CHAPTER IV NEW IDEALS THE WARTONS-PERCY AND THE BALLAD REVIVAL-CHATTERTON A visionary shore, That faintly gleamed on their prophetic eye Through the dark volume of futurity. T. WARTON: New Year Ode, 1786. I THOMAS WARTON (The Elder) (1688-1745) SOME six months after the appearance of Akenside's Odes in 1745, the worthy Thomas Warton, vicar of Basingstoke and former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, lay dying. Though born in the same year as Pope, he had never completely surrendered to Augustan poetic ideals. He chose Milton and Spenser for his literary guides, and preserved throughout his life a love of nature, of the natural, and of simplicity. His verses were not published during the poet's life, but shortly after his death, his elder son, Joseph, secured their publication in a volume entitled Poems on Several Occasions.1 Warton's aloofness from the spirit of his age is by no means complete, perhaps not even dominant. Nevertheless, his poems remind us frequently, not only of his models Spenser and Milton, but also of the work of his two sons, Joseph and Thomas Warton, and at times, even more strongly, of Collins. Warton had a real love of nature, and an almost romantic affection for solitude, and in Retirement: 1 Dated 1747. 200 An Ode, these feelings find expression. In the second stanza of the poem the poet tells how Joy, rose-lipt Dryad, loves to dwell In the fourth stanza of the same poem, he exclaims in language which reminds us of Gray and Collins : Nymphs of the Groves, in green array'd, Where haunts the lonesome Nightingale ; Leans against some aged Pine, Wrapt in stedfast Thought profound, Her Eyes fixt stedfast on the Ground.1 Like Collins, too, are the title and many of the expressions and ideas in Warton's Ode on the Passion. His love of Spenser led him to write an elegy, Philander, in Imitation of Spenser. He writes a poem On May Morning, and An Ode written in a Grotto near Farnham. In the latter poem he cries: Let me therefore ever dwell, In this twilight, solemn Cell, For musing Melancholy made. Whose Entrance venerable Oaks o'ershade, With awful Gloom my serious Thoughts befriends : Here let me dwell, 'Till Death shall say-" Thy Cavern leave, Change it for a darker Grave." Wisdom and Virtue are to be Warton's great comforters amid the disillusion of life. In an Ode he tells how To tinkling Brooks, to twilight Shades, 1 Cf. Gray; supra, p. 169, quotation 2. Later, he turns for joy to "Beauty," the " Muses," Harmony and Picture," but without avail. He anticipated Gray by writing a Runic Ode, and something of Collins's, as of Milton's, music rings through his Ode to Sleep: Let sobbing Grief, and midnight Feast, Nor whistling Whirlwinds wound my Ear, To wake the Wolf is wont to howl: But whispering Show'rs from off the Eaves, Mix'd with the mildly-stirring Wind, Shall woo to rest my weary Mind; Now Silence o'er the midnight Ground, Slowly walks his solemn Round, In Mead or Forest, Dale or Hill, This quiet, meditative, somewhat thin poetic strain of the elder Warton was continued with greater force, with a slightly higher poetic power, in the work of his two sons, Joseph and Thomas Warton. JOSEPH WARTON (1722-1800) The elder son Joseph, who was obviously influenced by his father's literary taste, had the good fortune to find a kindred soul in William Collins, who was his schoolfellow at Winchester. Collins, Warton, and a third boy named Tomkins, wrote verses in friendly rivalry, and in October 1739, each of them published a poem in The Gentleman's Magazine. In the next number of the magazine a complimentary notice of the poems appeared, in which Collins's work received special commendation, and according to Warton's biographer Wooll, the friendly critic was Dr. Johnson. Joseph Warton published a first poem, The Enthusiast; or, The Lover of Nature,' in 1744, and in 1746 a book of verse, entitled Odes on Various Subjects. Like Akenside, the poet was a lover of Greek art, and he took the earliest opportunity of giving expression to the new poetic ideals which animated him. In the edition of his father's poems were some translations of Greek epigrams, to which Joseph prefixed an "advertisement," in which he says: 'The following Pieces are a Pattern of the Simplicity so much admir'd in the Grecian Writings, so foreign to the present prevailing Taste, to the Love of Modern Witticism, and Italian Conceit.” · But the Such was the small beginning of his revolt. spirit which here found expression had been fostered long before. As an undergraduate he had written to the father whose nature was so much in sympathy with his own: "I shall read Longinus as long as I live: it is impossible not to catch fire and rapture from his glowing style. The noble causes he gives (at the conclusion) for the decay of the sublime amongst men, to wit-the love of pleasure, riches, and idleness, would almost make one look down upon the world with contempt, and rejoice in and wish for toils, poverty and dangers, to combat with. For me, it only still serves to give me a greater distaste, contempt and hatred of the profane vulgus, 1 The Dict. Nat. Biog. wrongly describes this volume as the Ode on Reading West's Pindar. This ode, however, did not appear until 1749; v. infra, p. 208. 2 T. Warton's Poems on Several Occasions, 1747, p. 194; also in Wooll, P. I, note. and to tread underfoot this ἀγεννέστατον πάθος, as thoroughly below and unworthy of man.' 1 Warton's idealism was not strong enough to flourish when met by opposing forces, and this enthusiastic undergraduate, longing for toil and danger in a noble cause, was within nine years converted into the acquiescent, though reluctantly acquiescent, rector of Winslade, trundled across France at the heels of his patron the Duke of Bolton, that he might be able, as soon as the Duchess should breathe her last, to marry the Duke to the actress Lavinia Fenton, the Polly Peachum" of Gay's opera. But if Warton's ideals of conduct were warped by the realities of life, his poetic ideals, meeting with that most liberal form of toleration, the toleration of indifference, remained with him to the end. When only eighteen, this precocious rebel had sketched out a plan for a poem of revolt, in which the supremacy of reason is challenged. "The subjects of Reason," he writes, "having lately rebelled against him, he summons them to his court, that they may pay their obedience to him; whilst he sits on his throne, attended by the Virtues, his handmaids." In the "Advertisement" to his Odes on Various Subjects, which appeared in 1746, Warton once more criticised the poetry of the day. The Public," he says, "has been so much accustom'd of late to didactic Poetry alone, and Essays on moral Subjects, that any work where the imagination is much indulged, will perhaps not be relished or regarded. The author therefore of these pieces, is in some pain lest certain austere critics should think them too fanciful and descriptive. But as he is convinced that the fashion of moralizing in verse has been carried too far, and as he looks upon Invention and Imagination to be the chief faculties 1 Wooll, P. 9. 2 Ibid., p. II. |