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436A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent life’s evening gray, Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell What is bliss, and which the way?’ ”Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed, Scarce suppressed the starting tear: When the hoary sage replied, ’-Come, my lad, and drink some beer.-’” [2] ”Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland” was pub- lished in 1791, and Burns wrote ”Tam o’Shanter” to accompany the picture of Kirk Alloway in this work. See his poem, ”On the late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations through Scotland.” [3] ”Ragnaroek,” or ”Goetterdaemmerung,” the twilight of the Gods [4] For a full discussion of Gray’s sources and of his knowledge of Old Norse, the reader should consult the appendix by Professor G. L. Kittredge to Professor W. L. Phelps’ ”Selections from Gray” (1894, pp. xl-1.) Professor Kittredge concludes that Gray had but a slight knowledge

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438A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent [5] ”Some Specimens of the Poetry of the An- cient Welsh Bards, translated into English,” by Rev. Evan Evans, 1764. The specimens were ten in number. The translations were in En- glish prose. The originals were printed from a copy which Davies, the author of the Welsh dictionary, had made of an ancient vellum MS. thought to be of the time of Edward II, Edward III, and Henry V. The book included a Latin ”Dissertatio de Bardis,” together with notes, ap- pendices, etc. The preface makes mention of Macpherson’s recently published Ossianic po- ems. [6] ”Life of Gray.” [7] See Phelps’ ”English Romantic Movement,” pp. 73, 141-42. [8] Wm Dugdale published his ”Monasticon Anglicanum,” a history of English religious houses, in three parts, in 1655-62-73. It was accom-

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440A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent ”For me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask The classic poet’s well-conned task?” etc. Scott spoke of himself in Warton’s exact lan- guage, as a ”truant to the classic page.” [11] See -ante-, pp. 99-101-.- [12] ”Eighteenth Century Literature,” p. 397. [13] Lowell mentions the publication of Dod- sley’s ”Old Plays,” (1744) as, like Percy’s ”Reliques,” a symptom of the return of the past. Essay on ”Gray.” [14] ”Eighteenth Century Literature,” pp. 401- 03. [15] It is curious, however, to find Warton describing Villon as ”a pert and insipid ballad- monger, whose thoughts and diction were as low and illiberal as his life,” Vol. II. p. 338 (Fifth Edition, 1806). [16] Warton quotes the follow bathetic open- ing of a ”Poem in Praise of Blank Verse” by Aaron

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442A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent

VII. The Gothic Revival. One of Thomas Warton’s sonnets was ad- dressed to Richard Hurd, afterward Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and later of Worcester. Hurd was a friend of Gray and Mason, and his ”Letters on Chivalry and Romance” (1762) helped to initiate the romantic movement. They per- haps owed their inspiration, in part, to Sainte Palaye’s ”Memoires sur l’ancienne Chevalerie,” the first volume of which was issued in 1759, though the third and concluding volume ap- peared only in 1781. This was a monumental 443

444A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent work and, as a standard authority, bears much the same relation to the literature of its subject that Mallet’s ”Histoire de Dannemarc” bears to all the writing on Runic mythology that was done in Europe during the eighteenth-century. Jean Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte Palaye was a scholar of wide learning, not only in the his- tory of mediaeval institutions but in old French dialects. He went to the south of France to familiarize himself with Provencal: collected a large library of Provencal books and manuscripts, and published in 1774 his ”Histoire de Troubadours.” Among his other works are a ”Dictionary of French Antiquities,” a glossary of Old French, and an edition of ”Aucassin et Nicolete.” Mrs. Susan- nah Dobson, who wrote ”Historical Anecdotes of Heraldry and Chivalry” (1795), made an En- glish translation of Sainte Palaye’s ”History of the Troubadours” in 1779, and of his ”Memoirs

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446A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent derives from the military necessities of the feu- dal system, he proceeds to establish a ”remark- able correspondency between the manners of the old heroic times, as painted by their ro- mancer, Homer, and those which are represented to us in the books of modern knight-errantry.” He compares, -e.g.-, the Laestrygonians, Cyclopes- , -Circes, and Calypsos of Homer, with the gi- ants, paynims, sorceresses encountered by the champions of romance; the Greek aoixoi with the minstrels; the Olympian games with tour- naments; and the exploits of Hercules and The- seus, in quelling dragons and other monsters, with the similar enterprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul. The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic manners the preference over the heroic. Homer, he says, if he could have known both, would have chosen the former by reason of ”the improved gallantry of the feudal times, and the

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448A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent forest?. . . The fancies of our modern bards are not only more gallant, but . . . more sublime, more terrible, more alarming than those of the classic fables. In a word, you will find that the manners they paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the more poetical for being Gothic.” Evidently the despised ”Gothick” of Addison– as Mr. Howells puts it–was fast becoming the admired ”Gothic” of Scott. This pronunciamento of very advanced romantic doctrine came out several years before Percy’s ”Reliques” and ”The Castle of Otranto.” It was only a few years later than Thomas Warton’s ”Observations on the Faerie Queene” and Joseph’s ”Essay on Pope,” but its views were much more radical. Neither of the Wartons would have ventured to pronounce the Gothic manners superior to the Homeric, as materials for poetry, whatever, in his secret heart, he might have thought.[1] To Johnson such an

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450A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent the Gothic, having been disgraced in their in- fancy by bad writers, and a new set of manners springing up before there were any better to do them justice, they could never be brought into vogue by the attempts of later poets.” Moreover, ”the Gothic manners of chivalry, as springing out of the feudal system, were as singular as that system itself; so that when that political constitution vanished out of Europe, the man- ners that belonged to it were no longer seen or understood. There was no example of any such manners remaining on the face of the earth. And as they never did subsist but once, and are never likely to subsist again, people would be led of course to think and speak of them as romantic and unnatural.” Even so, he thinks that the Renaissance po- ets, Ariosto and Spenser, owe their finest ef- fects not to their tinge of classical culture but to

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452A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent chiefly, perhaps, the discredit into which the stories of chivalry had now fallen by the im- mortal satire of Cervantes. Yet we see through all his poetry, where his enthusiasm flames out most, a certain predilection for the legends of chivalry before the fables of Greece.” Hurd says that, if the ”Faerie Queene” be regarded as a Gothic poem, it will be seen to have unity of de- sign, a merit which even the Wartons had de- nied it. ”When an architect examines a Gothic structure by the Grecian rules he finds nothing but deformity. But the Gothic architecture has its own rules by which; when it comes to be ex- amined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the Grecian.” The essayist complains that the Gothic fa- bles fell into contempt through the influence of French critics who ridiculed and disparaged the Italian romancers, Ariosto and Tasso. The En-

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454A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent We have seen that, during the classical pe- riod, ”Gothic,” as a term in literary criticism, was synonymous with barbarous, lawless, and tawdry. Addison instructs his public that ”the taste of most of our English poets, as well as readers, is extremely Gothic.”[3] After commend- ing the French critics, Bouhours and Boileau, for their insistence upon good sense, justness of thought, simplicity, and naturalness he goes on as follows: ”Poets who want this strength of genius, to give that majestic simplicity to na- ture which we so much admire in the works of the ancients, are forced to hunt after foreign or- naments, and not to let any piece of wit, of what kind soever, escape them. I look upon these writers as Goths in poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Ro- mans, have endeavored to supply its place with

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456A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent cial representatives of this affectation, Herbert, Cowley, and Sylvester. But it is significant that Addison should have described this fashion as Gothic. It has in reality nothing in common with the sincere and loving art of the old builders. He might just as well have called it classic; for, as he acknowledges, devices of the kind are to be found in the Greek anthology, and Ovid was a poet given to conceits. Addison was a writer of pure taste, but the coldness and timidity of his imagination, and the maxims of the critical school to which he belonged, made him mis- take for spurious decoration the efflorescence of that warm, creative fancy which ran riot in Gothic art. The grotesque, which was one ex- pression of this sappy vigor, was abhorrent to Addison. The art and poetry of his time were tame, where Gothic art was wild; dead where Gothic was alive. He could not sympathize with

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458A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent The most notable instance that we encounter of virtuosity invading the neighboring realm of literature is in the case of Strawberry Hill and ”The Castle of Otranto.” Horace Walpole, the son of the great prime minister, Robert Walpole, was a person of varied accomplishments and undoubted cleverness. He was a man of fash- ion, a man of taste, and a man of letters; though, in the first of these characters, he entertained or affected a contempt for the last, not uncom- mon in dilettante authors and dandy artists, who belong to the -beau monde- or are oth- erwise socially of high place, -teste- Congreve, and even Byron, that ”rhyming peer.” Walpole, as we have seen, had been an Eton friend of Gray and had traveled–and quarreled–with him upon the Continent. Returning home, he got a seat in Parliament, the entree at court, and var- ious lucrative sinecures through his father’s in-

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460A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent woman, began to turn his house into a minia- ture Gothic castle, in which he is said to have ”outlived three sets of his own battlements.” These architectural experiments went on for some twenty years. They excited great interest and attracted many visitors, and Walpole may be re- garded as having given a real impetus to the re- vival of pointed architecture. He spoke of Straw- berry Hill as a castle, but it was, in fact, an odd blend of ecclesiastical and castellated Gothic applied to domestic uses. He had a cloister, a chapel, a round tower, a gallery, a ”refectory,” a stair-turret with Gothic balustrade, stained windows, mural scutcheons, and Gothic paper- hangings. Walpole’s mock-gothic became some- thing of a laughing-stock, after the true princi- ples of medieval architecture were better un- derstood. Since the time when Inigo Jones, court architect to James I., came back from

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462A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent specialists. But Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Salisbury Cathedral, and York Min- ster, ruins such as Melrose and Fountain Abbeys, Crichton Castle, and a hundred others were im- pressive witnesses for the civilization that had built them and must, sooner or later, demand respectful attention. Hence it is not strange that the Gothic revival went hand in hand with the romantic movement in literature, if indeed it did not give it its original impulse. ”It is impossible,” says Eastlake,[6] speaking of Walpole, ”to peruse either the letters or the romances of this remarkable man, without be- ing struck by the unmistakable evidence which they contain of his medieval predilections. His ’Castle of Otranto’ was perhaps the first mod- ern work of fiction which depended for its inter- est on the incidents of a chivalrous age, and it thus became the prototype of that class of novel

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464A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Cent one might expect from a man who possessed a vague admiration for Gothic without the knowl- edge necessary for a proper adaptation of its features. Ceilings, screens, niches, etc., are all copied, or rather parodied, from existing ex- amples, but with utter disregard for the orig- inal purpose of the design. To Lord Orford, Gothic was Gothic, and that sufficed. He would have turned an altar-slab into a hall-table, or made a cupboard of a piscine, with the great- est complacency, if it only served his purpose. Thus we find that in the north bed-chamber, when he wanted a model for his chimney-piece, he thought he could not do better than adopt the form of Bishop Dudley’s tomb in Westmin- ster Abbey. He found a pattern for the piers of his garden gate in the choir of Ely Cathe- dral.” The ceiling of the gallery borrowed a de- sign from Henry VII.’s Chapel; the entrance to

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