Some Diversions of a Man of Letters by Edmund William Gosse
page 66 of 330 (20%)
page 66 of 330 (20%)
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effect which is faintly indicated, but in its phantom way unique in
English literature up to that date, 1740. There had been a tendency to the sepulchral in the work of several writers, in particular in the powerful and preposterous religious verse of Isaac Watts, but nothing had been suggested in the pure Romantic style. In Joseph Warton, first, we meet with the individualist attitude to nature; a slightly hysterical exaggeration of feeling which was to be characteristic of romance; an intention of escaping from the vanity of mankind by an adventure into the wilds; a purpose of recovering primitive manners by withdrawing into primitive conditions; a passion for what we now consider the drawing-master's theory of the picturesque--the thatched cottage, the ruined castle with the moon behind it, the unfettered rivulet, the wilderness of "the pine-topped precipice Abrupt and shaggy." There was already the fallacy, to become so irresistibly attractive to the next generation, that man in a state of civilisation was in a decayed and fallen condition, and that to achieve happiness he must wander back into a Golden Age. Pope, in verses which had profoundly impressed two generations, had taken the opposite view, and had proved to the satisfaction of theologian and free-thinker alike that "God and Nature link'd the general frame, And bade Self-love and Social be the same." Joseph Warton would have nothing to say to Social Love. He designed, or pretended to design, to emigrate to the backwoods of America, to live |
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