Many writers and more readers were of quite another mind.

But popular taste is an indefinite and intangible thing. It is a composite of likings by no means feeble or without means of positive expression, yet inevitably unreasoned and unformulated. We are more immediately concerned with those likings which did find articulate expression, which were often only too well codified and reduced to neat formulas. We have to do, not with the taste that was necessarily dominant, but with that which wished to be dominant, that which men who had read and thought about matters critical felt ought properly to be dominant.

But before discussing individual critics of this period it may be well to summarize briefly the opinions which they inherited from a previous generation, to separate as clearly as may be the main currents of previous critical thought. Various such divisions have been made. One of the most useful is that of Hamelius,1 who divides the critics of the later seventeenth century into four classes: the neo-classicists, the rationalists, the religionists, and the romanticists. We may pass over the religionists, if only because of the barbarity of the word. By these Hamelius means men who, like Milton, felt the importance to poetry of religion, especially the Christian religion, who insisted on the necessity of religious emotion as a vitalizing poetic force. Although Dennis, one of the most significant of eighteenth century critics, gave to this view its clearest and most definite expression, we may safely omit it from our classification on the ground that it is merely descriptive of an opinion of certain individuals, an opinion which was held as a

'Die Kritik in der englischen Literatur des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts.

portion of a theory of poetry which otherwise falls in with one or more of the other three.

In defining classicist theories as they found expression in England it is important to remember that they manifest primarily an intense and justifiable admiration. They are often spoken of as though they expressed only an unjustifiable dislike for things not classic. Love for the classics needs no apology, and when lovers of the classics went astray it was primarily because they did not love enough. The faults of the school are most apparent in those who went, not to the classics, but to what later scholars had said about the classics.

In the classics men found a type of beauty rich without extravagance, simple without baldness, profound without obscurity. They learned from Aristotle that certain characteristics were common to the greater examples of this type. They found also that in much of modern poetry there was extravagance and obscurity, restlessness and confusion. They consequently urged the imitation of classical models, obedience to the laws of Aristotle, as a means of avoiding these faults. Many of them went too far in their admiration of a single type of beauty, but they did not-in England, at least-go so far as to suppose that mere imitation of the ancient authors would supply the lack of genius; they merely said that such imitation would lead genius into safer paths.) Their theory had, therefore, the merits and defects which safe theories always have. Those who really follow them avoid great sins and great virtues. It must not be forgotten, however, that restraint is a virtue, and it should not be confounded with mere emptiness or mediocrity. In our condemnation of the namby-pamby we too often ignore the fact that the fault is not in restraint but in the lack of anything to restrain.

There is, however, in classical literature much that is freely imaginative. There are works in which the poet's imagination oversteps the bounds of prosaic reason. Consequently such critics as were most devoted to the white light of reason, those who were most offended by the extravagances of such writers as the 'metaphysicals', believed the classics somewhat lacking in qualities essential to a true literary guide. We find, therefore, among the critics of the seventeenth century, besides those who regarded the classics as infallible, others who wished a dual government of classics and reason, and a third class who felt that safety lay only in the constant restraint of the fancy by the judgment. These last cannot be called classicists without confusion of terms. It is simpler to label them rationalists.

The romanticists in criticism are easy to define for our purposes. The others are romanticists-the men who preferred Elizabethan to Greek or French drama-the men who saw possibilities in mediæval literature.

But all such division, as far as the first quarter of the eighteenth century is concerned, is of use solely as offering definitions of terms which are convenient to use. Practically no critic fits into one of these categories to the exclusion of the others. And no one-this cannot be too much emphasized-no one was the kind of classicist or rationalist that is to be found in some popular books and essays dealing with eighteenth century literature. The only appearance of this imaginary creature is among the straw figures which writers put together for purposes of demolition. That there was in this period any critic of importance who actually believed that one could make a poet by teaching rules, or that art could replace genius, or any such silly stuff, I emphatically

deny. There were many shades of opinion, many opinions with which most of us would totally disagree, but none so patently absurd as they are often supposed to be, none that do not contain some truth-distorted, under or overstated, perhaps but still truth.

The following discussions of individual men make no attempt, therefore, at any definite classification. They are neither pleas nor verdicts. They aim merely to point out such salient features as are especially significant for students of English criticism.

CHARLES If Charles Gildon occupies first place, it is GILDON not because of his deserts. Whatever critical

ability he possessed best appears in the work he published before the beginning of the century, so that in fairness he had to be taken from the place in the second decade which his most pretentious work would have given him.

This duality of chronological position corresponds to a duality in character. As his life was divided between two centuries, so his opinions were divided between two extremes. Once a Catholic, he became a Deist; once a critic, he became a criticaster. It is not impossible that there was a connection between the two declensions, though they were not synchronous and though he partially recovered from the first. Certainly in both cases he substituted a barren and superficial rationalism for conceptions at once more fruitful and more profound.

In his earlier work, such as the attack on Rymer and the two essays here reprinted from the same Miscellany, he uses such authority as he has in defence of literary freedom, refusing to attribute universal validity to the opinions of Aristotle, and maintaining the principle that

new times and new conditions demand new forms of literary expression. "And as in Physic, so in Poetry, there must be a regard had to the Clime, Nature, and Customs of the People." Such a dictum was by no means a critical commonplace in the seventeenth century. Apparently this young man-for he was not yet thirtywas in a fair way to become a critic of some ability. If his enthusiasm for Dryden touched madness, it drove him at times to unusual sanity.

It is, therefore, with considerable surprise that one finds him publishing in 1710 an essay of a very different sort, that on the Art, Rise, and Progress of the Stage. This presents the same uncompromisingly rationalistic opinions as were later developed in the Art of Poetry. And here, as commonly elsewhere, rationalism is another name for crude dogmatism. The Art of Poetry is almost devoid of real thinking. It is an echo of echoes; for the sections that follow the one here reprinted are a cento of quotations from Roscommon, Mulgrave, and Boileau, with prose comments which are additions to the bulk rather than to the ideas of the work. Obviously, then, the thought of the book is not of the eighteenth, but of the seventeenth century, and its positive value lies almost solely in the fact that it is the most complete statement which we have from this period of the point of view which is often supposed to have dominated it. The fact that such a statement found few purchasers is consequently significant.

Poor as the book is, it would be unfair to ignore its occasional flashes of insight. Although the doctrine of 'English numbers' which forms the concluding section is mistaken, Gildon at any rate recognizes the existence of

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