classic rhetoric, a new affectation in place of the old. Above all we see the deplorable influence of the wretched charlatan Young, who by his insincere moralising threatened to choke true romance at the very outset. Nevertheless, there is in Warton a real if exaggerated love of nature, a real revolt against the domination of the social spirit in literature, a realisation of false gods, a vague idea of a better way. Of Joseph Warton's other poems little need be said. His Enthusiast, a blank-verse poem written in 1740, is outside the treatment of lyric poetry. But in the title of the poem, as also in such lines as What are the lays of artful Addison, Coldly correct, to Shakespear's warblings wild? we see the poet's renunciation of Augustan poetic standards. Warton's sympathy with Greek literature naturally led him to acclaim the appearance in 1749 of West's translation of Pindar. He addressed an ode to the translator, which began: Albion exult! thy sons a voice divine have heard, Warton was undoubtedly influenced by Akenside, to whom he pays a genuine tribute of respect. In his famous Essay on Pope, he declared that Akenside's odes on Lyric Poetry and to Lord Huntingdon were superior to all lyrical attempts of Pope himself. Indeed he took this latter ode as the standard in lyric, declaring that "Swift's rhapsody on poetry is far more popular than Akenside's noble ode to Lord Huntingdon."' It must be admitted that Warton's poetic virtue lies more in his precepts than in his practice, but nevertheless it is to his honour that he cast The Enthusiast in the teeth of an age that regarded enthusiasm as lunacy; that he pointed to Spenser and Milton as poets who should sit in the seats of the mighty in song; that in an age not yet free from 1 Essay on Writings and Genius of Pope, 5th ed., 1806, Vol. I, p. iii the glamour of Pope, he turned the eyes of men back to Imagination as the supreme source of inspiration; that, in a time when "wit" had not yet been banished to the limbo of rejected delusions, he declared, "The Sublime and the Pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine poesy." In his own limited way, Warton called the age from town and salon out into the light of things, that Nature might be its teacher. He praised Gray's Elegy and Dyer's Grongar Hill. He gave to his poems a semblance of individual emotion, but it is little more than a semblance. But whatever his failings as a poet, by virtue of his criticism and his verse, by reason of the time of poetic transition in which he lived, we see him, dimly and indistinctly perhaps, a mere silhouette, standing out dark against the horizon, yet pointing the future path of poetry in the grey of the romantic dawn. THOMAS WARTON (The Younger) (1728-1790) The love of nature, of Milton and of Spenser, which the father of the Wartons handed on to his son Joseph, was shared, and expressed with greater energy, by the younger son Thomas. The poetry of Thomas Warton the younger is indeed the place in which the wandering fires of nascent romance unite in a clear and steady, though by no means hot, flame. We have no distinct and complete picture of the poet, only a few revealing glimpses of him in youth and later life. We see him as a boy of eleven stealing away from the family hearth on cold winter evenings, to read in the quietude of his own chill room.' Another of the all too scarce anecdotes of the poet's boyhood records how the two boys were taken by their father to see Windsor Castle. Misled by the continued silence of his younger son, the father exclaimed to Joseph, "Thomas goes on, and takes no notice of anything he has seen. But in later life, 1 Essay on Writings and Genius of Pope, p. vi. 3 Warton's Poems, ed. Mant, I, xi. Ibid., I, 30, 34. Joseph saw in that silence the silence of boyish emotion, the delight of his brother's romantic spirit, and said, "I believe my brother was more struck with what he saw, and took more notice of every object, than either of us." After a private education at home, Thomas went to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1744, at the age of sixteen, and henceforth Oxford became his permanent abode. Like his greater contemporary, Gray, Warton chose the life of a college don, a life into which he tried, according to contemporary evidence, to bring some variety by chatting, smoking, and drinking with the bargemen of the town: a form of relaxation which speedily earned the disapproval of his more sedate friends. In writing verse, the genial poet was as precocious as his brother. Five years after Joseph wrote his Enthusiast, Thomas gave similar expression to more definitely "romantic feeling in a poem of considerable length, whose name, The Pleasures of Melancholy, is derived from Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination. It is written in blank verse, and is full of Spenserian and Miltonic echoes, but is outside the limits of our present remarks. A series of Pastorals which appeared in 1745 were imputed to him by his friends, but his biographer asserts that he denied all knowledge of them.' The Triumph of Isis, Warton's reply to Mason's poem Isis: An Elegy, attacking the Jacobite sympathies of Oxford, appeared in 1749, and gave him a great academic reputation. Written in the rhyming couplets dear to the Augustan heart, it nevertheless shows something of romantic imagination in its description of Oxford. One of Thomas Warton's poems, a translation of Horace's Bandusian Fountain, had appeared in his brother's book of odes in 1746, but with no indication of his authorship. In The Union (1753) Thomas Warton issued a collection of verses by himself and others, none except The Triumph of Isis bearing his name. 1777 a collected edition of his poems was published, 1 Works, ed. Mant, I, xxix. 2 Ibid., I, xiii-xiv. In and on the death of the Poet Laureate, William Whitehead, in 1785, Thomas Warton, the former poet laureate of Trinity College common room, was elected as his successor. During the last year of his life, he busied himself in preparing a new edition of his poems, which, although he did not live to complete it, appeared in 1791. On the night of Thursday, May 20, 1790, Warton, who seemed even more cheerful than usual, was seized with a paralytic stroke while in the common room of Trinity, and died the next day. "The gods had made him poetical, but not a poet," said Christopher North of Thomas Warton, and the verdict is a just one. The bulk of his verse, though not the best, was written prior to 1777. After the publication of his poems in that year, discouraged, the poet turned to criticism and historical studies, but poetry was ever dearest to his heart. The love of nature, which animates Warton, finds expression in such a poem as The Hamlet, which also reveals the growing humanism, the increasing love of sentiment and of simplicity, in its idealisation of the life of the village hind. Suggested, it is said, by a passage in Fletcher's Purple Island, it reminds us also of the description by Akenside of village life,' and of the similar work in Gray's Elegy. Though somewhat "sing-song," hardly musical, scarcely free from the rigid rhythms of Pope, the language is direct, and the employment of real names in place of "poetic diction" in describing the country gives to it a reality which evaporated amidst the artificial diction of his Augustan predecessors. The following extract reveals both the excellencies and defects of Warton's nature-poems : Midst gloomy glades, in warbles clear, Wild nature's sweetest notes they hear : 1 Blackwood's Magazine, September 1831, Vol. XXX, p. 483: An Hour's Talk about Poetry. * Canto XII. Vide Mant, I, 123. • V. supra, pp. 114 and 177 In their lone haunts and woodland rounds, Like his brother, Thomas Warton delights in evening twilight: As evening slowly spreads his mantle hoar, The same spirit breathes through his regret at leaving a Hampshire village, where he recalls howOwn'd by no poetic eye, Thy pensive evenings shade the sky! 3 He delights in the joys that come to him: Her varied vesture far and wide! His love of nature finds expression in the verses to a Hampshire village mentioned above: For lo the Bard who rapture found In every rural sight or sound; Whose genius warm, and judgement chaste, No charm of genuine nature pass'd; Who felt the Muse's purest fires, Far from thy favour'd haunt retires : Who peopled all thy vocal bowers With shadowy shapes, and airy powers.5 At times the poet comes under the influence of Spenser, and of the mythology of Greece, with thoughts of fairies and river-deities. No pearl-crown'd Maids, with wily look, Nor brush, half-seen, in airy tread, The violet's unprinted head." |