- invention of Homer, the wisdom of Socra- reverential, sometimes regretful, sometimes tes, the criticism of Longinus, the philoso- compassionate, always keen and sensitive, an phy of Aristotle, united to form a court of interest not only in the great actions, but popular appeal from whose dicta there was in the every-day lives, the homes, the no escaping. The "wisdom of the an- streets, the costume, the occupations, the cients," and the genius of the ancients, follies, the most trifling gossip of our anwere lauded in proportion to the progress cestors, whether remote or only a few genwhich the polite world considered itself to erations separated from us, in the standard be making in the true principles of taste writings of the eighteenth century, on the beyond the knowledge and practice of the other hand, this interest is entirely mute, generations preceding. It did not occur as though a whole department of intellito that polite world anxiously to inquire gent curiosity had been as yet unopened. where and in how far the Greeks and Ro- The style in which the writers of the mans were right in their principles, nor Augustan age" of our literature looked how their position in the world's history back on the England of the past was that came to affect their conceptions of human of immeasurable and self-satisfied superioriculture. Simply they were the classics; ty. Nothing, it seemed to them, was to be and, being the classics, had as divine a learned from those epochs of twilight civiliright over the province of taste as Tory zation; then why waste time in decipherpoliticians once held a Stuart to have over ing their paltry riddles? These were the the laws and liberties of England: and authorities who voted Shakspeare an inthis species of classic conventionalism con- spired barbarian * and would only endure tinued to be the orthodox test of elegant his genius in the travesties of Dryden. education while the old state of things These were the authorities whose histrionic lasted; that is to say, before the French conceptions were satisfied with Hamlet in Revolution and its stupendous results had startled mankind out of all their former proprieties. Now be it observed, we differ, indeed, entirely from those who assert that it was that great crisis in European history and society, which, throwing the preceding constitution of the world to an immeasurable distance, first awoke, from contrast, that interest in bygone thoughts and habits of life which is so marked a feeling of our age. That interest had, as we conceive, been in fact growing for a long time before, and would eventually have supplanted the quasi-classical fashions of our great-grandfathers, even if the change of taste had not been precipitated, as it no doubt was, by the great political convulsion aforesaid. But of this in its place. At present we wish to point out distinctly the fact of the change. Let any one read two or three essays in the Spectator or Rambler, and then a few of those by Charles Lamb, or let him dip into the works of Dickens or Thackeray, or those of almost any of the lesser humorists of our own generation. Setting aside such peculiarities of allusion as might naturally belong to the different states of society a hundred years earlier or later, what will strike him as the most characteristic difference in the setting of the two pictures, in the atmospheric conditions, so to speak, of the two regions of taste? Surely it is this: that whereas in these our actual times there is an ever wakeful sympathy with the past of history and society, a feeling sometimes the full dress-coat of St. James's, and the Roman stoic giving himself the mortal wound in " long gown, flowered wig, and lacquered chair." For though their models of taste and fancy were formed chiefly on scholastic traditions, yet in the classical notions which men affected in the days of Anne and the early Georges, there was no spirit of antiquarian criticism, no real intelligent sympathy even with old Greece and Rome: of "Gothic," or old English antiquarianism there was professedly and boastingly nothing. The very word Gothic was, with our great-grandfathers, synonymous with utter and contemptible bar barism: "La Fable offre à l'esprit mille agrémens divers : Là, tous les noms heureux semblent nés pour les vers; *Oliver Goldsmith, a generation later, was scarcely more enlightened in his estimate of Shakspeare. Dryden and Rowe's manner, sir,' said the poor player to the Vicar of Wakefield, are quite out of fashion; our taste has gone back a whole century. Fletcher, Ben Jonson, and all the plays of Shakspeare are the only things that go down.' 'How!' said I (the Vicar is the narrator), is it possible the present age can be pleased with that antiquated dialect, that obsolete humour, those overcharged characters, which abound in the works you mention? Sir,' returned my companion, the public think nothing about a dialect, or humour, or character, for that is none of their business. They only go to be amused, and find themselves happy when they can enjoy a pantomime under the sanction of Jonson's or Shakspeare's name.'" It, is evident, however, even from this passage, that whatever the creed of the arbiters of literary taste might be, the unsophisticated populace relished Shakspeare scarcely less than his own contemporaries had done. So sung the poetical satirist of a foreign kingdom, unconscious that Childebrand's day was yet to come, that the Gothic renaissance was looming in the future. In the older generation whom we can ourselves remember, among ladies and gentlemen who did not affect deep study, but only a fair share of refined cultivation, the fruit of training under these influences was still apparent, in a somewhat pedantic conversance with the hackneyed stories of heathen mythology, in the remembrance of readings, more or less extensive, in such books as Melmoth's translations of Cicero and Pliny, Mrs. Carter's Epictetus, Plutarch's Lives, Homer and Virgil as versified by our English poets. These studies, and such as these, were the credentials of a good education eighty, or even seventy years ago; and by them literary taste, except in some few daring spirits, was guided controlled, suggested. The cultivation of the softer sex was assuredly very inconsiderable in those days compared with the results it displays now; yet we may venture to assert that the "elegant young female" to whom a paper in the Spectator was the prescribed sedative of each successive morning, and whose tastes trained in strict accordance with the intellectual standard therein displayed, would in some chapters of acquirement have been entitled to put to shame many a pupil of the present day advanced in German and geology, and distinguished in the classrooms of a ladies' college. Did not Ogilby's Virgil and Dryden's Juvenal occupy the most honoured places on the bookshelves of that model to her sex described by Addison, the well-read Leonora, † even at a date when women required the popular moralist's special castigation to rouse them out of their ignorance? * were Europe; how, after the learned had laid broad and deep foundations, and poets had imitated the classics in their verse, the superstructure of sentiment and fancy rose, displacing those whimsical extravagances of medieval chronicle and fable, which, when printing first began, were the staple of the press, and which, even in Shakspeare's time, had by no means lost their hold over the popular mind. It would be curious next to trace how a certain blending took place between the older taste and what was then the new, and how the eclectic fancy of the Scudéris and Calprenédes in France formed a school of stilted romance. partly chivalrous, partly classic, which moulded the taste of the age in that country, and to a certain extent in England too, till Boileau and Addison and common sense gave it the death-blow. In England too, we say; for the spirit of French imitation, introduced under the second Charles, continued long to infect English habits, whether in letters or in social intercourse, notwithstanding the episode of the Silent Dutchman and his anti-Gallican propensities. Thus in the Spectator we often come upon traces of warfare which the best writers of the age were still waging against the affectations of a waning fashion. It passed away, and then the guage of all good composition and elegant imagery became, as we have noticed, a greater or less conformity with the modes of ancient literature; while invention, reduced to topics of quiet social speculation and humour gave us the prelude to much of the essay-writing and novel-writing of our own time. It is fon the succeeding revolution in Fancy's wheel that we now wish to fix attention. Our aim is to show how, while classical taste (to use the language of the schools) still ruled the hour, an undergrowth of romantic taste struck root, subtending the accepted fashions, and pushing forth a new vegetation, which was soon to contest the place of the old and effete foliage. It would be curious, though beside our present purpose, to trace how these airs and graces of classical pedantry in our lighter fiterature were themselves, in accordance with the process which we set out with in- A hint of the coming change may be disdicating, a result of the laborious classi-cerned where least we might expect it, even cal renaissance of the fifteenth century in in the early pages of the Specta'or. Addison, notwithstanding the prejudices of his age against "Gothicism," was too much a man of genius not to possess sensibility for the vigorous and the picturesque whereever it might be found; and in the rough old ballad of Chevy Chace he discerned the workings of true poetry, for which he was not afraid to claim the admiration of his contemporaries, though in accordance with the loyalty to classical precedents which was the creed of his age, he sought to establish the merits of the ballad in question rather on its imagined coincidences with the style and treatment of Virgil than on its spirited description of Border life and habits; indeed, he owns that without such corroboration his favourable judgment of this out-ofthe-way minstrelsy would naturally have laid him open to the charge of singularity. For if Chevy Chace had been written in the Gothic manner, he says, "which is the delight of all our little wits, whether writers or readers, it would not have hit the taste of so many ages, and have pleased the readers of all ranks and conditions." But what then did Addison mean by the Gothic manner? it may here be asked; for he speaks as if a style so called were really in vogue at the date of his own writing- a style clearly not the same with the rough old English balad style, of Chevy Chase. The meaning which Addison attached to the term Gothic will be apparent if we compare this passage in the Spectator with others in which the same word is used by him. For instance, in one of his criticisms, where he is occupied in distinguishing between "true wit," false wit," and " mixt wit," he adduces Martial among the ancients, and Cowley among the moderns, as eminent instances of this last, and then proceeds, "I look upon these writers as Goths in poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being able to come up to the simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, have endeavoured to supply its place with all the extravagances of an irregular fancy." And again, "Our general taste in England is for epigram, turns of wit, and forced conceits, which have no manner of influence, either for the bettering or enlarging the mind of him who reads them and have been carefully avoided by the greatest writers, both among the ancients and moderns. I have endeavoured, in several of my speculations, to banish this Gothic taste, which has taken possession among us. From these indications, it is clear that "Gothic" poetry and "Gothic" art were not in Addison's view what, fifty years later, they were in the view of Horace Walpole. Addison seems to have understood the word as expressive of a certain blending of the uncouth and the whimsical, of which * No. 409. there were many instances in his day and that preceding; and of which the school of poets, called by Johnson the "metaphysical school," were perhaps the most systematic artists. The real aim and meaning of a Gothic revival, in the sense of a due appreciation of the elements of beauty to be found in the self-developed culture of the northern nations had been as yet unexplained by the philosophy of criticism; and in the interim the progress of real knowledge and taste was hampered, as so often happens, by pretension and imposture, and by the confusion of a vague nomenclature. Meanwhile, Addison's criticism on Chevy Chace may in all probability have been the seed which bore fruit half a century later in the collections of Percy, afterwards Bishop of Dromore, who, in 1765, published his Reliques of Ancient Poetry; at all events, Percy cites Addison's remarks as a precedent and an excuse for his own undertaking. The apologetic tone of his preface throughout sounds not a little singular to our ears in the present day. In connection with the subject before us, it is very significant. "In a polished age like the present," he says, "I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them." And then, after citing Dr. Johnson, Warton, and other literary characters, as taking an interest in his work, he adds: "The names of so many men of learning and character, the editor hopes, will serve him as an amulet to guard him from every unfavourable censure for having bestowed any attention on a parcel of old ballads. It was at the request of many of these gentlemen, and of others eminent for their genius and taste, that this little work was undertaken. To prepare it for the press has been the amusement of, now and then, a vacant hour amid the leisure and retirement of rural life, and hath only served as a relaxation from graver studies. The editor hopes he need not be ashamed of having bestowed some of his idle hours on the ancient literature of our own country (!) or in regaining from oblivion some pieces (though but the amusements of our ancestors) which tend to place in a striking light their taste, genius, sentiments, or manners." Hopes he need not be ashamed of critical researches than which none are more highly estimated now, alike by poet, philologist, historian, and man of taste, as furnishing indispensable aid towards one of the most cherished objects of our time-the appreciation of the historic Past. almost anticipated the popularizing process of time on the materials before him. Still, Percy's tone of apology was an advance upon the confusion of Addison's ideas respecting old English ballads. Percy, at Within the ten years succeeding the publeast, did not fall into the error of suppos- lication of Percy's Reliques, appeared Dr. ing that the merit of Chevy Chace depended Johnson's and Steevens's editions of Shakupon its supposed resemblance to the style speare, and Warton's History of English and sentiments of Virgil. On the contrary, Poetry, both most important labours, as he clearly indicates the essential diversity turning up the as yet nearly virgin soil of of origin and character between medieval English philological research. Antiquaripoetry and the poetry of Greece and Rome. anism in the various departments of literaBy the time Percy entered the field, in- ture and art now began to form a school of deed, much had been going on in other de- ardent disciples. Dr. Johnson, with sentenpartments of taste to foster the glimmering tious condescension, uttered his celebrated interest in these memorials of an age of dictum, "Whatever withdraws us from the "barbarism." Shenstone and Horace Wal- power of our senses, whatever makes the pole, in the middle of the century, success- past, the distant, or the future, predominate fully sought to introduce a reform into the over the present, advances us in the dignity arts of landscape gardening and architec- of thinking beings. . . . That man is litture, of which the chief characteristics tle to be envied whose patriotism would not were an attention to the natural features of gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or scenery and a revival of the "Gothic" prin- whose piety would not grow warmer among ciples of art. In the World, a fashionable the ruins of Iona." Shenstone, devoted to periodical of 1753-1755, formed on the or- song writing as well as landscape-gardenthodox model of the Spectator, we find a ing, found the hunt after old abbeys and fancy for Gothic architecture mentioned as old ballads congenial to his sense of the pica recent and prevalent whim, likely to be turesque both in scenery and verse. Capdisplaced by a still later whim, for Chinese tain Francis Grose, from 1773 to 1776, construction and decoration. The writer made the tour of England and Wales, and in the World speaks of both with equal con- published its results in four quarto volumes tempt; but while the Chinese fancy, an ex- of Antiquities, elaborately got up with deotic imported after Lord Anson's voyage in scriptions and plates. Gough and Pennant 1744, proved itself a mere transitory caprice prosecuted their topographical investigaand passed away, Gothicism, the purer kind tions. The Society of Antiquaries put - for here, as so often happens, real knowl- forth in 1770 the first volume of their Archedge was struggling with pretension-held æologia. All tended in the same direction. its ground. Horace Walpole was its most Then, after a short interval, followed the efficient advocate and champion. Writing era of the German classics, and of inquiry from Worcestershire just at this time, he into the antiquities of Teutonic fable; and, says: "Gothicism, and the restoration of contemporaneously with these, the stupenthat architecture, and not of the bastard dous wars and convulsions of the French breed, spreads extremely in this part of the Revolution, giving that impetus to the imworld." And when in Yorkshire he ex-aginative faculty which is never so effectuclaims with kindling enthusiasm at sight of the ancient remains, "O what quarries for working in Gothic!" His letters are full of this new taste, which for many years was quite the passion of his life. He worked out his own conceptions in what, though it seems to us now but a spurious and flimsy imitation of medieval art, was doubtless one of the most important initiatory steps in that renaissance movement which has to so great an extent given the law to our modern æsthetics-the famous toy of Strawberry. And not only in architecture and decoration, but in literature also, Horace Walpole may be said, perhaps by his zeal, to have deserved the meed of originality in this revival more than any of his contemporaries, while, by his lively fancy, he ally supplied as by the vivid experiences and sharp vicissitudes of human fate. So the train was laid, and preparation made for the glowing romance of Walter Scott. The Northern Enchanter fired with the torch of his genius the pyre heaped up by the labour and research of previous students. He first, to any noteworthy degree, popularized the new education of taste. He brought a poet's soul to bear on ideas of feudality and chivalry, and on the many picturesque aspects of historic and traditional lore; and from his time, not mediaval research only, but mediaval sentiment, may be said to have fairly become a primary element in our æsthetic culture. lenced now was the orthodox jargon of the past about the "barbarous productions of Si ture. a Gothic genius," and the dread of their at large. We allude to a prefatory essay superseding in the realm of taste that "sim- in one of his republications of old literaplicity which distinguished the Greek and Roman arts as eternally superior to those of every other nation" (World, vol. iii. p. 81). Greek and Roman art, indeed, was not deposed from its claims to man's homage, but room was conceded in the realm of beauty for another and not less influen-ous as an augmentation of the number of fixed tial potentate. How does one blast from the clarion of the "romantic " muse proclaim her attributes! "If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright, When the broken arches are black in night, grave, Then go; but go alone the while, Then view St. David's ruin'd pile, And home returning, soothly swear Was never scene so sad and fair." The sentiment soon, in fact, came to be far more commonly professed from affectation than ignored from indifference; for who, pretending to any nineteenth century cultivation, would not have been ashamed to own that a medieval work of art, as such -a poem, a picture, a relic, a building, a chronicle of past days - exercised no more spell over him than the yellow cowslip did over the rude soul of Peter Bell? How many lisping ladies, we may be sure, were wont to echo Scott's genuine enthusiasm when lionizing visitors over the ruins of Melrose Abbey! "There is no telling," he used to say," what treasures are hid in that glorious old pile. It is a famous place for antiquarian plunder. There are such rich bits of old-time sculpture for the architect, and old-time story for the poet. There is as rare picking in it as in a Stilton cheese; and in the same taste - the mouldier the better."* Nevertheless, in 1812, Scott's own language on the new development of taste his days had witnessed bore something of the character of advocacy, as though its results were not yet fully credited with the world See Washington Irving's Recollections of Abbottsford. "The present age," he says, "has been so distinguished for research into poetical antiquities, that the discovery of an unknown bard is, in certain chosen literary circles, held as curistars would be esteemed by astronomers. It is true, these blessed twinklers of the night,' are so far removed from us, that they afford no more light than serves barely to evince their existence to the curious investigator; and in like manner the pleasure derived from the revival of an obscure poet is rather in proportion to the rarity of his volume than to its merits; yet this pleasure is not inconsistent with reason and principle. We know by every day's experience the peculiar interest which the lapse of ages confers upon works of human art. The clumsy strength of the ancient castles, which, when raw from the hand of the builder, inferred only the oppressive power of the barons who reared them, is now broken by partial ruin into proper subjects for the poet or the painter. The monastery, too, which was at first but a tion of monarchs, or of the purple pride of fatfantastic monument of the superstitious devotened abbots, has gained, by the silent influence of antiquity, the power of impressing awe and devotion. If such is the effect of time in adding interest to the labours of the architect, if partial destruction is compensated by the additional interest of that which remains, can we deny his exerting a similar influence upon those subjects which are sought after by the bibliographer and poetical antiquary? The obscure poet, who is detected by their keen research, may indeed have possessed but a slender portion of that spirit which has buoyed up the works of distinguished contemporaries durshall, in the lapse of time, acquire an interest ing the course of centuries. Yet still his verses which they did not possess in the eyes of his own generation. The mere attribute of antiquity is of itself sufficient to interest the fancy, by the lively and powerful train of associations which it awakens." * If these observations upon the taste of the day, which take so much for granted that Bishop Percy dared only timidly to suggest, do notwithstanding appear somewhat trite to us fifty years later still, it is because the retrospective sentiment has become so much more a matter of course now, than it was even at the date of the publication of Rokeby. We come now to the third stage of the assimilating process which we set out with describing; and as we have indicated Horace Walpole's as on the whole the most representative name in the first, or exploring *See Lockhart's Life of Scott, vol. iii. p. 30. |
