SOURCE: Griffin, Robert J. “The Eighteenth-Century Construction of Romanticism: Thomas Warton and the Pleasures of Melancholy.” ELH 59, no. 4 (winter 1992): 799-815.

[In the following essay, Griffin explores the idea that Warton is a romantic poet by analyzing his poem The Pleasures of Melancholy.]

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 complete 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 1803 by the critic generally recognized to be Wordsworth's mortal enemy, Francis Jeffrey.¹ The feeling of disorientation that comes over one upon realizing this is caused by certainties 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 Wordsworth?

It's certainly possible to argue that Jeffrey owes his critical orientation to Wordsworth's 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 early 1770s, primarily by Joseph and Thomas Warton, and by Edward Young. Jeffrey's placing of Cowper, for instance, which one easily mistakes for a much later critic's placing of Wordsworth using Wordsworthian terms, reads like a summary of the main points of Joseph Warton's Essay on Pope (1756) and Young's 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 Pope's 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, moreover, is shared by those who divide sharply over the value of Wordsworth, 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 Pope's place in English literary history. Pope's considerable influence throughout this period, even when construed as purely negative, is brought home by Byron's 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 Athenian's 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 “protean”—but negatively as a phenomenon that is intimately bound up 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 ambivalent 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 (attention to details of nature, symbol, lyric expression, etc.), nor a particular 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 Wordsworth's and Coleridge's 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 alternative 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 Bloom's notion of the way that strong poets are able to reverse chronological 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 influenced, or indeed shaped by Warton's discourse, Morley actually compliments Warton for agreeing with Wordsworth: “Wordsworth himself 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 1817 named the most recent era of English poetry, “from Cowper to the present day.”⁷ But already by 1852 Wordsworth's reputation appears to have eclipsed Cowper's with the consequence that Cowper's 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 command 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 today's dominant understanding of the relation between the Romantics and the eighteenth century, and the very different perspective that historical reconstruction 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 pretensions 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.”⁹ The exposure of the pretenders to the throne, Dryden-Addison-Pope, and the reinstatement 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 Warton's “The Pleasures of Melancholy” for the insights it gives into the genesis of a romantic construction 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 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 Warton's “The Pleasures of Melancholy,” written in 1745, a year after Pope's 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 Keats's “Ode on Melancholy.”¹⁰ 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 Warton's poem.

Drawing upon “Il Penseroso” (and implicitly “L'Allegro”) 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 speaker's 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 Spenser's Una, alone in the wilderness, to Pope's Belinda, launched at noon on the silver Thames.

Thro' POPE'S soft song though all the Graces breathe,
And happiest art adorn his Attic page;
Yet does my mind with sweeter transport glow,
As at the root of mossy trunk reclin'd,
In magic SPENSER'S 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)¹¹

To identify Pope with his ironic heroine, Belinda, is rather tendentious because it collapses the distance signaled by Pope's satire. But if we read the poem simply as a statement of preference for The Fairie Queene over The Rape of the 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. Warton's poem is intensely interesting because it reveals the contradictions at the very heart of the ideological construction 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—Spenser's Una, Milton's 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. The opening lines of Pope's “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” (1717) read as follows:

What beck'ning ghost, along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?
'Tis she!—but why the bleeding bosom gor'd,
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?(12)

The ghost appears with sword and bleeding bosom, we discover, because 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 imagined midnight vigils:

                                                                                But when the world
Is clad in Midnight's raven-color'd 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 beck'ning hand.

(44-49, emphasis added)

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 Pope's “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717):

The darksome pines that o'er yon rocks reclin'd
Wave high, and murmur to the hollow wind,
The wand'ring 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 o'er 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 ev'ry flower, and darkens ev'ry 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 refin'd,
Whose soft sensation feels a quicker joy
From Melancholy's scenes, than the dull pride
Of tasteless splendor and magnificence
Can e'er afford. Thus Eloise, whose mind
Had languished to the pangs of melting love,
More genuine transport found, as on some tomb
Reclin'd, she watch'd the tapers of the dead;
Or through the pillar'd iles, amid pale shrines
Of imag'd saints, and intermingled graves,
Mus'd a veil'd votaress; than Flavia feels,
As through the mazes of festive balls,
Proud of her conquering charms, and beauty's blaze,
She floats amid the silken sons of dress,
And shines the fairest of the fair.

(2nd ed., 93-106)

Warton's 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 Warton's synecdochal method of associating characters with their authors, the explicit opposition Eloisa/Flavia signifies the implicit opposition 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 displacement, and indeed by the dissociation of “Pope” from himself, that the ideology of what later will be called “romanticism” grows and flourishes.¹³ In “Eloisa” Pope drew upon Ovid's Heroides for a genre of the woman's 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 Warton's 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 Pope's influence.

In this erotics of reading that substitutes the female character as object of desire for the male author as inspiring muse, Warton's identification with, his desire to be, Pope is made quite clear in his subsequent use of Eloisa. After claiming that Pope's description of Belinda “coldly strikes the mind with feeble bliss,” Warton turns away and cries, in lines I've cited above: “Oh, wrap me then in shades of darksome pine. …” The darksome pines, of course, are those with which Pope surrounded Eloisa's convent in the other passage already cited: “The darksome pines that o'er yon rock reclin'd. …” Thus, Warton turns coldly from Belinda to rush into the arms of Eloisa. In the continuation of these lines Warton's use of Eloisa is revealing.

Gothic settings are congenial to ghosts and phantoms, and these poems are no exception. Pope's “Unfortunate Lady” opens, as we noted, with an apparition; in “Eloisa,” too, the heroine's 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:

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 Zephyr's 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 L'Allegro chain of associations that he shuns (day, sunshine, greenness, spring-summer). Not just “beauteous as the Spring,” she actually embodies the Spring's 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 December's 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 Warton's version, brought into being simultaneously with his desire for Allegra.

If we correlate this section with Warton's 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 the earlier passage suggests, in the light of this later one, a parallel between Warton and the Baron who plots to clip Belinda's 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 neutralized.

This episode rehearses Eloisa's hallucinatory sorrow over Abelard's 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 acceptable image of Belinda, duly transferred from a social to a pastoral garden. The contradictions in Warton's text suggest that the poem accomplishes for him the first stages of a disengagement from Pope, while the fact that he retreats into Eloisa's role at all reveals the strength of the original attachment. Out of this double bind, he clears a space for himself by creating a structure that fragments Pope, and then opposes part to part.

Warton's original identification with Pope, we may conclude, gave rise to an ambivalence that produced a series of corresponding images: the negative values attached to Belinda and her double, Flavia, little better than tarts, are matched symmetrically by the positive values attached to Eloisa, the holy, and Sapphira, the light of life. The text of the father-as-muse has been first feminized and then fragmented into a saint on one hand and a whore on the other. Warton's double-headed synecdoche, representing Pope as Eloisa-Belinda, distances Pope from his work, and thus allows Warton to appropriate that work in an oedipal exchange.¹⁴

“The Pleasures of Melancholy” is both useful and fascinating because it manifests the influence of Pope before it has been fully repressed and transformed. Here we see the very process by which the text of Pope is divided, alienated from itself, and assigned to “Pope” on the one hand, and to “Spenser-Milton” on the other. Warton's poem is “pre”-romantic only in the limited sense that a “fully” romantic text would be self-conscious enough of its own origins to efface any explicit trace of Eloisa while retaining her poetic value in the name of the gothic. But then we must remember that Warton was seventeen; in his revision of the poem ten years later, he in fact did edit out several verbatim echoes of “Eloisa,” including the “darksome pine” passage, but could not eradicate her completely without destroying the fabric of the poem.

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 Pope's mediation of the early Milton in “Eloisa to Abelard” leads to the valorization of the penseroso figure as the characteristic romantic protagonist, Pope's role as transmitter of gothic alienation (and this describes “Eloisa” more appropriately than it does Milton's poem) will nonetheless be gradually forgotten, even though it remains open to be read in Warton's 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 Milton's “Il Penseroso” from being appreciated. They, of course, revived the “true” line, and thus, as Thomas said in his 1785 Preface to an edition of Milton's 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 Pope's Eloisa to Milton's Penseroso takes us to the heart of romantic literary history.

According to the Wartons, Pope owed his knowledge of Milton's minor poems to their father, Thomas Warton the Elder, who brought them to his attention through Digby, a mutual acquaintance. Very shortly after, Pope's “Eloisa” appeared with passages, Tom Warton claims,

pilfered from COMUS and the PENSEROSO. He was however conscious, that he might borrow from a book then scarcely remembered, without the hazard of discovery, or the imputation of plagiarism.

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 Eloisa's convent, the solitary Paraclete.¹⁶

Whether Pope's 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 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 Pope's poem ever came into existence because it isn't like him:

It is strange that Pope, by no means of a congenial spirit, should be the first who copied Comus and Il 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.¹⁷

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 Milton's 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 Trumball, former secretary of state under William III and Pope's neighbor, sent Pope a letter, dated 19 October 1705, thanking him for the loan of the book. Internal evidence, furthermore, shows that influences of “Penseroso” appear as early as Pope's first published work, The Pastorals (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.¹⁸

There are two conclusions I draw from these facts. First, Milton's minor poems were rarely read, but Pope assimilated them and transmitted 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 fact, encodes in miniature the paradigm of romantic literary history operative in Francis Jeffrey and many others, according to which it is the Wartons who revived Milton in opposition to Pope.¹⁹ Francis Jeffrey simply repeats the Wartons, as others will repeat Jeffrey. Wordsworth recalls the anecdote when he comments on Milton's 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 of its being known.”²⁰ Gosse retells this story in the early twentieth century, but adds, extraordinarily, that “Eloisa” never was a favorite among Pope's 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 Pope's line is a French deviation from English stock. Northrop Frye echoes this essentially 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 channel.²¹

III

The denials that work themselves out in the foundation of the Wartonian 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 father's death in 1745, the dutiful sons, pressed for funds, hit upon the idea of publishing a collection of their father's 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 Brittania's 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 o'er 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 Dulness's “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 Dunciad. 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 Warton's life.

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 father's corpus was not large enough to make up a volume, his pious sons contributed about ten poems of their own, generously donating them in their father's name. Subsequent investigations by Christina 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 Pope's generation. He does not deal with “The Ode to Taste” except to identify it as Thomas, Jr.'s. But Fairer's scholarship, and Le Prevost's 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.

Notes

1. Review of William Hayley's Life of Cowper in Edinburgh Review (April 1803), in Francis Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 4 vols. (London, 1844), 1:411. Jeffrey's “this-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 Ross's similar formulation: “In other words, romantic ideology began to dominate the literary establishment before the romantic canon, as we know it, was established” (54). Two differences: 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, Ross's statement occurs in a discussion of Wordsworth's 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 Ross's very rich and wide-ranging book see The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989).

3. Lord Byron, Selected Prose, ed. Peter Gunn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 406.

4. 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 Young's Night Thoughts, but does not address the Wartons at all.

5. Edwin Stein, commenting on Wordsworth's 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 Wordsworth's Art of Allusion (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 all 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 Movement, 2nd ed. [New York: Ronald Press, 1949], 6-7).

6. Edith Morley, “Joseph Warton: A Comparison of His Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope with His Edition of Pope's 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 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1810), 17:602. For Jeffrey see his review of John Ford, Edinburgh Review (August 1811), in Jeffrey (note 1), 2:294. Coleridge's comment appears in Biographia Literaria, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 7, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), 7:54.

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 Circle 20 (1989): 156. Richardson traces the influence of Lockhart on Whitwell Elwin, the author of the review in the Quarterly Review (December 1852): 182-236. My citation is taken from page 233.

9. Jeffrey's review of Scott's edition of Swift, Edinburgh Review (September 1816), (note 1), 1:166.

10. 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 Warton's ‘The Pleasures of Melancholy’ and Keats's ‘Ode on Melancholy,’” in Proceedings of the Xth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, Vol. 1: General Problems 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 Warton's poem was raw material for Keats. The best overview of both Wartons, and the place to begin, is Lawrence Lipking's 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 Warton: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1983).

11. 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 Dodsley's A Collection of Poems, in Six Volumes, by Several Hands, with Notes, (London, 1782), 4:224-35.

12. My text for “Eloisa” and “The Unfortunate Lady” is Twickenham Edition: The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), 252-61, 262-64.

13. 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 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” [1915], in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff [New York: Collier, 1963], 108).

14. My analysis here draws directly upon Patricinio Schweickart's observations on Joyce: “Relevant here is Levi-Strauss's theory that woman functions as currency exchanged between men. The woman in the text converts the text into a woman, and the circulation of this text/woman becomes the central ritual that establishes the bond between the author and his male readers.” See Patricinio Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves: 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 Studies, ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1989), 126.

15. John Milton, Poems upon Several Occasions, ed. Thomas Warton (London: Dodsley, 1785), xi.

16. Warton introduces the anecdote by saying, “My brother remembers to have heard my father say. …” (Milton [note 15], viii-ix).

17. Milton, 186.

18. Arthur H. Scouten discusses this incident in “The Warton Forgeries and the Concept of Preromanticism in English Literature,” Etudes Anglaises 40 (1987): 438.

19. 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 Thomas 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, Bernbaum's 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.

20. Wordsworth, “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface,” in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 3:70.

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, 1963], 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, 395-406; 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): 314-47.