowadays are often divided in their allegiance to him. A frequent part of his humour deals very flippantly with subjects that are what we have been taught to consider indelicate or objectionable. It is worse than useless to try to explain this foible of his away, because he was aware of it and did it on purpose. He said that "nothing but the more gross and carnal parts of a composition will go down." His indecency was objected to in his own age, but not with any excluding severity. And I would like to call your attention to the curious conventionality of our views on this subject. Human nature does not change, but it changes its modes of expression. In the eighteenth century very grave people, even bishops, allowed themselves, in their relaxed moments, great licence in jesting. Yet they would have been scandalised by the tragic treatment of sex by our more audacious novelists of to-day. We are still interested in these matters, but we have agreed not to joke about them. I read the other day a dictum of one of those young gentlemen who act as our moral policemen: he prophesied that a jest on a sexual subject would, in twenty years, be not merely reprehensible, as it is now, but unintelligible. Very proper, no doubt, only do not let us call this morality, it is only a change of habits.
Sterne is not suited to readers who are disheartened at irrelevancy. It is part of his charm, and it is at the same time his most whimsical habit, never to proceed with his story when you expect him to do so, and to be reminded by his own divagations of delightful side-issues which lead you, entranced, whither you had no intention of going. He did not merely not shun occasions of being irrelevant, but he sought them out and eagerly cultivated them. Remember that a whole chapter of Tristram is devoted to the attitude of Corporal Trim as he prepared himself to read the Sermon. Sterne kept a stable of prancing, plump little hobby-horses, and he trotted them out upon every occasion. But this is what makes his books the best conversational writing in the English language. He writes for all the world exactly as though he were talking at his ease, and we listen enchanted to the careless, frolicking, idle, penetrating speaker who builds up for us so nonchalantly, with persistent but unobtrusive touch upon touch, the immortal figures of Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Trim, Yorick, the Widow Wadman, and so many more.
This, I am inclined to think, in drawing this brief sketch to an end, is Sterne's main interest for ourselves. He broke up the rhetorical manner of composition, or, rather, he produced an alternative manner which was gradually accepted and is in partial favour still. I would ask you to read for yourselves the scene of the ass who blocked the way for Tristram at Lyons, and to consider how completely new that method of describing, of facing a literary problem, was in 1765. I speak here to an audience of experts, to a company of authors who are accustomed to a close consideration of the workmanship of their métier. I ask them where, at all events in English, anything like that scene had been found before the days of Sterne. Since those days we have never been without it.
To trace the Shandean influence down English literature for the last century and a half would take me much too long for your patience. In Dickens, in Carlyle, even in Ruskin, the Shandean element is often present and not rarely predominant. None of those great men would have expressed himself exactly as he does but for Laurence Sterne. And coming down to our own time, I see the influence of Sterne everywhere. The pathos of Sir James Barrie is intimately related to that of the creator of Uncle Toby and Maria of Moulines, while I am not sure that of all the books which Stevenson read it was not the Sentimental Journey which made the deepest impression upon him.
In the announcements of the approaching celebration of the centenary of Poe in this country, the fact of his having been a poet was concealed. Perhaps his admirers hoped that it might be overlooked, as without importance, or condoned as the result of bad habits. At all events, the statement that the revels on that occasion would be conducted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was quite enough to prove that it was the prose writer of "The Black Cat" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and not the verso writer of "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee" who would be the centre of attention. On that side of Poe's genius, therefore, although it is illustrated by such masterpieces of sullen beauty as "The Fall of the House of Usher" and such triumphs of fantastic ingenuity as "The Gold Bug," I feel it needless to dwell here, the more as I think the importance of these tales very slight by the side of that of the best poems. Edgar Poe was, in my opinion, one of the most significant poetic artists of a century rich in poetic artists, and I hold it to be for this reason, and not because he wrote thrilling "detective" stories, that he deserves persistent commemoration.
The dominance of Poe as an important poetic factor of the nineteenth century has not been easily or universally admitted, and it is only natural to examine both the phenomena and the causes of the objections so persistently brought against it. In the first instance, if the fame of Browning and Tennyson advanced slowly, it advanced firmly, and it was encouraged from the beginning by the experts, by the cultivated minority. Poe, on the other hand, was challenged, and his credentials were grudgingly inspected, by those who represented the finest culture of his own country, and the carpings of New England criticism are not quite silent yet. When he died, in 1849, the tribunal of American letters sat at Cambridge, in the neighbourhood of Boston, and it was ill-prepared to believe that anything poetical could deserve salvation if it proceeded from a place outside the magic circle. Edgar Poe, the son of Irish strolling players, called "The Virginia Comedians," settled in the South and was educated in England. By an odd coincidence, it now appears that he actually was a native, as it were by accident, of Boston itself. In the words of the Psalmist, "Lo! there was he born!" This Gentile poet, such was the then state of American literature, could not arrive on earth elsewhere than in the Jerusalem of Massachusetts. But that concession was not known to the high priests, the Lowells, the Holmeses, the Nortons, to whom Poe seemed a piratical intruder from Javan or Gadire.
Nothing is so discouraging to a young poet of originality as to find himself isolated. Everything new is regarded with suspicion and dislike by the general world of readers, and usually by the leaders of criticism as well. Yet the daring prophet feels supported if he has but his Aaron and his Hur. In the generation that immediately preceded Poe, Wordsworth and Coleridge had been derided, but they had enjoyed the emphatic approbation of one another and of Southey. Shelley had been a pariah of letters, yet he was cordially believed in by Byron and by Peacock. Even Keats could shrink from the mud-storms of the Scotch reviewers behind the confident zeal of Leigh Hunt and Reynolds. At a still later moment Rossetti and Morris would shelter themselves securely, and even serenely, from the obloquy of criticism, within a slender peel-tower of the praise of friends. In all these cases there could be set against the stupidity of the world at large the comfortable cleverness of a few strong persons of taste, founded, as all good taste must be, upon principles. The poet could pride himself on his eclecticism, on his recognition within, as Keats said, "a little clan." But Poe's misfortune was to have no clan of his own, and to be rejected by precisely those persons who represented, and on the whole justly represented, good taste in America.
His behaviour in this predicament was what might have been expected from a man whose genius was more considerable than his judgment or his manners. He tried, at first, to conciliate the New England authorities, and he flattered not merely the greater planets but some of the very little stars. He danced, a plaintive Salome, before Christopher P. Cranch and Nathaniel P. Willis. When he found that his blandishments were of no avail, he turned savage, and tried to prove that he did not care, by being rude to Bryant and Longfellow. He called the whole solemn Sanhedrim a college of Frog-pondian professors. Thus, of course, he closed upon himself the doors of mercy, since the central aim and object of the excellent men who at that time ruled American literature was to prove that, in what this impertinent young man from Virginia called the Frog Pond, the United States possessed its Athens and its Weimar, its home of impeccable distinction. Indeed, but for the recognition of Europe, which began to flow in richly just as Poe ceased to be able to enjoy it, the prestige of this remarkable poet might have been successfully annihilated.
Nor was it only the synod of Boston wits who issued the edict that he should be ignored, but in England also many good judges of literature, especially those who belonged to the intellectual rather than the artistic class, could not away with him. I recollect hearing Leslie Stephen say, now nearly thirty years ago, that to employ strong terms of praise for Poe was "simply preposterous." And one whom I admire so implicitly that I will not mention his name in a context which is not favourable to his judgment, wrote (in his haste) of Poe's "singularly valueless verses."
This opposition, modified, it is true, by the very different attitude adopted by Tennyson and most subsequent English poets, as well as by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and the whole younger school in France, was obstinately preserved, and has not wholly subsided. It would be a tactical mistake for those who wish to insist on Poe's supremacy in his own line to ignore the serious resistance which has been made to it. In the canonisation-trial of this whimsical saint, the Devil's advocates, it may be confessed, are many, and their objections are imposing. It is possible that local pique and a horror of certain crude surroundings may have had something to do with the original want of recognition in New England, but such sources of prejudice would be ephemeral. There remained, and has continued to remain, in the very essence of Poe's poetry, something which a great many sincere and penetrating lovers of verse cannot endure to admit as a dominant characteristic of the art.
To recognise the nature of this quality is to take the first step towards discovering the actual essence of Poe's genius. His detractors have said that his verses are "singularly valueless." It is therefore necessary to define what it is they mean by "value." If they mean an inculcation, in beautiful forms, of moral truth; if they mean a succession of ideas, clothed in exalted and yet definite language; if they are thinking of what stirs the heart in reading parts of Hamlet and Comus, of what keeps the pulse vibrating after the "Ode to Duty" has been recited; then the verses of Poe are indeed without value. A poet less gnomic than Poe, one from whom less, as they say in the suburbs, "can be learned," is scarcely to be found in the whole range of literature. His lack of curiosity about moral ideas is so complete that evil moves him no more than good. There have been writers of eccentric or perverse morality who have been so much irritated by the preaching of virtue that they have lent their genius to the recommendation of vice. This inversion of moral fervour is perhaps the source of most that is vaguely called "immoral" in imaginative literature. But Edgar Poe is as innocent of immorality as he is of morality. No more innocuous flowers than his are grown through the length and breadth of Parnassus. There is hardly a phrase in his collected writings which has a bearing upon any ethical question, and those who look for what Wordsworth called "chains of valuable thoughts" must go elsewhere.
In 1840 they might, in New England, go to Bryant, to Emerson, to Hawthorne; and it is more than excusable that those who were endeavouring to refine the very crude community in the midst of which they were anxiously holding up the agate lamp of Psyche, should see nothing to applaud in the vague and shadowy rhapsodies then being issued by a dissipated hack in Philadelphia. What the New England critics wanted, patriotically as well as personally, was as little like "Ulalume" as can possibly be conceived. They defined what poetry should be—there was about that time a mania for defining poetry—and what their definition was may be seen no less plainly in the American Fable for Critics than in the preface to the English Philip van Artevelde. It was to be picturesque, intellectual, pleasing; it was to deal, above all, with moral "truths"; it was to avoid vagueness and to give no uncertain sound; it was to regard "passion" with alarm, as the siren which was bound sooner or later to fling a bard upon the rocks. It is not necessary to treat this conception of poetry with scorn, nor to reject principles of precise thought and clear, sober language, which had been illustrated by Wordsworth in the present and by Gray in the past. The ardent young critics of our own age, having thrown off all respect for the traditions of literature, speak and write as if to them, and them alone, had been divinely revealed the secrets of taste. They do not give themselves time to realise that in Apollo's house there are many mansions.
It is sufficient for us to note here that the discomfort of Poe's position resided in the fact that he was not admitted into so much as the forecourt of the particular mansion inhabited by Bryant and Lowell. There is a phrase in one of his own rather vague and "valueless" essays (for Poe was a poor critic) which, as it were accidentally, describes his ideal in poetry, although it is not his own verse of which he is speaking. He described—in 1845, when his ripe genius had just brought forth "The Raven"—the poetic faculty as producing "a sense of dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, indefinable delight." This shadowy but absorbing and mastering pleasure impregnated his own best writings to such a degree that it gives us the measure of his unlikeness to his contemporaries, and states the claim of his individuality. Without precisely knowing it or perceiving his revolution, in an age of intelligent, tame, lucid and cautiously-defined poetry, Edgar Poe expressed the emotions which surged within him in numbers that were, even to excess, "dreamy, wild, indefinite and indefinable."
His early verses are remarkably exempt from the influences which we might expect to find impressed on them. He imitated, as every man of genuine originality imitates while he learns his trade, but his models were not, as might have been anticipated, Coleridge and Shelley; they were Byron and Scott. In the poetry of Byron and Scott, Poe found nothing to transfer to his own nature, and the early imitations, therefore, left no trace on him. Brief as is the volume of his poems, half of it might be discarded without much regret. Scattered among his Byron and Scott imitations, however, we find a few pieces which reveal to us that, while he was still almost a child, the true direction of his genius was occasionally revealed to him. The lyric "To Helen," which is said to have been composed in his fourteenth year, is steeped in the peculiar purity, richness and vagueness which were to characterise his mature poems:—