Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/162

 156 Whitford latter, indeed, increased in importance and developed in tech- nique as the emotionalism which it combated grew stronger. This literary satire, though in itself of little absolute worth, is of interest for its criticism of tendencies which merged in the English Romantic Movement. Chief among these was senti- mentalism, a hardy perennial which thrived with especial vigor in Johnson's England. In the eighth and ninth decades of the century, satirists were particularly occupied with rebuking the dangerous affectations of Sensibility. But even then they did not fail to comment upon other phases, more distinctly roman- tic, of the revulsion from reason to emotion. Both the criticism of sentimentalism and that of romanticism in general afford glimpses of contemporary opinion, otherwise but scantily recorded, concerning not insignificant literary schools and ten- dencies, and therefore both are of interest to the student of the history of literature. As it happens, however, the purely literary criticism of distinctly romantic literature is not exten- sive, and, perhaps, not typical of the attitude of any consider- able group of the reading public. There is a larger body of satirical criticism of sentimentalism, and one which, if we may judge by its widespread though ephemeral popularity, repre- sented the opinion of many intelligent English readers. II In the period under discussion few satirical poems which might fairly be considered satires in criticism were concerned exclusively or even largely with distinctly romantic tendencies in literature. And in the general satires, most of the incidental attack upon romanticism, since they were directed from the point of view not of the regular critic but of the conservative censor of politics and morals, involved few judgments that are of interest as literary criticism. Yet these casual critical estimates, though few, are too suggestive to deserve to be ignored. Of romanticism itself there is little enough in satire. A few of the satirists between Churchill and Byron, to be sure, expressed the moderate opinion that inspiration, not imitation, is the true source of poetry. Thomas Chatterton, for instance,