INTRODUCTION

That period of English literature which is commonly styled with more regard for alliteration than accuracy— the Age of Anne, is summarily dismissed by the average student of literary history. Here, if anywhere, he is undisturbed by critical doubts. He may question the absolute merit of the minor Elizabethans; he may have misgivings as to his estimate of the Victorians; but in dealing with the Augustans he is happily certain. Especially is this true of Augustan ideals and tendencies. There was the 'Classical School'; one can trace the 'beginnings of Romanticism'; the former is fortunately dead, the latter grown into something of much greater importance. It is all perfectly clear.

To the person, however, who takes pains to read what was written during this period, nothing is clearer than the falsity of such an opinion. The Age of Anne has suffered from adulation and from vituperation, from ignorant generalization and from scholarly misrepresentation, but from nothing so much as from being hastily pigeon-holed. It is possible to conceive how persons so unfortunate as to be blind to a certain type of literary merit might be eager to get this period off their hands. It is much more remarkable that they should suppose they had done so.

Such ungrounded assumption is largely the product of indifference, an indifference fortunately lessening. The mere passage of time is transferring it to the Victorian period. It begins to appear, for example, as if Tennyson

were succeeding to Pope's position as a phenomenon sufficiently considered by English critics and now definitely disposed of and laid away. Cowley was similarly treated by the mid-eighteenth century. It is no new thing, this curt dismissal of our literary greatgrandfathers; it is perhaps the original sin of criticism. The glory of the present or the immediate past has always cast a shadow backward. But, as the present becomes the past, the shadow moves.

If the early eighteenth century seems to have emerged somewhat slowly, the fact is due, in part at least, to two causes: to the character of the period and to the character of those who have written about it. The critics of the nineteenth century to whose lot fell the disposition of the 'classical period' were men of unusual ability, men who wrote with such force that it has often been easier to remember their criticisms than the work they criticized. The period, on the other hand, was of such a sort that it could not be completely forgotten. Its writers had a way of making phrases which became first proverbial and then banal, so that people became prematurely bored by men whom they had not read. "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread," "The proper study of mankind is man" these, and a hundred others like them, are so familiar that it has been impossible to 'discover' Pope as the minor Elizabethans, for instance, were discovered.

Similarly, the critical theory of the period has been presented to us in compact, easily digested, and to many minds-disagreeable doses, so that familiarity could easily breed ignorance. Queen Anne critics are believed to have cherished a pathetic devotion to 'the Rules' and the couplet. Some of their best-known work bears out this belief. We scorned the rules and were easily wearied by the couplet, and we accepted this as sufficient.

If we are to escape from this position into one from which we may estimate this period more justly, comprehend it more accurately, we shall not do so by means of new generalizations. Some very accurate generalizations about this period have already been made without much apparent effect. The one thing needful is that the student shall actually read what was then written, shall know in detail what these men thought they were doing. Then he will realize the variety of opinion which existed, and possibly come to feel that some of these opinions are not wholly without validity.

Believing this, I have not attempted to make this introduction in any sense a history of the critical theories championed between 1700 and 1725. I have attempted to point out certain fairly obvious facts concerning the real nature of some of these theories, to call attention to their variety-sometimes not superficially clear—and to indicate their general tendencies, their points of view, which are often quite other than what we should infer from isolated opinions and individual judgments.

Before attempting to determine what the critics of the time did do, it is necessary to emphasize one thing they did not do. There is an impression still at large that Alexander Pope, aided and abetted by servile followers, foisted upon the meek British public a hide-bound and pedantic theory of poetry commonly described as 'pseudoclassic'. Whatever Pope's faults may have been—and they were many-this was not one of them. He was neither the originator of this pseudo-classic theory nor its most extreme adherent. Nor was any other person in the eighteenth century. For the really thoroughgoing classicist or rationalist in criticism it is necessary to go to the preceding century. If by pseudo-classic is meant the type of mind which carries its admiration of the

ancients to the point of idolatry, to the point of inculcating a slavish imitation of Greeks and Latins and of censuring departure from their methods, we can best find it in Thomas Rymer. In his Short View of Tragedy, which appeared in 1693, besides attacking Shakespeare with a virulence unparalleled in England until our own day, he strongly advised the use of the chorus in English tragedy. Admiration for the classics could scarcely carry one further. If, on the other hand, pseudo-classic be taken as referring to the theory that emotion in poetry should be kept in strict subjection to reason and common sense, we shall find the extreme position represented in D'Avenant's Preface to Gondibert, published in 1650. There, as a justification of his subject, he writes, "Truth operative, and by effects continually alive, is the Mistris of Poets, who hath not her existence in matter but in reason."1 This insistence on reason to the neglect of feeling or imagination is characteristic of a critical temper which makes him look upon Spenser's Fairy Queen as a dream "such as Poets and Painters, by being overstudious, may have in the beginning of Feavers."2 Neither Rymer nor D'Avenant is an isolated phenomenon. Opinions similar to theirs were repeatedly expressed in the third and fourth quarters of the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century cannot, therefore, be credited with either the invention or the most thoroughgoing application of pseudo-classic theory.

It is equally misleading to say that such theories as these were dominant in the period with which we are now concerned. In the first place a distinction should be made between the opinions of professional critics and men of letters and those of the reading and theater-going

'Spingarn, Critical Essays of the XVII Century, 2.11. 21b. 2.6.

public. The former are by no means homogeneoussome of them show little trace of pseudo-classic influence. The latter were commonly hostile to it. Dogmatic assertions about the popular taste of a bygone age require considerable qualification, yet there is every reason to believe that the great majority of the public regarded the rules with suspicion and disfavor. There is, on the one hand, the evidence supplied by the success of plays, both old and new, written without regard for the rules, and the failure of others which conformed to them. There is also more significant still the admission by critics who upheld the rules that their opinions were not those generally prevalent. In the Art of Poetry Gildon repeatedly asserts that his opinions are not those of the crowd; and in his earlier Essay on the Art, Rise, and Progress of the Stage he writes, "There is indeed a very formidable Party among us, who are such Libertines in all manner of Poetry, especially in the Drama, that they think all regular Principles of Art an Imposition not to be born." The author of Cato Examin'd (1713) gives similar testimony: "For let the ignorant Million exclaim as they please against the Rules, and Art, and make a senseless Clamour about Nature, without giving us any Account what they mean by the Word." From the Harlequin Horace, published after the turn of the quarter-century, we learn that

"Most Readers like Romantick Flights alone,
And scorn a Poem where Design is shewn."

Such quotations might be multiplied indefinitely. Moreover, the necessity of arguing in behalf of the rules shows that the fight for them was far from won. The pseudoclassic theory was by no means securely dominant.