American literature -- History and criticism; English literature -- History and criticism; World War, 1914-1918 -- Poetry
This conservatism was not peculiar to Johnson; there was a general
tendency to resist the reintroduction into language and literature of
words and forms which had been allowed to disappear. A generation later,
a careful and thoughtful grammarian like Gilpin was in danger of being
dismissed as "a cockscomb" because he tried to enlarge our national
vocabulary. The Wartons were accused of searching old libraries for
glossaries of disused terms in order to display them in their own
writings. This was not quite an idle charge; it is to be noted as one of
the symptoms of active Romanticism that it is always dissatisfied with
the diction commonly in use, and desires to dazzle and mystify by
embroidering its texture with archaic and far-fetched words. Chatterton,
who was not yet born when the Wartons formed and expressed their ideas,
was to carry this instinct to a preposterous extreme in his Rowley
forgeries, where he tries to obtain a mediæval colouring by transferring
words out of an imperfect Anglo-Saxon lexicon, often without discerning
the actual meaning of those words.
Both the Wartons continued, in successive disquisitions, to repeat their
definition of poetry, but it cannot be said that either of them
advanced. So far as Joseph is concerned, he seems early to have
succumbed to the pressure of the age and of his surroundings. In 1766 he
became head master of Winchester, and settled down after curious
escapades which had nothing poetical about them. In the head master of a
great public school, reiterated murmurs against bondage to the Classical
Greeks and Romans would have been unbecoming, and Joseph Warton was a
man of the world. Perhaps in the solitude of his study he murmured, as
disenchanted enthusiasts often murmur, "Say, are the days of blest
delusion fled?" Yet traces of the old fire were occasionally manifest;
still each brother woke up at intervals to censure the criticism of
those who did not see that imagination must be paramount in poetry, and
who made the mistake of putting "discernment" in the place of
"enthusiasm." I hardly know why it gives me great pleasure to learn that
"the manner in which the Rev. Mr. Joseph Warton read the Communion
Service was remarkably awful," but it must be as an evidence that he
carried a "Gothick" manner into daily life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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