century John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, had stated the new poetic ideal with an energy that bordered perilously upon enthusiasm when he wrote: While in dark Ignorance we lay afraid Of Fancies, Ghosts, and every empty Shade, And inspired by so exalted a theme as the work of Hobbes, he soars into the poetic empyrean singing: But here sweet Eloquence does always smile, Sheffield has at least the merit of having stated in that last line, clearly, concisely, and correctly, the poetic aim of the next age. This following of a plain, a very plain Reason, was a natural revolt against the poetic ideals of the earlier romantic age. With the decay of the romantic imagination, poetry had fallen a prey to involved, fantastic, and frequently obscure imagery, to farsought conceits, which not seldom crossed the boundaries of the ludicrous. The inevitable reaction, when it came, was not, as is too often assumed, entirely detrimental to English verse. In the first place it must not be forgotten that, under the leadership of Pope, the rebels took " Truth" as one of their watchwords. Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find, was to be the subject of their song; and this, after the false wit of the seventeenth century, was a great gain, in theory if not in practice. That they chose throughout the first part of the century what to 1 On Mr. Hobbes and his Writings. 2 Essay on Criticism. the modern reader appear some of the most unpoetic aspects of truth, so that he is tempted to vary Madame Roland's despairing cry and exclaim, "O Truth! what crimes are committed in thy name! has obscured the very real gain in the realm of poetic theory, by burying it beneath a very heavy if only temporary weight of extremely unpoetic practice. This pursuit of plain truth and reason naturally led to a new respect for plain, or common, sense, which was also justified by, and a healthy reaction against, the preceding decadent romanticism. Along with this there came inevitably a new, plain language, a language which contained tremendous poetical possibilities, as practice and the development of a truer poetic spirit were to discover. In so far, then, as the new aims in poetry were opposed to the very real and prevalent defects of the earlier romantic writers, they were beneficial to the future development of English verse; but, unfortunately, these literary iconoclasts threw down the true gods with the false idols, as iconoclasts usually do. The keenness of vision with which they detected the faults of their immediate poetic ancestors was only equalled by the blindness shown towards what was good and worthy of imitation in their work. Above all, in the excitement of a literary revolution, they failed to appreciate the high poetic power of the romantic imagination, language, and imagery at its best, and impatiently swept it away as an antiquated superstition. The "Fancies," Ghosts," and "empty Shades" had gone in poetry as well as in philosophy, and they had left the poetic temple, stripped of its ancient language and symbolism, bare indeed. No visions could come to the worshipper, for they had departed with the " empty Shades,' and the "Gothic" gloom; the half-lights and deeper shadows that had lurked in far corners of the echoing aisles, and half veiled the Holy of Holies itself, were banished by the electric light of that very plain Reason which sat enthroned beyond the bare altar.1 The ancient imagery, false to a superficial science, but profoundly true to deeper insight as a symbol of the hopes and fears and dreams of humanity, which had given life and colour to that dim, romantic world of Spenser in which the good and evil passions of Man, clad as knights in shining armour, had battled and adventured through dark forest-ways in a strange land, where fear and sorrow and mystery took on unknown forms of beauty, and still pools, or lonely, silent glades revealed unexpected loveliness, a world linked to that eternal good which is beauty, by the visionary light of the mystic Grail, interpenetrated and transfigured by it with momentary splendour of the Infinite: this imagery by which a new and clear insight into life, under the terms of the romantic imagination, had been given to men, was swept aside with the casual indifference with which one discards an outworn garment. To the writers of the eighteenth century the following of nature meant more than an allegiance to reason alone, more than the abandonment of the 1 The following hymn to their deity is not without interest: REASON Remote from Liberty and Truth, I bow'd to Priests and Kings. Soon Reason dawn'd, with troubl'd Sight Too weak it shone to mark my way, Restless I roam'd, when from afar "Ode to Wm. Pulteney, Esq.," Odes and Epistles, 1739, by Robert, Earl Nugent. wild and extravagant, the mystic and supernatural in poetry. With the gradual disintegration and dissolution of the fabric, mental and material, of the medieval world, and the decay of the Scholastic Philosophy which necessarily accompanied it, the old conception of "Wit " as a strained, subtle, discordia concors, so prominent in the poems of Donne and Cowley, gradually weakened, until Dr. Johnson, in a famous passage, gave it a formal certificate of death and burial. Meanwhile, before the close of the seventeenth century, a new conception of "Wit" had commenced to displace the old, and the style of wit which Johnson, borrowing from Pope and Dryden, termed "metaphysical" was dismissed as a conceit." Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, prepared the way for Dr. Johnson, when he wrote: Some to Conceit alone their taste confine, wit, of the In place of the " metaphysical discordia concors, wit was henceforth to be the counterpart, in poetry, of that "close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can," which according to Sprat, the Royal Society "exacted" from its members, in prose.1 In a word, wit was Correctness. Pope characteristically both defined, and exemplified in his definition, this new conception of wit, in the lines True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd; Such was the new poetic theory; systematic, 1 History of the Royal Society. London, 1667, p. 113. clear, simple, and above all logical; in harmony with reason. Unfortunately for its advocates, that logical basis of which they were so proud, contained as a corollary its own undoing; for so logical a system, in the hands of such devotees of reason, naturally led to a system of rules, to an art more deliberate and artificial, than that from which this new conception of "Wit" and "Nature" had appeared to offer a way of escape. Nor were the rules slow in appearing. Culled from the works of the ancients, they reached the new Augustans" by way of Horace, Bossu, and Boileau. These rules were Nature." Those Rules of old discovered, not devis'd, sings Pope in true eighteenth-century style. Everything was to be "methodiz'd," art, nature, even religion. We are very sure," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, that the beauty of form, the expression of the passions, the art of composition, even the power of giving a general air of grandeur to a work, is at present very much under the dominion of rules. These excellences were, heretofore, considered merely as the effects of genius: and justly, if genius is not taken for inspiration, but as the effect of close observation and experience. . . . How many more principles may be fixed and ascertained, we cannot tell ; but as criticism is likely to go hand in hand with the art which is its subject, we may venture to say, that as that art shall advance, its powers will be still more and more fixed by rules."" So with measure, line, and set-square they set to work to erect a new classic temple of poetry, which should be symmetrical and systematic, solid and clear-cut, with nothing of the wonder and mystery, the barbaric irregularity and wanton 1 Essay on Criticism. 2 Discourses, VI. |