-
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CONSTRUCTION OF ROMANTICISM: THOMAS
WARTON AND THE PLEASURES OF MELANCHOLY
BY ROBERT J. GRIFFIN
The great merit of this writer appears to us to consist in the
boldness and originality of his composition, and in the fortunate
audacity with which he has carried the dominion of poetry into
regions that had been considered as inaccessible to her ambition.
The gradual refinement of taste had, for nearly a century, been
weakening the force of original genius. Our poets had become timid
and fastidious, and circumscribed themselves both in the choice and
management of their subjects, by the observance of a limited number
of models, who were thought to have exhausted all the legitimate
resources of the art. - was one of the first who crossed this
enchanted circle; who reclaimed the natural liberty, and walked
abroad in the open field of observation as freely as those by whom
it was originally trodden. He passed from the imitation of poets to
the imitation of nature.
This quotation expresses many of the essentials of the romantic
version of literary history. The chain of associations-boldness,
original genius, break from a refined taste, natural liberty,
direct observation, and imitation of nature -would lead most
readers, I suggest, to com- plete the chain and fill in the space I
have left blank with the name Wordsworth. Pressed to identify the
author of the passage, one might reasonably guess it was Arnold, or
some other Victorian influenced by Wordsworth, surveying the
revolution in taste that occurred at the beginning of his/her
century. In actual fact, this is an appreciation of William Cowper
written in I803 by the critic generally recognized to be
Wordsworths mortal enemy, Francis Jeffrey? The feeling of dis-
orientation that comes over one upon realizing this is caused by
cer- tainties rapidly dissolving. How is it that in 1803 Jeffrey
writes in these terms? And if his subject is Cowper, why do we
expect it to be Words- worth?
Its certainly possible to argue that Jeffrey owes his critical
orien- tation to Wordsworths Preface to Lyrical Ballads published a
few years earlier. But this response misses the broader cultural
context: both Wordsworth and Jeffrey participate in a discourse
that was formulated in the 1740s and 1750s twenty years before they
were born in the
ELH 59 (1992) 799-815 0 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University
Press 799
-
early 1770s primarily by Joseph and Thomas Warton, and by Edward
Young. Jeffreys placing of Cowper, for instance, which one easily
mistakes for a much later critics placing of Wordsworth using
Words- worthian terms, reads like a summary of the main points of
Joseph Wartons Essay on Pope (1756) and Youngs Conjectures on
Original Composition (1759). Similarly, it was Joseph Warton who
first argued that Pope was the poet of reason. To the extent that
we give assent to the wordsworthian version of the eighteenth
century, or agree with Arnold that the century was an age of reason
and prose, we continue to participate uncritically in the master
narrative established by Popes rivals in the decade after his
death. Students of the eighteenth century have long abandoned such
terminology, but they have been talking mostly to themselves. The
romantic paradigm continues to dominate the way critics think about
literature generally, as several recent studies have confirmed.
The critical paradigm that prepared poets like Cowper, Bowles,
and Wordsworth to challenge Pope was already in place by 1760,
though it was not widely accepted. Romantic literary history, in
other words, existed before there was such a thing as romantic
poetry, or rather, before a great romantic poet appeared.2 The
romantic paradigm, more- over, is shared by those who divide
sharply over the value of Words- worth, as my opening citation of
Jeffrey should make clear. Romantic literary history, as I argue
here, originates with, and continues to function in relation to, an
anxiety about Pope. It begins in the mid- eighteenth century and
develops through the early nineteenth century as a polemical
construction of Popes place in English literary history. Popes
considerable influence throughout this period, even when con-
strued as purely negative, is brought home by Byrons sardonic
remark about his contemporaries in 1821: The attempt of the
poetical populace of the present day to obtain an ostracism against
Pope is as easily accounted for as the Athenians shell against
Aristides; they are tired of hearing him always called the Just.
They are also fighting for life; for, if he maintains his station,
they will reach their own-by falling.3
The Wartons and Young are usually defined as minor, pre-romantic
poets, stock figures in a Whig history of ideas in which progress
leads to a magic year, 1798. The teleological fallacy inherent in
the notion pre-romanticism has often been noticed, most recently by
Douglas Lane Patey in a review of a book by James Engell.4 My
perspective, however, defines romanticism not positively according
to the very varied forms its takes -Marilyn Butler uses the word
pro- tean-but negatively as a phenomenon that is intimately bound
up
800 Pleasures of Melancholy
-
in what it dislikes. The unity of romanticism, that is to say,
is discovered in the agreement over what it rejects. From this
perspective, the Wartons and Young are key figures, for they, in
conscious but ambiv- alent rebellion against Pope, helped create
the new paradigm out of old materials -such as the hierarchy of
genres and the distinction between art and nature. For me, then,
pre-romanticism disappears entirely as a category: the Wartons and
Young are simply the first romantics. Critics from at least the
1930s to the present have argued that romanticism is something that
happened to Wordsworth or to Blake at a certain stage of their
career, which is to say that before that they were pre-romantic.5
This makes no sense to me because I see what is generally called
romanticism as neither a particular style (at- tention to details
of nature, symbol, lyric expression, etc.), nor a par- ticular
content, but rather as a discourse that arises in response to a
psychological dilemma in relation to modernity in general, and
modern poetry, which is to say Pope, in particular.
Though discredited as a concept by many, the point of view
implied by the notion of pre-romanticism continues to function as a
mode of understanding literary history from Wordsworths and
Coleridges point of view. This is only one example of the way that
criticism, and with it literary history, tends to become simply a
satellite orbiting around the attractive power of great writers.
Since Wordsworth writes the poetry that is taken, retrospectively,
to be the true alter- native to Pope, criticism simply subsumes
under his name a movement that had been gathering force for a half
a century, labeling it pre-. This leads to strange formulations
that seem to corroborate Harold Blooms notion of the way that
strong poets are able to reverse chron- ological priority. Edith
Morley, for example, cites Joseph Warton on the need to see the
object steady and whole, and on the need for a simpler poetic
diction. Rather than suggest that Wordsworth was in- fluenced, or
indeed shaped by Wartons discourse, Morley actually compliments
Warton for agreeing with Wordsworth: Wordsworth him- self could say
no more.6
The same dynamic is at work in the fate of Cowper, for
Wordsworth would eventually assume the place in the romantic
paradigm that had once been held by the earlier poet. Chalmers, in
1810, wrote that Cowper, above all poets of recent times, has
become the universal favourite of his nation. Jeffrey, in 1811,
repeated his estimate of 1803: Cowper is, and is likely to
continue, the most popular of all who have written for the present
or the last generation. Coleridge in I817 named the most recent era
of English poetry, from Cowper to the present
Robert J. Grifin 801
-
day. 7 But already by 1852 Wordsworths reputation appears to
have eclipsed Cowpers with the consequence that Cowpers priority
was eclipsed as well. A reviewer thus protests against distortions
of literary history:
It is constantly asserted that he [that is, Wordsworth] effected
a reform in the language of poetry, that he found the public
bigoted to a vicious and flowery diction which seemed to mean a
great deal and really meant nothing, and that he led them back to
sense and simplicity. The claim appears to us to be a fanciful
assumption, refuted by the facts of literary history. Feebler
poetasters were no doubt read when Wordsworth began to write than
would now com- mand an audience, however small, but they had no
real hold on the public, and Cowper was the only popular bard of
the day. His masculine and unadorned English was relished in every
cultivated circle in the land, and Wordsworth was the child, and
not the father of the reaction, which after all, has been greatly
exaggerated.8
My interest in the genealogy of literary values, in telling the
story of the story -telling, that is, not how mirror became lamp,
but how this particular episode of literary history came to be
constructed in that way-focuses on the disjunction between todays
dominant un- derstanding of the relation between the Romantics and
the eighteenth century, and the very different perspective that
historical reconstruc- tion opens up. In turning to the Wartons, it
is useful to recall that Francis Jeffrey, writing in the early
nineteenth century, took their place in history for granted: The
Whartons [sic], both as critics and as poets, were of considerable
service in discrediting the high pre- tensions of the former race
[that is, the Augustans], and in bringing back to public notice the
great stores and treasures of poetry which lay hid in the records
of our older literature. The exposure of the pretenders to the
throne, Dryden-Addison-Pope, and the reinstate- ment of the true
line of inheritance is, in fact, the constitutive gesture of that
narrative of history we call romanticism. Everything follows from
this.
In this essay I focus on Thomas Wartons The Pleasures of Mel-
ancholy for the insights it gives into the genesis of a romantic
con- struction of literary history. The relegation of Thomas Warton
to the category of pre- by our standard literary histories is
richly suggestive. From a more oblique angle, the prefix conjures
up an archaeological level of romantic consciousness that has been
labeled in order to be forgotten because it is meant to serve as a
foundation we can confidently build upon in our discussions of what
really matters. The uncanny, as defined by Freud, involves a
confrontation with something strange, yet familiar, something that
awakens in us something we thought was
Pleasures of Melancholy
-
long put to rest. The notable obscurity of a figure like Thomas
Warton holds forth the possibility of moments of uncanny
recognition on the margin -uncanny not simply because they appear
so often as repressed doubles of our own discourse, but also
because of the way they repeat Pope in the very act of displacing
him.
I
Thomas Wartons The Pleasures of Melancholy, written in 1745, a
year after Popes death, is a poem referred to more often than read.
In the last forty years it has been addressed infrequently, twice
as a rough draft for Keatss Ode on Melancholy.l Dismissing pre-
romanticism as the logic of the contradictions inherent in
romanticism proper, I find that nowhere is the genesis of
romanticism better studied than in Wartons poem.
Drawing upon I1 Penseroso (and implicitly LAllegro) for its
structure, The Pleasures of Melancholy constructs itself around the
allegorical opposition between Day and Night, Mirth and Melancholy.
The noise of the city is opposed to the quiet of nature, vice to
virtue, summer to winter, bright sunshine to fogs, gloom, and rain.
The speak- ers preference for solitude and night, emblems for
virtue, expresses itself further in his choice between fictional
women, emblems for their authors. In this erotics of reading,
Warton prefers Spensers Una, alone in the wilderness, to Popes
Belinda, launched at noon on the silver Thames.
Thro POPES soft song though all the Graces breathe, And happiest
art adorn his Attic page; Yet does my mind with sweeter transport
gloY As at the root of mossy trunk reclind, In magic SPENSERS
wildy-warbled song I see deserted UNA wander wide Through wasteful
solitudes, and lurid heaths Weary, forlorn; than when the fated
fair, Upon the bright bosom of silver Thames, Launches in all the
lustre of brocade, Amid the splendors of the laughing Sun. The gay
description palls upon the sense, And coldly strikes the mind with
feeble bliss.
Oh, wrap me then in shades of darksome pine, Bear me to caves of
desolation brown, To dusky vales and hermit-haunted rocks!
(153-68)l
Robert J. Grcfin 803
-
To identify Pope with his ironic heroine, Belinda, is rather
ten- dentious because it collapses the distance signaled by Popes
satire. But if we read the poem simply as a statement of preference
for The Fairie Queene over The Rape ofthe Lock, there is no point
in quibbling, nor are standards of taste here the real issue. What
is more to the point is an examination of the evidence the poem
provides for the grounds of evaluation. Wartons poem is intensely
interesting because it reveals the contradictions at the very heart
of the ideological con- struction we recognize as romanticism. For
the poem cannot sustain its own dichotomy between a sunny
classicism that is attractive but superficial - Pope, Belinda,
Attic art-and a melancholy Gothicism that offers deeper pleasures -
Spensers Una, Miltons Penseroso. The poem itself gives evidence
that Pope, master of classic forms, is also the primary revivalist
and transmitter of Gothic gloom.
Structured as it is by opposing Mirth to Melancholy, Day to
Night, and Spenser-Milton to Pope, the logic of the poem breaks
down in several places. First of all, Pope is represented not just
by Belinda, but also by his Eloisa and the Unfortunate Lady, both
of whom are recruited to the side of pensive Melancholy. It is
worth noting that these two figures were the ones Blake, too,
recalled when representing Pope for a series of English authors
[see fig. 11. The opening lines of Popes Elegy to the Memory of an
Unfortunate Lady (1717) read as follows:
What beckning ghost, along the moonlight shade Invites my steps,
and points to yonder glade? ~ Tis she!-but why the bleeding bosom
gord, Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?12
The ghost appears with sword and bleeding bosom, we discover,
be- cause she is the spirit of a principled young woman who chose
death rather than marry against her wishes in order to enrich her
guardian. Thomas Warton, apparently, saw the same ghost during his
own imag- ined midnight vigils:
But when the world Is clad in Midnights raven-colord robe, In
hollow charnel let me watch the flame Of taper dim, while airy
voices talk Along the glimmering walls, or ghostly shape At
distance seen, invites with beckning hand.
(4449, emphasis added)
804 Pleasures of Melancholy
-
Eloisa, unlike the Unfortunate Lady, is named explicitly, but
before turning to that passage it is useful to reread the
much-admired set piece on Melancholy from Popes Eloisa to Abelard
(1717):
The darksome pines that oer yon rocks reclind Wave high, and
murmur to the hollow wind, The wandring streams that shine between
the hills, The grots that echo to the tinkling rills, The dying
gales that pant upon the trees, The lakes that quiver to the
curling breeze; No more these scenes my meditation aid, Or lull to
rest the visionary maid. But oer the twilight groves and dusky
caves, Long-sounding isles, and intermingled graves, Black
Melancholy sits, and round her throws A death-like silence, and a
dread repose: Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene, Shades
evry flower, and darkens evry green, Deepens the murmur of the
falling floods, And breathes a browner horror on the woods.
(155-70)
Here is Warton, 28 years later:
Few know the elegance of soul refind, Whose soft sensation feels
a quicker joy From Melancholys scenes, than the dull pride Of
tasteless splendor and magnificence Can eer afford. Thus Eloise,
whose mind Had languished to the pangs of melting love, More
genuine transport found, as on some tomb Reclind, she watchd the
tapers of the dead; Or through the pillard iles, amid pale shrines
Of imagd saints, and intermingled graves, Musd a veild votaress;
than Flavia feels, As through the mazes of festive balls, Proud of
her conquering charms, and beautys blaze, She floats amid the
silken sons of dress, And shines the fairest of the fair.
(2nd ed., 93-106)
Wartons allusion to Eloisa imbeds her within an opposition to a
Belinda-like coquette, picking up verbal echoes from both poems.
Notice that the thematic structure in this passage is the same as
in the lines preferring Una-Spenser to Belinda-Pope. If we follow
War- tons synecdochal method of associating characters with their
authors, the explicit opposition Eloisa/Flavia signifies the
implicit opposition
806 Pleasures of Melancholy
-
of Pope to himself, Pope/Pope. Since this passage (Pope/Pope)
occurs some fifty lines before the one in which authors are openly
named and evaluated (Spenser/Pope), and since the thematic content
of the two passages is identical, the difference between them, the
substitution of Una for Eloisa in the second passage, is highly
significant. For it is this substitution that allows Warton to
displace Pope altogether. When Pope/Pope becomes Spenser/Pope, the
preference expressed between two characters in Pope has been
transformed into a preference for Spenser over a Pope now wholly
identified with one of his own satiric creations.
The internal contradiction by which Pope is dissociated from
Eloisa but identified with Belinda is the crucial, foundational
move. For it is in the disjunctive space created by that
substitution and displace- ment, and indeed by the dissociation of
Pope from himself, that the ideology of what later will be called
romanticism grows and flour- ishes.13 In Eloisa Pope drew upon
Ovids Her&es for a genre of the womans lament, but he
transposed it to the Gothic Middle Ages. Thomas Warton, however,
separates out the gothic and the classical strands in Pope, and
then attributes what is valued more highly, in this case gothic, to
someone else. This constitutive contradiction and displacement, of
course, is a symptom of Wartons intense identification with Pope,
who is apparently both Muse and rival. The misrecognition that
brings romanticism into being is, at bottom, a response to the
anxiety of Popes influence.
In this erotics of reading that substitutes the female character
as object of desire for the male author as inspiring muse, Wartons
iden- tification with, his desire to be, Pope is made quite clear
in his sub- sequent use of Eloisa. After claiming that Popes
description of Belinda coldly strikes the mind with feeble bliss,
Warton turns away and cries, in lines Ive cited above: Oh, wrap me
then in shades of dark- some pine. . . . The darksome pines, of
course, are those with which Pope surrounded Eloisas convent in the
other passage already cited: The darksome pines that oer yon rock
reclind. . . . Thus, Warton turns coldly from Belinda to rush into
the arms of Eloisa. In the continuation of these lines Wartons use
of Eloisa is revealing.
Gothic settings are congenial to ghosts and phantoms, and these
poems are no exception. Popes Unfortunate Lady opens, as we noted,
with an apparition; in Eloisa, too, the heroines desire for Abelard
produces in her the delusion of his presence. She rushes after the
phantom, only to be returned abruptly to her forlorn condition.
Eloisa:
Robert J. Grijjjn 807
-
Sudden you mount! you beckon from the skies; Clouds interpose,
waves roar, and winds arise. I shriek, start up, the same sad
prospect find, And wake to all the griefs I left behind.
(254-58)
Warton rewrites this incident, but in his version the you refers
reflexively to the speaker who recounts his experience of waking
from delusion:
Sudden you start- the imagined joys recede, The same sad
prospect opens on your sense.
(186-87)
The close verbal repetitions suggest that the narrator writes
from the place of Eloisa. The ghost he chases, however, is not
Abelard, but one Sapphira, and the experience, unlike the painful
awakening of Eloisa, is for Warton one of the pleasures of
melancholy:
These are delights that absence drear has made Familiar to my
soul, ere since the form Of young Sapphira, beauteous as the
Spring, When from her violet-woven couch awaked By frolic Zephyrs
hand, her tender cheek Graceful she lifts, and blushing from her
bower, Issues to clothe in gladsome-glistering green The genial
globe, first met my dazzled sight.
(191-98)
According to the logic of the poem, Sapphira should not really
be attractive to Warton because she so clearly personifies the
LAllegro chain of associations that he shuns (day, sunshine,
greenness, spring- summer). Not just beauteous as the Spring, she
actually embodies the Springs power for it is she who issues to
clothe in gladsome- glistering green / The genial globe, But the
speaker had already told us: I choose the pale Decembers foggy
glooms (74). Now we see that he was driven to melancholy by his
love for Sapphira, that, indeed, one of its pleasures is the
contemplation of her glad, green, spring- dayness from his retreat.
Penseroso, so far from holding Allegr[a] in contempt, has been
dazzled by her and nurses his wound in solitude; the Penseroso
character is, in Wartons version, brought into being simultaneously
with his desire for Allegra.
If we correlate this section with Wartons literary historical
allegory, the contempt he displays for Belinda is the defensive
reaction-formation of his desire for her. The explicit aggression
against Pope-Belinda in
808 Pleasures of Melancholy
-
the earlier passage suggests, in the light of this later one, a
parallel between Warton and the Baron who plots to clip Belindas
lock, and whose only wish in battling her is to die upon his foe.
For surely, Sapphira, as goddess and power of nature, is a
pastoralized, or rather pasteurized form of Belinda, launched forth
on the Thames and shining brighter than the sun, in that her toxic
elements have been neu- tralized.
This episode rehearses Eloisas hallucinatory sorrow over
Abelards absence (and ultimately, of course, over the crucial
absence signified by his castration), but with a difference, for
now we have a male Eloisa contemplating in retreat a sublimated,
idealized, and thus more ac- ceptable image of Belinda, duly
transferred from a social to a pastoral garden. The contradictions
in Wartons text suggest that the poem accomplishes for him the
first stages of a disengagement from Pope, while the fact that he
retreats into Eloisas role at all reveals the strength of the
original attachment.
-
Romanticism, therefore, originates in a two-fold strategy:
arising from a primal reading of Pope, it misrepresents him on a
doctrinal level, while transposing him into a less threatening,
pastoral version of himself on the level of imagery. The doctrinal
necessity of opposing Pope to Spenser, or to Milton, ensures that
explicit references to Eloisa will eventually drop out. Thus,
although Popes mediation of the early Milton in Eloisa to Abelard
leads to the valorization of the penseroso figure as the
characteristic romantic protagonist, Popes role as trans- mitter of
gothic alienation (and this describes Eloisa more appro- priately
than it does Miltons poem) will nonetheless be gradually forgotten,
even though it remains open to be read in Wartons poem.
II
Both Wartons quickly became jealously possessive of Milton and
began to consider Pope as a usurper of the poetic tradition. They
came to construct Pope as no more than the poet of witty rhyme and
polished couplet whose dominance actually prevented Miltons I1
Penseroso from being appreciated. They, of course, revived the true
line, and thus, as Thomas said in his 1785 Preface to an edition of
Miltons minor poems, the school of Milton rose in emulation of the
school of Pope.15 An anecdote told by both brothers about the
relation of Popes Eloisa to Miltons Penseroso takes us to the heart
of romantic literary history.
According to the Wartons, Pope owed his knowledge of Miltons
minor poems to their father, Thomas Warton the Elder, who brought
them to his attention through Digby, a mutual acquaintance. Very
shortly after, Popes Eloisa appeared with passages, Tom Warton
claims,
pilfered from COMUS and the IWVSEROSO. He was however conscious,
that he might borrow from a book then scarcely remem- bered,
without the hazard of discovery, or the imputation of pla- giarism
.
Having made the accusation, Warton backs off a little:
Yet the theft was so slight, as hardly to deserve the name: and
it must be allowed, that the experiment was happily and judiciously
applied, in delineating the sombrous scenes of the pensive Eloisas
convent, the solitary Paraclete. l6
Whether Popes troping upon Milton deserves the name of theft or
not, it is curious that the charge comes from the writer who drew
so liberally upon Pope when writing The Pleasures of Melancholy.
It
810 Pleasures of Melancholy
-
is odd also that it appears in an edition of Milton, the
overstuffed notes of which call our attention to parallel passages
in authors ancient and modern.
Tom Warton recurs to this story in his discussion of Comus, and
manages to insinuate that it is an odd thing altogether that Popes
poem ever came into existence because it isnt like him:
It is strange that Pope, by no means of a congenial spirit,
should be the first who copied Comus and 1I Penseroso. But Pope was
a gleaner of Old English poets; and he was pilfering from obsolete
English poetry, without the least fear or danger of being detected.
l7
The problem with such a narrative, of course, is that it is
false, not just in its larger claims, but also in the very details
of the transmission. In actual fact Pope possessed an edition of
Miltons minor poems (1645) at least as early as 1705, when he was
seventeen, some twelve years before Eloisa, and before the Elder
Warton is supposed to have mentioned the volume to Digby. We know
this because William Trum- ball, former secretary of state under
William III and Popes neighbor, sent Pope a letter, dated 19
October I-705, thanking him for the loan of the book. Internal
evidence, furthermore, shows that influences of Penseroso appear as
early as Popes first published work, The Pas- torals (1709), as the
Twickenham edition records. The elder Warton, apparently, lent Pope
a rare copy of Gorbuduc in the summer of 1717, but the probability
is that Warton came to the early Milton through Pope, not the other
way around. l8
There are two conclusions I draw from these facts. First,
Miltons minor poems were rarely read, but Pope assimilated them and
trans- mitted their strain in his work. Second, the Wartons cannot
give Pope credit for this; instead they transfer the source of
proper taste to their father, while accusing Pope of being both an
alien (uncongenial, literally, not of the same spirit) and a thief.
While the Wartons are defenders of true poetry, Pope is the usurper
who came to the early Milton through the Elder Warton and stole
from it shamelessly. This anecdote, in erary his torv
fact, encodes in miniature the paradigm of romantic lit-
operative in Francis Jeffrey and many others, according
to which it is the Wartons who revived Milton in opposition to
Pope. lg Francis Jeffrey simply repeats the Wartons, as others will
repeat Jeffrey. Wordsworth recalls the anecdote when he comments on
Miltons early poems, which, he says, though on their first
appearance they were praised by a few of the judicious, were
afterwards neglected to that degree, that Pope in his youth could
borrow from them without risk
Robert J. Grif$n 811
-
of its being known. 20 Gosse retells this story in the early
twentieth century, but adds, extraordinarily, that Eloisa never was
a favorite among Popes admirers, probably, he speculates, because
of its horror. The only thing missing, but found elsewhere in the
Wartons, Jeffrey, Coleridge and others, is the corollary that Popes
line is a French deviation from English stock. Northrop Frye echoes
this es- sentially eighteenth-century Wartonian view, but in a
different context, when he says in 1963 that criticism, having
recognized its true lineage in romanticism, has returned to its
proper channe1.21
III
The denials that work themselves out in the foundation of the
War- tonian version of literary history need, perhaps, no further
explanation. But some ironies are too rare, too significant, and
too representative, to let pass. One of these involves, again, the
elder Warton, who, as it happens, was born in the same year as
Pope, 1688. A few years after their fathers death in 1745, the
dutiful sons, pressed for funds, hit upon the idea of publishing a
collection of their fathers verse by subscription to friends and
relatives as a kind of memorial. Occasionally, scholars have looked
into the collection to discover signs of pre- romanticism and found
them. But it also possible to find there a poem like The Ode to
Taste, which pays tribute to Pope. The opening stanza, addressed to
Taste, reads as follows:
Leave not Brittanias Isle; since Pope is fled To meet his Homer
in Elysian Bowers,
What Bard shall dare presume His various-sounding Harp?
Let not resistless Dulness oer us spread Deep Gothic night; for
lo! the Fiend appears
To blast each blooming Bay That decks our barren Shores .22
Pope, according to this stanza, was the last bulwark of Taste
against the spread of Dulnesss Gothic night. Now that he is gone,
Britain appears to be in bad way, for no worthy successor has
appeared to take up his instrument, so that the loss threatens an
apocalyptic breach with true standards, The poem, in fact,
constructs Pope in the very terms he had fashioned for himself in
The Dun&ad. It is fair to assume he would have been pleased.
Since Pope fled to Elysian Bowers in 1744, this clearly had to have
been written in the final year of the Elder Wartons life.
812 Pleasures of Melancholy
-
However, the most remarkable thing about this poem is that it
was not written by the Elder Warton at all, but by Thomas, Jr.
roughly about the same time that he wrote The Pleasures of
Melancholy. David Fairer, by examining the manuscripts, determined
that, since the fathers corpus was not large enough to make up a
volume, his pious sons contributed about ten poems of their own,
generously do- nating them in their fathers name. Subsequent
investigations by Chris- tina Le Prevost led-her to conclude that
nineteen poems were certainly by the brothers, and probably
fourteen others, leaving the father with less than a third of the
volume, not even counting the fact that some . of those were
revised by Joseph.23
Fairer concludes from his evidence that, since poems showing
pre- romantic tendencies (whatever that might mean) were actually
written by the sons, the Elder Warton can no longer be legitimately
considered a lone pre-romantic voice in Popes generation. He does
not deal with The Ode to Taste except to identify it as Thomas,
Jr.s. But Fairers scholarship, and Le Prevosts even more so, adds
evidence to my own thesis that romanticism begins in a love-hate
relation to Pope. When Warton assigned his ode to his father, he
simply transferred his own earlier self, one cathected to Pope, to
the previous generation, and then began a series of polemics
against it.
Tel Aviv University
NOTES
Review of William Hayleys Lifk of Cowper in Edinburgh Review
(April 1803), in Francis Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh
Review, 4 ~01s. (London, 1844), 1:411. Jeffreys th is-will-never-do
review of The Excursion is the infamous and standard example of the
forces Wordsworth had to overcome in order to obtain
recognition.
2 I wrote this sentence before I discovered that my words echo
Marlon Rosss similar formulation: In other words, romantic ideology
began to dominate the literary estab- lishment before the romantic
canon, as we know it, was established (54). Two differ- ences:
first, my phrase refers to literary history rather than ideology
because I assume throughout that ideological values require a
narrative framework for their expression; second, Rosss statement
occurs in a discussion of Wordsworths reputation circa 1820,
whereas the burden of my argument is that we find essentially the
same romantic paradigm operative in literary history before
Wordsworth was born. For Rosss very rich and wide-ranging book see
The Contours of Masculine Desire: Ro- manticism and the Rise of
Womens Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989).
3 Lord Byron, Selected Prose, ed. Peter Gunn (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1972), 406.
See Douglas Lane Patey, review of Forming the Critical Mind:
Dryden to Coledrige, by James Engell, Eighteenth Century Studies 23
(1989-90): 205-211. See also Henry Knight Miller, The Whig
Interpretation of Literary History, Eighteenth Century Studies 6
(1972): 60-84, especially 78. Marshall Brown defends the notion of
teleology in a new book, Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford Univ.
Press, 1991). He offers a reading of Youngs Night Thoughts, but
does not address the Wartons at all.
Robert J. Gri#in 813
-
Edwin Stein, commenting on Wordsworths early long poems,
exemplifies the general application of this conceptual frame: The
mixture of naturalism and vision in these poems is evident in its
cruder pre-Romantic form; see Wordsworths Art of AZZusion
(University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1988), 194.
Stein, of course, is in good company, for very few critics of the
Romantics have seriously questioned the term. Ernest Bernbaum
provides the crudest, most naive example of the logic of
pre-romanticism when he gives us a Chronological Table of the Chief
Pre-Romantic Works. The list begins with 1696 and includes aZZ of
the major and minor eighteenth- century writers of every possible
genre- the only exceptions are Dryden, Pope, Swift, Fielding, and
Johnson (Guide through the Romantic Mouemcnt, 2nd ed. [New York:
Ronald Press, 19491, 6-7).
6 Edith Morley, Joseph Warton: A Comparison of His Essay on the
Genius and Writings of Pope with His Edition of Popes Works, Essays
and Studies, vol. 9, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924),
102,
7 See Chalmers Life of Cowper in The Works of the English Poets
from Chaucer to Cowper, ed. Alexander Chalmers, 21~01s. (London: J.
Johnson, ISlO), 17:602. For Jeffrey see his review of John Ford,
Edinburgh Review (August lSll), in Jeffrey (note l), 2:294.
Coleridges comment appears in Biographia Liter-aria, The Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, VOL. 7, ed. James Engell and W.
Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), 7:~.
8 Within the last few years a scholar has concluded, oddly from
my point of view, that the review itself is of minor interest in
the history of Wordsworth scholarship; see Thomas C. Richardson,
Lockhart and Elwin on Wordsworth, Wordsworth CircZe 20 (1989): 156.
Richardson traces the influence of Lockhart on Whitwell Elwin, the
author of the review in the QuartcrZy Review (December 1852):
182-236. My citation is taken from page 233.
g Jeffreys review of Scotts edition of Swift, Edinburgh Review
(September 1816), (note l), 1:166.
lo See Oliver Ferguson, Warton and Keats: Two Views of
Melancholy, Keats and Shelley Journal 18 (1969): 12-15; and
Nathaniel Teich, A Comparative Approach to Periodization: Forms of
Self-Consciousness in Wartons The Pleasures of Melancholy and
Keatss Ode on Melancholy, in Proceedings of the Xth Congress of the
Inter- nationaL Comparative Literature Association, VOL. 1: GeneraZ
ProbZems of Literary History (New York: Garland, 1982): 158-63.
This volume provides much evidence that romantic literary history
continues to thrive. In relation to Teich, I would only suggest
that it may be more useful to compare forms of self-consciousness
in two major poets, rather than pitting a major one against a minor
one, especially in this case since Wartons poem was raw material
for Keats. The best overview of both Wartons, and the place to
begin, is Lawrence Lipkings The Ordering of the Arts in
Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1970). For a selection of scholarship, see John A. Vance, Joseph
and Thomas War-ton: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland,
1983).
l1 Although written in 1745, the poem was first published in
1747; a revised version was printed by Dodsley in 1755. The first
edition is reprinted in Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose, ed.
Louis I. Bredvold, Alan D. McKillop, and Lois Whitney (New York:
Ronald Press, 1939), 565-70. I quote from this anthology except
where I indicate the 2nd edition, which I cite from Dodsleys A
CoLLection of Poems, in Six VoZumes, by SeveraL Hands, with Notes,
(London, 1782), 4:224-35.
l2 My text for Eloisa and The Unfortunate Lady is Twickenham
Edition: The Poems of ALexunder Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1963), 252- 61, 262-64.
l3 It may be useful here to cite Freud on the mechanism of
repression: In this connection it becomes comprehensible that those
objects to which men give their preference, that is, their ideals,
originate in the same perceptions and experiences as those objects
of which they have the most abhorrence, and that the two
originally
814 Pleasures of Melancholy
-
differed from one another only by slight modifications. Indeed,
. . . it is possible for the original instinct-presentation to be
split into two, one part undergoing repression, while the
remainder, just on account of its intimate association with the
other undergoes idealization (Repression [ 19151, in General
Psychological Theory: Papers on Meta- psychology, ed. Philip Rieff
[New York: Collier, 19631, 108).
l4 My analysis here draws directly upon Patricinio Schweickarts
observations on Joyce: Relevant here is Levi-Strausss theory that
woman functions as currency ex- changed between men. The woman in
the text converts the text into a woman, and the &culation of
this text/woman becomes the central ritual that establishes the
bond between the author and his male readers. See Patricinio
Schweickart, Reading Our- selves: Toward a Feminist Theory of
Reading, in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and
Contexts, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patricinio P. Schweickart
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), 31-62. The quotation
is taken from the reprint of this article in Contemporary Literary
Criticism: Literary and Cultural Stud- ies, ed. Robert Con Davis
and Ronald Schleifer, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1989), 126.
l5 John Milton, Poems upon SeveraL Occasions, ed. Thomas Warton
(London: Dods- ley, 1785), xi.
l6 Warton introduces the anecdote by saying, My brother
remembers to have heard my father say. . . . (Milton [note 151,
viii-ix).
l7 Milton, 186. l8 Arthur H. Scouten discusses this incident in
The Warton Forgeries and the
Concept of Preromanticism in English Literature, Etudes
Anglaises 40 (1987): 438. lg After the establishment of romanticism
in the nineteenth century, the Wartons
were forgotten until, at the end of the century, scholars began
to search for precursors to the romantic movement . Phelps (1893),
Beers (1898), and Courthope (1905) are some of the literary
historians who call attention to the Wartons. Courthope wrote that
Joseph and Th omas were the pioneers of the Romantic Movement.
Shortly afterwards the concept of pre-romanticism, part of a
certain politicized version of French history, was applied to the
literary history of Europe by Van Tieghem (1924), and to English
literary history by Legouis and Cazamian (1924). A few years later,
Bernbaums Guide Through the Romantic Movement (1930) provided an
extensive discussion of pre- romanticism. For details see Arthur H.
Scouten, The Warton Forgeries and the Concept of Preromanticism in
English Literature, Etudes Anglaises 40 (1987): 434- 47.
2o Wordsworth, Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, in The Prose
Works of Wil- ham Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane
Worthington Smyser, 3 ~01s. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I974),
3:7O.
21 The anti-Romantic movement in criticism. which in Britain and
America followed the Hulme-Eliot-Pound broadsides of the early
twenties, is now over and done with, and criticism has got its
sense of literary tradition properly in focus again (Foreword to
the collection of English Institute essays, Romanticism
Reconsidered, ed. Nothrop Frye [New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
19631, v), It is here that Frye simply takes for granted the
standard construction of romantic literary history: It is a datum
of literary experience that when we cross the divide of 1798 we
find ourselves in a different kind of poetic world, darker in
color, so to speak, than what has preceded it (v-vi).
22 Thomas Warton the Elder, Poems on Several Occasions (1748)
(New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), 180.
23 See David Fairer, The Poems of Thomas Warton the Elder?
Review of English Studies 26 (1975): 287-300, 395406; together with
The Poems of Thomas Warton the Elder?-A Postscript, Review of
English Studies 29 (1978): 61-65. For Christina Le Prevost, see
More Unacknowledged Verse by Joseph Warton, Review of English
Studies 37 (1986): 31447.
Robert J. Grifin 815