POETIC DICTION

POETIC DICTION

A STUDY OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY VERSE

BY
THOMAS QUAYLE

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1924

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

CONTENTS

PREFACE

The studies on which this book is based were begun during my tenure of the “William Noble” Fellowship in English Literature at the University of Liverpool, and I wish to thank the members of the Fellowship Committee, and especially Professor Elton, under whom I had for two years the great privilege of working, for much valuable advice and criticism. I must also express my sincere obligation to the University for a generous grant towards the cost of publication.

POETIC DICTION

CHAPTER I
THE AGE OF PROSE AND REASON

From the time of the publication of the first Preface to the “Lyrical Ballads” (1798) the poetical language of the eighteenth century, or rather of the so-called “classical” writers of the period, has been more or less under a cloud of suspicion. The condemnation which Wordsworth then passed upon it, and even the more rational and penetrating criticism which Coleridge later brought to his own analysis of the whole question of the language fit and proper for poetry, undoubtedly led in the course of the nineteenth century to a definite but uncritical tendency to disparage and underrate the entire poetic output of the period, not only of the Popian supremacy, but even of the interregnum, when the old order was slowly making way for the new. The Romantic rebels of course have nearly always received their meed of praise, but even in their case there is not seldom a suspicion of critical reservation, a sort of implied reproach that they ought to have done better than they did, and that they could and might have done so if they had reacted more violently against the poetic atmosphere of their age. In brief, what with the Preface to the “Lyrical Ballads” and its successive expansions at the beginning of the century, and what, some eighty years later, with Matthew Arnold’s calm description of the eighteenth century as an “age of prose and reason,” the poetry of that period, and not only the neo-classical portion of it, fared somewhat badly. There could be no better illustration of the influence and danger of labels and tags; “poetic diction,” and “age of prose and reason” tended to become a sort of critical legend or tradition, by means of which eighteenth century verse, alike at its highest and its lowest levels, could be safely and adequately understood and explained.

Nowadays we are little likely to fall into the error of assuming that any one cut and dried formula, however pregnant and apt, could adequately sum up the literary aspects and characteristics of an entire age; the contributory and essential factors are too many, and often too elusive, for the tabloid method. And now that the poetry of the first half or so of the eighteenth century is in process of rehabilitation, and more than a few of its practitioners have even been allowed access to the slopes, at least, of Parnassus, it may perhaps be useful to examine, a little more closely than has hitherto been customary, one of the critical labels which, it would almost seem, has sometimes been taken as a sort of generic description of eighteenth century verse, as if “poetic diction” was something which suddenly sprang into being when Pope translated Homer, and had never been heard of before or since.

This, of course, is to overstate the case, the more so as it can hardly be denied that there is much to be said for the other side. It may perhaps be put this way, by saying, at the risk of a laborious assertion of the obvious, that if poetry is to be written there must be a diction in which to write it—a diction which, whatever its relation to the language of contemporary speech or prose may be, is yet in many essential respects distinct and different from it, in that, even when it does not draw upon a special and peculiar word-power of its own, yet so uses or combines common speech as to heighten and intensify its possibilities of suggestion and evocation. If, therefore, we speak of the “poetic diction” of the eighteenth century, or of any portion of it, the reference ought to be, of course, to the whole body of language in which the poetry of that period is written, viewed as a medium, good, bad, or indifferent, for poetical expression. But this has rarely or never been the case; it is not too much to say that, thanks to Wordsworth’s attack and its subsequent reverberations, “poetic diction,” so far as the eighteenth century is concerned, has too often been taken to mean, “bad poetic diction,” and it has been in this sense indiscriminately applied to the whole poetic output of Pope and his school.

In the present study it is hoped, by a careful examination of the poetry of the eighteenth century, by an analysis of the conditions and species of its diction, to arrive at some estimate of its value, of what was good and what was bad in it, of how far it was the outcome of the age which produced it, and how far a continuation of inherited tradition in poetic language, to what extent writers went back to their great predecessors in their search for a fresh vocabulary, and finally, to what extent the poets of the triumphant Romantic reaction, who had to fashion for themselves a new vehicle of expression, were indebted to their forerunners in the revolt, to those who had helped to prepare the way.

It is proposed to make the study both a literary and a linguistic one. In the first place, the aim will be to show how the poetic language, which is usually labelled “the eighteenth century style,” was, in certain of its most pronounced aspects, a reflex of the literary conditions of its period; in the second place, the study will be a linguistic one, in that it will deal also with the words themselves. Here the attention will be directed to certain features characteristic of, though not peculiar to, the diction of the eighteenth century poetry—the use of Latinisms, of archaic and obsolete words, and of those compound words by means of which English poets from the time of the Elizabethans have added some of the happiest and most expressive epithets to the language; finally, the employment of abstractions and personifications will be discussed.

CHAPTER II
THE THEORY OF POETICAL DICTION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

About the time when Dryden was beginning his literary career the preoccupation of men of letters with the language as a literary instrument was obvious enough. There was a decided movement toward simplicity in both prose and poetry, and, so far as the latter was concerned, it was in large measure an expression of the critical reaction against the “metaphysical” verse commonly associated with the names of Donne and his disciples. Furetière in his “Nouvelle Allegorique ou Histoire des dernier troubles arrivez au Royaume d’Eloquence,” published at Paris in 1658,[1] expresses the parallel struggle which had been raging amongst French poets and critics, and the allegory he presents may be taken to symbolize the general critical attitude in both countries.

Rhetoric, Queen of the Realm of Eloquence, and her Prime Minister, Good Sense, are represented as threatened by innumerable foes. The troops of the Queen, marshalled in defence of the Academy, her citadel, are the accepted literary forms, Histories, Epics, Lyrics, Dramas, Romances, Letters, Sermons, Philosophical Treatises, Translations, Orations, and the like. Her enemies are the rhetorical figures and the perversions of style, Metaphors, Hyperboles, Similes, Descriptions, Comparisons, Allegories, Pedantries, Antitheses, Puns, Exaggerations, and a host of others. Ultimately the latter are defeated, and are in some cases banished, or else agree to serve as dependents in the realm of Eloquence.

We may interpret the struggle thus allegorically expressed by saying that a new age, increasingly scientific and rational in its outlook, felt it was high time to analyze critically and accurately the traditional canons and ideals of form and matter that classical learning, since the Renaissance, had been able to impose upon literature. This is not to say that seventeenth century writers and critics suddenly decided that all the accepted standards were radically wrong, and should be thrown overboard; but some of them at least showed and expressed themselves dissatisfied, and, alongside of the unconscious and, as it were, instinctive changes that reflected the spirit of the age, there were deliberate efforts to re-fashion both the matter and the manner of literary expression, to give creative literature new laws and new ideals.[2]

The movement towards purity and simplicity of expression received its first definite statement in Thomas Sprat’s “History of the Royal Society, 1667.” One section of the History contains an account of the French Academy, and Sprat’s efforts were directed towards the formation of a similar body in England as an arbiter in matters of language and style. The ideal was to be the expression of “so many things almost in an equal number of words.”[3] A Committee of the Royal Society, which included Dryden, Evelyn, and Sprat amongst its members, had already met in 1664, to discuss ways and means of “improving the English tongue,” and it was the discussions of this committee which had doubtless led up to Evelyn’s letter to Sir Peter Wyche, its chairman, in June 1665.[4] Evelyn there gives in detail his ideas of what an English academy, acting as arbiter in matters of vocabulary and style, might do towards purifying the language. Twenty-three years later Joseph Glanvill defined the new ideal briefly in a passage of his “Essay Concerning Preaching”: “Plainness is a character of great latitude and stands in opposition, First to hard words: Secondly, to deep and mysterious notions: Thirdly, to affected Rhetorications: and Fourthly, to Phantastical Phrases.”[5] In short, the ideal to be aimed at was the precise and definite language of experimental science, but the trend of the times tended to make it more and more that ideal of poetry also which was later to be summed up in Dryden’s definition of “wit” as a “propriety of thoughts and words.”[6]

It is of some little interest perhaps to note that it is not until the end of the seventeenth century that the word diction definitely takes on the sense which it now usually bears as a term of literary criticism. In the preface to “Sylvae, or The Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies” (1685), Dryden even seems to regard the term as not completely naturalized.[7] Moreover, the critics and poets of the eighteenth century were for the most part quite convinced that the special language of poetry had begun with Dryden. Johnson asserted this in his usual dogmatic fashion, and thus emphasized the doctrine, afterwards vigorously opposed by Wordsworth, that between the language of prose, and that proper to poetry, there is a sharp distinction. “There was therefore before the time of Dryden no poetical diction.... Those happy combinations of words which distinguished poetry from prose had been rarely attempted; we had few elegancies or flowers of speech.”[8] Gray moreover, while agreeing that English poetry had now a language of its own, declared in a letter to West that this special language was the creation of a long succession of English writers themselves, and especially of Shakespeare and Milton, to whom (he asserts) Pope and Dryden were greatly indebted.[9]

It is not very difficult to understand Dryden’s own attitude, as laid down in the various Prefaces. He is quite ready to subscribe to the accepted neo-classical views on the language of poetry, but characteristically reserves for himself the right to reject them, or to take up a new line, if he thinks his own work, or that of his contemporaries, is likely to benefit thereby. Thus in the preface to “Annus Mirabilis” (1666) he boldly claims the liberty to coin words on Latin models, and to make use of technical details.[10] In his apology for “Heroic Poetry and Poetic License” (1677) prefixed to “The State of Innocence and Fall of Man,” his operatic “tagging” of “Paradise Lost,” he seems to lay down distinctly the principle that poetry demands a medium of its own, distinct from that of prose,[11] whilst towards the end of his literary career he reiterates his readiness to enrich his poetic language from any and every source, for “poetry requires ornament,” and he is therefore willing to “trade both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our native language.”[12] But it is significant that at the same time he rejects the technical terms he had formerly advocated, apparently on the grounds that such terms would be unfamiliar to “men and ladies of the first quality.” Dryden has thus become more “classical,” in the sense that he has gone over or reverted to the school of “general” terms, which appeared to base its ideal of expression on the accepted language of cultured speakers and writers.[13]

Toward the establishment of this principle of the pseudo-classical creed the theory and practice of Pope naturally contributed; indeed, it has been claimed that it was in large measure the result of the profound effect of the “Essay on Criticism,” or at least of the current of thought which it represents, on the taste of the age.[14] In the Essay, Pope, after duly enumerating the various “idols” of taste in poetical thought and diction, clearly states his own doctrine; as the poets’ aim was the teaching of “True Wit” or “Nature,” the language used must be universal and general, and neologisms must be regarded as heresies. For Pope, as for Dryden, universal and general language meant such as would appeal to the cultured society for whom he wrote,[15] and in his practice he thus reflected the traditional attitude towards the question of language as a vehicle of literary expression. A common “poetics” drawn and formulated by the classical scholars mainly (and often incorrectly) from Aristotle had established itself throughout Western Europe, and it professed to prescribe the true relation which should exist between form and matter, between the creative mind and the work of art.[16]

The critical reaction against these traditional canons had, as we have noted, already begun, but Pope and his contemporaries are in the main supporters of the established order, in full agreement with its guiding principle that the imitation of “Nature” should be the chief aim and end of art. It is scarcely necessary to add that it was not “Nature” in the Wordsworthian sense that was thus to be “imitated”; sometimes, indeed, it is difficult to discover what was meant by the term. But for Pope and his followers we usually find it to mean man as he lives his life in this world, and the phrase to “imitate Nature” might thus have an ethical purpose, signifying the moral “improvement” of man.

But to appreciate the full significance of this “doctrine,” and its eighteenth century interpretation, it is necessary to glance at the Aristotelian canon in which it had its origin. For Aristotle poetry was an objective “imitation” with a definite plan or purpose, of human actions, not as they are, but as they ought to be. The ultimate aim, then, according to the Poetics, is ideal truth, stripped of the local and the accidental; Nature is to be improved upon with means drawn from Nature herself. This theory, as extracted and interpreted by the Italian and French critics of the Renaissance, was early twisted into a notion of poetry as an agreeable falsity, and by the end of the seventeenth century it had come to mean, especially with the French, the imitation of a selected and embellished Nature, not directly, but rather through the medium of those great writers of antiquity, such as Homer and Virgil, whose works provided the received and recognized models of idealized nature.[17]

As a corollary to this interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of ideal imitation, there appeared a tendency to ignore more and more the element of personal feeling in poetry,[18] and to concentrate attention on the formal elements of the art. This tendency, reinforced by the authority of the Horatian tag, ut pictura poesis (“as is painting, so is poetry”), led naturally, and in an ever-increasing degree, to the formal identification of poetry with painting. Critics became accustomed to discussing the elements in the art of writing that correspond to the other elements in pictorial art, such as light, colour, expression, etc. And as the poet was to be an imitator of accepted models, so also he was to be imitative and traditional in using poetical colouring, in which phrase were included, as Dryden wrote, “the words, the expressions, the tropes and figures, the versification, and all the other elegancies of sound.”[19] That this parallelism directly encourages the growth of a set “poetic diction” is obvious; the poet’s language was not to be a reflection of a genuine emotion felt in the mind for his words, phrases, and figures of speech, his operum colores,[20] he must not look to Nature but to models. In brief, a poetical gradus, compiled from accepted models, was to be the ideal source on which the poet was to draw for his medium of expression.

It is not necessary to dwell long on this pseudo-classical confusion of the two arts, as revealed in the critical writings of Western Europe down to the very outbreak of the Romantic revolt.[21] In English criticism, Dryden’s “Parallel” was only one of many. Of the eighteenth century English critics who developed a detailed parallelism between pictorial and plastic art on the one hand and poetry on the other, maintaining that their standards were interchangeable, the most important perhaps is Spence, whose “Polymetis” appeared in 1747, and who sums the general position of his fellow-critics on this point in the remark, “Scarce anything can be good in a poetical description which would appear absurd if represented in a statue or picture.”[22] The ultimate outcome of this confusion of poetry and painting found its expression in the last decade of the eighteenth century in the theory and practice of Erasmus Darwin, whose work, “The Botanic Garden,” consisted of a “second part,” “The Loves of the Plants,” published in 1789, two years before its inclusion with the “first part” the “Economy of Vegetation,” in one volume. Darwin’s theory of poetry is contained in the “Interludes” between the cantos of his poems, which take the form of dialogues between the “Poet” and a “Bookseller.” In the Interlude to Canto 1 of Part II (“The Loves of the Plants”) he maintains the thesis that poetry is a process of painting to the eye, and in the cantos themselves he proceeds with great zeal to show in practice how words and images should be laid on like pigments from the outside. The young Wordsworth himself, as his early poems show, was influenced by the theory and practice of Darwin, but Coleridge was not slow to detect the danger of the elaborate word-painting that might arise from the confusion of the two arts. “The poet,” he wrote,[23] “should paint to the Imagination and not to the Fancy.” For Coleridge Fancy was the “Drapery” of poetic genius, Imagination was its “Soul” or its “synthetic and magical power,”[24] and he thus emphasized what may be regarded as one of the chief distinctions between the pseudo-classical, and the romantic, interpretations of the language of poetry. In its groping after the “grand style,” as reflected in a deliberate avoidance of accidental and superficial “particularities,” and in its insistence on generalized or abstract forms, eighteenth century poetry, or at least the “neo-classical” portion of it, reflected its inability to achieve that intensity of imaginative conception which is the supreme need of all art.

The confusion between the two arts of poetry and painting which Coleridge thus condemned did not, it is needless to say, disappear with the eighteenth century. The Romanticists themselves finally borrowed that much-abused phrase “local colour” from the technical vocabulary of the painter, and in other respects the whole question became merged in the symbolism of the nineteenth century where literature is to be seen attempting to do the work of both music and painting.[25]

As regards the language of poetry then—its vocabulary, the actual words in which it was to be given expression—the early eighteenth century had first this pseudo-classical doctrine of a treasury of select words, phrases, and other “ornaments,” a doctrine which was to receive splendid emphasis and exemplification in Pope’s translation of Homer. But alongside of this ideal of style there was another ideal which Pope again, as we have seen, had insisted upon in his “Essay on Criticism,” and which demanded that the language of poetry should in general conform to that of cultivated conversation and prose. These two ideals of poetical language can be seen persisting throughout the eighteenth century, though later criticism, in its haste to condemn the gradus ideal, has not often found time to do justice to the other.

But, apart from these general considerations, the question of poetic diction is rarely treated as a thing per se by the writers who, after Dryden or Pope, or alongside of them, took up the question. There are no attempts, in the manner of the Elizabethans,[26] to conduct a critical inquiry into the actual present resources of the vernacular, and its possibilities as a vehicle of expression. Though the attention is more than once directed to certain special problems, on the whole the discussions are of a general nature, and centre round such points as the language suitable for an Heroic Poem, or for the “imitation” of aspects of nature, or for Descriptive Poetry, questions which had been discussed from the sixteenth century onwards, and were not exhausted by the time of Dr. Johnson.[27]

Goldsmith’s remarks, reflecting as they do a sort of half-way attitude between the old order and the new, are interesting. Poetry has a language of its own; it is a species of painting with words, and hence he will not condemn Pope for “deviating in some instances from the simplicity of Homer,” whilst such phrases as the sighing reed, the warbling rivulet, the gushing spring, the whispering breeze are approvingly quoted.[28] It is thus somewhat surprising to find that in his “Life of Parnell” he had pilloried certain “misguided innovators” to whose efforts he attributed the gradual debasing of poetical language since the happy days when Dryden, Addison, and Pope had brought it to its highest pitch of refinement.[29] These writers had forgotten that poetry is “the language of life” and that the simplest expression was the best: brief statements which, if we knew what Goldsmith meant by “life,” would seem to adumbrate the theories which Wordsworth was to expound as the Romantic doctrine.

Dr. Johnson has many things to say on the subject of poetic language, including general remarks and particular judgments on special points, or on the work of the poets of whom he treated in his “Lives.” As might be expected, he clings tenaciously to the accepted standards of neo-classicism, and repeats the old commonplaces which had done duty for so long, pays the usual tribute to Waller and Denham, but ascribes the actual birth of poetical diction to the practice of Dryden. What Johnson meant by “poetical diction” is clearly indicated; it was a “system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to different arts,”[30] that is, the language of poetry must shun popular and technical words, since language is “the dress of thought” and “splendid ideas lose their magnificence if they are conveyed by low and vulgar words.”[31] From this standpoint, and reinforced by his classical preference for regular rhymes,[32] all his particular judgments of his predecessors and contemporaries were made; and when this is remembered it is easier to understand, for instance, his praise of Akenside[33] and his criticism of Collins.[34]

Gray, however, perhaps the most scrupulous and precise of all our poets with regard to the use of words in poetry,[35] has some pertinent things to say on the matter. There is his important letter to West, already referred to, with its dogmatic assertion that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry,” and that “our poetry has a language to itself,” an assertion which, with other remarks of Gray, helps to emphasize the distinction to be made between the two ideals of poetical diction to be seen persisting through the eighteenth century. It was generally agreed that there must be a special language for poetry, with all its artificial “heightening,” “licenses,” and variations from the language of prose, to serve the purpose of the traditional “Kinds,” especially the Epic and the Lyric. This is the view taken by Gray, but with a difference. He does not accept the conventional diction which Pope’s “Homer” had done so much to perpetuate, and hence he creates a poetic language of his own, a glittering array of words and phrases, blending material from varied sources, and including echoes and reminiscences of Milton and Dryden.

The second ideal of style was that of which, as we have seen, the canons had been definitely stated by Pope, and which had been splendidly exemplified in the satires, essays, and epistles. The aim was to reproduce “the colloquial idiom of living society,”[36] and the result was a plain, unaffected style, devoid of the ornaments of the poetic language proper, and, in its simplicity and directness, equally suitable for either poetry or prose. Gray could make use of this vehicle of expression, whenever, as in “The Long Story,” or the fragmentary “Alliance of Education and Government,” it was suitable and adequate for his purpose; but in the main his own practice stood distinct from both the eighteenth century ideals of poetical language. Hence, as it conformed to neither of the accepted standards, Goldsmith and Johnson agreed in condemning his diction, which was perhaps in itself sufficient proof that Gray had struck out a new language for himself.

Among the special problems connected with the diction of poetry to which the eighteenth century critics directed their attention, that of the use of archaic and obsolete words was prominent. It had been one of the methods by which the Elizabethans had hoped to enrich their language, but contemporary critics had expressed their disapproval, and it was left to Jonson, in this as in other similar matters, to express the reasonable view that “the eldest of the present and the newest of the past language is best.”[37] Dryden, when about to turn the “Canterbury Tales” “into our language as it is now refined,”[38] was to express a similar common-sense view. “When an ancient word,” he said, with his Horace no doubt in his mind, “for its sound and significancy deserves to be revived, I have that reasonable veneration for antiquity to restore it. All beyond this is superstition.”

A few years later the long series of Spenserian imitations had begun, so that the question of the poetic use of archaic and obsolete words naturally came into prominence. Pope, as might be expected, is to be found among the opposition, and in the “Dunciad” he takes the opportunity of showing his contempt for this kind of writing by a satiric gird, couched in supposedly archaic language:

But who is he in closet close y-pent

Of sober face with learned dust besprent?

Right well mine eyes arede the myster wight

On parchment scraps y-fed and Wormius hight—

(Bk. III, ll. 185-8)

an attack which is augmented by the ironic comment passed by “Scriblerus” in a footnote.[39] Nevertheless, when engaged on his translation of Homer he had an inclination, like Cowper, towards a certain amount of archaism, though it is evident that he is not altogether satisfied on the point.[40]

In Gray’s well-known letter to West, mentioned above, there is given a selection of epithets from Dryden, which he notes as instances of archaic words preserved in poetry. Gray, as we know, had a keen sense of the value of words, and his list is therefore of special importance, for it appears to show that words like mood, smouldering, beverage, array, wayward, boon, foiled, etc., seemed to readers of 1742 much more old-fashioned than they do to us. Thirty years or so later he practically retracts the views expressed in this earlier letter, in which he had admirably defended the use in poetry of words obsolete in the current language of the day. “I think,” he wrote to James Beattie, criticizing “The Minstrel,”[41] “that we should wholly adopt the language of Spenser or wholly renounce it.” And he goes on to object to such words as fared, meed, sheen, etc., objections which were answered by Beattie, who showed that all the words had the sanction of such illustrious predecessors as Milton and Pope, and who added that “the poetical style in every nation abounds in old words”—exactly what Gray had written in his letter of 1742.

Johnson, it need hardly be said, was of Pope’s opinion on this matter, and the emphatic protest which he, alarmed by such tendencies in the direction of Romanticism, apparent not only in the Spenserian imitations, but still more in such signs of the times as were to culminate in Percy’s “Reliques,” the Ossianic “simplicities” of Macpherson, and the Rowley “forgeries,” is evidence of the strength which the Spenserian revival had by then gained. “To imitate Spenser’s fiction and sentiments can incur no reproach,” he wrote: “but I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction and his stanza.”[42] To the end he continued to express his disapproval of those who favoured the “obsolete style,” and, like Pope, he finally indulges in a metrical fling at the innovators:

Phrase that time has flung away

Uncouth words in disarray;

Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet,

Ode and Elegy and Sonnet.[43]

Goldsmith too had his misgivings. “I dislike the imitations of our old English poets in general,” he wrote with reference to “The Schoolmistress,” “yet, on this minute subject, the antiquity of the style produces a very ludicrous solemnity.”[44]

On this matter of poetic archaism, the point of view of the average cultured reader, as distinct from the writer, is probably accurately represented in one of Chesterfield’s letters. Writing to his son,[45] he was particularly urgent that those words only should be employed which were found in the writers of the Augustan age, or of the age immediately preceding. To enforce his point he carefully explained to the boy the distinction between the pedant and the gentleman who is at the same time a scholar; the former affected rare words found only in the pages of obscure or antiquated authors rather than those used by the great classical writers.

This was the attitude adopted in the main by William Cowper, who, after an early enthusiasm for the “quaintness” of old words, when first engaged on his translation of Homer, later repented and congratulated himself on having, in his last revisal, pruned away every “single expression of the obsolete kind.”[46] But against these opinions we have to set the frankly romantic attitude of Thomas Warton, who, in his “Observations on the Faerie Queen” (1754), boldly asserts that “if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported,” whilst he is quite confident that Spenser’s language is not so difficult and obsolete as it is generally supposed to be.[47]

Here and there we also come across references to other devices by which the poet is entitled to add to his word-power. Thus Addison grants the right of indulging in coinages, since this is a practice sanctioned by example, especially by that of Homer and Milton.[48] Pope considered that only such of Homer’s compound epithets as could be “done literally into English without destroying the purity of our language” or those with good literary sanctions should be adopted.[49] Gray, however, enters a caveat against coinages; in the letter to Beattie, already quoted, he objects to the word “infuriated,” and adds a warning not to “make new words without great necessity; it is very hazardous at best.”

Finally, as a legacy or survival of that veneration for the “heroic poem,” which had found its latest expression in Davenant’s “Preface to Gondibert”[50] (1650), the question of technical words is occasionally touched upon. Dryden, who had begun by asserting that general terms were often a mere excuse for ignorance, could later give sufficient reasons for the avoidance of technical terms,[51] and it is not surprising to find that Gray was of a similar opinion. In his criticism of Beattie’s “Minstrel” he objects to the terms medium and incongruous as being words of art, which savour too much of prose. Gray, we may presume, did not object to such words because they were not “elegant,” or even mainly because they were “technical” expressions. He would reject them because, for him, with his keen sense of the value of words, they were too little endowed with poetic colour and imagination. When these protests are remembered, the great and lasting popularity of “The Shipwreck” (1762) of William Falconer, with its free employment of nautical words and phrases, may be considered to possess a certain significance in the history of the Romantic reaction. The daring use of technical terms in the poem must have given pleasure to a generation of readers accustomed mainly to the conventional words and phrases of the accepted diction.

When we review the “theory” of poetical language in the eighteenth century, as revealed in the sayings, direct and indirect, of poets and critics, we feel that there is little freshness or originality in the views expressed, very little to suggest the changes that were going on underneath, and which were soon to find their first great and reasoned expression. Nominally, it would seem that the views of the eighteenth century “classicists” were adequately represented and summed up in those of Johnson, for whom the ideal of poetical language was that which Dryden had “invented,” and of which Pope had made such splendid use in his translation of Homer. In reality, the practice of the “neo-classical” poets was largely influenced by the critical tenets of the school to which they belonged, especially by that pseudo-Aristotelian doctrine according to which poetry was to be an “imitation” of the best models, whilst its words, phrases, and similes were to be such as were generally accepted and consecrated by poetic use. It was this conventionalism, reinforced by, as well as reflecting, the neo-classical outlook on external nature, that resulted in the “poetic diction” which Wordsworth attacked, and it is important to note that a similar stereotyped language is to be found in most of the contemporary poetry of Western Europe, and especially in that of France.[52]

We need not be surprised, therefore, to find that neither Johnson, nor any of his “classical” contemporaries, appears to attach any importance to the fact that Pope in his essays and epistles had set up a standard of diction, of which it is not too much to say that it was an ideal vehicle of expression for the thoughts and feelings it had to convey. So enamoured were they of the pomp and glitter of the “Homer” that they apparently failed to see in this real “Pope style” an admirable model for all writers aiming at lucidity, simplicity, and directness of thought. We may see this clearly by means of an instructive comparison of Johnson’s judgments on the two “Pope styles.” “It is remarked by Watts,” he writes, “that there is scarcely a happy combination of words or a phrase poetically elegant in the English language which Pope has not inserted into his version of Homer.”[53] On the other hand, he is perhaps more than unjust to Pope’s plain didactic style when he speaks of the “harshness of diction,” the “levity without elegance” of the “Essay on Man.”[54]

It was not until the neo-classical poetry was in its death-agony that we meet with adequate appreciation of the admirable language which Pope brought to perfection and bequeathed to his successors. “The familiar style,” wrote Cowper to Unwin,[55] “is of all the styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose without being prosaic—to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of the rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.” The “familiar style,” which Cowper here definitely characterizes, was in its own special province as good a model as was the beautiful simplicity of Blake when “poetical poetry” had once more come into its own; and it is important to remember that this fact received due recognition from both Wordsworth and Coleridge. “The mischief,” wrote the former,[56] “was effected not by Pope’s satirical and moral pieces, for these entitle him to the highest place among the poets of his class; it was by his ‘Homer.’... No other work in the language so greatly vitiated the diction of English poetry.” And Coleridge, too, called attention to the “almost faultless position and choice of words” in Pope’s original compositions, in comparison with the absurd “pseudo-poetic diction” of his translations of Homer.[57] The “Pope style” failed to produce real poetry—poetry of infinite and universal appeal, animated with personal feeling and emotion not merely because of its preference for the generic rather than the typical, but because its practitioners for the most part lacked those qualities of intense imagination in which alone the highest art can have its birth.

CHAPTER III
THE “STOCK” DICTION OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY

Since the time when Wordsworth launched his manifestoes on the language fit and proper for poetry, it may almost be said that whenever the term “poetic diction” is found used as a more or less generic term of critical disparagement, it has been with reference, implied or explicit, to the so-called classical poetry of the Augustan ages. But the condemnation has perhaps been given too wide an application, and hence there has arisen a tendency to place in this category all the language of all the poets who were supposed to have taken Pope as their model, so that “the Pope style” and “eighteenth century diction” have almost become synonymous terms, as labels for a lifeless, imitative language in which poets felt themselves constrained to express all their thoughts and feelings. This criticism is both unjust and misleading. For when this “false and gaudy splendour” is unsparingly condemned, it is not always recognized or remembered that it is mainly to be found in the descriptive poetry of the period.

It is sufficient to glance at the descriptive verse of practically all the typical “classical” poets to discover how generally true this statement is. We cannot say, of course, that the varied sights and sounds of outdoor life made no appeal at all to them; but what we do feel is that whenever they were constrained to indulge in descriptive verse they either could not, or would not, try to convey their impressions in language of their very own, but were content in large measure to draw upon a common stock of dead and colourless epithets. Local colour, in the sense of accurate and particular observation of natural facts, is almost entirely lacking; there is no writing with the eye on the object, and it has been well remarked that their highly generalized descriptions could be transferred from poet to poet or from scene to scene, without any injustice. Thus Shenstone[58] describes his birthplace:

Romantic scenes of pendent hills

And verdant vales, and falling rills,

And mossy banks, the fields adorn

Where Damon, simple swain, was born—

a quatrain which, with little or no change of epithet, was the common property of the versifiers, and may be met with almost everywhere in early eighteenth century poetry. Every type of English scenery and every phase of outdoor life finds its description in lines of this sort, where the reader instinctively feels that the poet has not been careful to record his individual impressions or emotions, but has contented himself with accepting epithets and phrases consecrated to the use of natural description. A similar inability or indifference is seen even in the attempts to re-fashion Chaucer, or the Bible, or other old material, where the vigour and freshness and colour of the originals might have been expected to exercise a salutary influence. But to no purpose: all must be cast in the one mould, and clothed in the elegant diction of the time. Thus in Dryden’s modernization of the “Canterbury Tales” the beautiful simplicity of Chaucer’s descriptions of the sights and sounds of nature vanishes when garbed in the rapid and conventional phrases and locutions of the classicists. Chaucer’s “briddes” becomes “the painted birds,” a “goldfinch” is amplified into a “goldfinch with gaudy pride of painted plumes,” whilst a plain and simple mention of sunrise, “at the sun upriste,” has to be paraphrased into

Aurora had but newly chased the night

And purpled o’er the sky with blushing light.

The old ballads and the Psalms suffered severely in the same way.[59]

The fact that the words most frequently used in this stock poetic diction have usually some sort of connexion with dress or ornament has not escaped notice, and it has its own significance. It is, as it were, a reflex of the fact that the nature poetry of the period is in large measure the work of writers to whom social life is the central fact of existence, for whom meadow, and woodland, and running water, mountain and sea, the silent hills, and the starry sky brought no inspiration, or at least no inspiration powerful enough to lead them to break through the shackles of conventionality imposed upon them by the taste of their age. Words like “paint” and “painted,” “gaudy,” “adorn,” “deck,” “gilds” and “gilded,” “damasked,” “enamelled,” “embroidered,” and dozens similar form the stock vocabulary of natural description; apart from the best of Akenside, and the works of one or two writers such as John Cunningham, it can safely be said that but few new descriptive terms were added to the “nature vocabulary” of English poetry during this period. How far English poetry is yet distant from a recognition of the sea as a source of poetic inspiration may be perhaps seen from the fact that its most frequent epithet is the feeble term “watery,” whilst the magic of the sky by night or day evokes no image other than one that can be expressed by changes rung on such words as “azure,” “concave,” “serene,” “ætherial.” Even in “Night Thoughts,” where the subject might have led to something new and fresh in the way of a “star-vocabulary,” the best that Young can do is to take refuge in such periphrases as “tuneful spheres,” “nocturnal sparks,” “lucid orbs,” “ethereal armies,” “mathematic glories,” “radiant choirs,” “midnight counsellors,” etc.

And the same lack of direct observation and individual expression is obvious whenever the classicists have to mention birds or animals. Wild life had to wait for White of Selborne, and for Blake and Burns and Cowper and Wordsworth, to be observed with accuracy and treated with sympathy; and it has been well remarked that if we are to judge from their verse, most of the poets of the first quarter of the eighteenth century knew no bird except the goldfinch or nightingale, and even these probably only by hearsay. For the same generalized diction is usually called upon, and birds are merely a “feathered,” “tuneful,” “plumy” or “warbling” choir, whilst a periphrasis, allowing of numerous and varied labels for the same animal, is felt to be the correct thing. In Dryden sheep are “the woolly breed” or “the woolly race”; bees are the “industrious kind” or “the frugal kind”; pigs are “the bristly care” or “the tusky kind”; frogs are “the loquacious race”; crows, “the craven kind,” and so on: “the guiding principle seems to be that nothing must be mentioned by its own name.”[60]

Many of these stock epithets owed their appearance of course to the requirements imposed upon poets by their adherence to the heroic couplet. Pope himself calls attention to the fact that the necessities of rhyme led to the unceasing repetition of stereotyped phrases and locutions:

Where’er you find the “cooling western breeze.”

In the next line it “whispers through the trees”;

If crystal streams “with pleasing murmur creep”

The reader’s threaten’d, not in vain, with “sleep”—

adducing, with unconscious irony, the very rhymes prevalent in much of his own practice.[61]

It was also recognized by the versifiers that the indispensable polish and “correctness” of the decasyllabic line could only be secured by a mechanical use of epithets in certain positions. “There is a vast beauty [to me],” wrote Shenstone, “in using a word of a particular nature in the 8th and 9th syllable of an English verse. I mean what is virtually a dactyl. For instance,

And pykes, the tyrants of the wat’ry plains.

Let any person of any ear substitute liquid for wat’ry and he will find the disadvantage.”[62] Saintsbury has pointed out[63] that the “drastic but dangerous device of securing the undulating penetration of the line by the use of the gradus epithet was one of the chief causes of the intensely artificial character of the versification and its attendant diction.... There are passages in the ‘Dispensary’ and ‘The Rape of the Lock,’ where you can convert the decasyllable into the octosyllable for several lines together without detriment to sense or poetry by simply taking out these specious superfluities.”

In the year of Dryden’s death (or perhaps in the following year) there had appeared the “Art of Poetry” by Edward Bysshe, whose metrical laws were generally accepted, as authoritative, during the eighteenth century. During the forty years of Dryden’s literary career the supremacy of the stopped regular decasyllabic couplet had gradually established itself as the perfect form of verse. But Bysshe was the first prosodist to formulate the “rules” of the couplet, and in doing so he succeeded, probably because his views reflected the general prosodic tendencies of the time, in “codifying and mummifying” a system which soon became erected into a creed. “The foregoing rules (of accent on the even places and pause mainly at the 4th, 5th, or 6th syllable) ought indispensably to be followed in all our verses of 10 syllables: and the observation of them will produce Harmony, the neglect of them harshness and discord.”[64] Into this rigid mechanical mould contemporary and succeeding versifiers felt themselves constrained to place their couplets. But to pad out their lines they were nearly always beset with a temptation to use the trochaic epithets, of which numerous examples have been given above. As a natural result such epithets soon became part and parcel of the poetic stock of language, and hence most of them were freely used by poets, not because of any intrinsic poetic value, but because they were necessary to comply with the absurd mechanics of their vehicle of expression.

Since the “Lives of the Poets” it has been customary to regard this “poetic diction” as the peculiar invention of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and especially of Dryden and Pope, a belief largely due to Johnson’s eulogies of these poets. As an ardent admirer of the school of Dryden and Pope, it was only natural that Johnson should express an exalted opinion of their influence on the poetic practice of his contemporaries. But others—Gray amongst them—did not view their innovations with much complacency, and towards the end of the century Cowper was already foreshadowing the attack to be made by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the next generation. To Pope’s influence, he says in effect, after paying his predecessor a more or less formal compliment, was due the stereotyped form both of the couplet and of much of the language in which it was clothed. Pope had made

poetry a mere mechanic art

And every warbler had his tune by heart;

and in one of his letters he stigmatizes and pillories the inflated and stilted phraseology of Pope, and especially his translation of Homer.[65] Finally, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed in ascribing the “poetical diction,” against which their manifestoes were directed, to that source.

It is to be admitted that Pope’s translation is to some extent open to the charge brought against it of corrupting the language with a meretricious standard of poetic diction. In his Preface he expresses his misgivings as to the language fit and proper for an English rendering of Homer, and indeed it is usually recognized that his diction was, to a certain extent, imposed upon him both by the nature of his original, as well as by the lack of elasticity in his closed couplet. To the latter cause was doubtless due, not only the use of stock epithets to fill out the line, but also the inevitable repetition of certain words, due to the requirements of rhyme, even at the expense of straining or distorting their ordinary meaning. Thus train, for instance, on account of its convenience as a rhyming word, is often used to signify “a host,” or “body,” and similarly plain, main, for the ocean. In this connexion it has also been aptly pointed out that some of the defects resulted from the fact that Pope had founded his own epic style on that of the Latin poets, whose manner is most opposed to Homer’s. Thus he often sought to deck out or expand simple thoughts or commonplace situations by using what he no doubt considered really “poetical language,” and thus, for instance, where Homer simply says, “And the people perished,” Pope has to say, “And heaped the camp with mountains of the dead.” The repeated use of periphrases: feathered fates, for “arrows”; fleecy breed for “sheep”; the wandering nation of a summer’s day for “insects”; the beauteous kind for “women”; the shining mischief for “a fascinating woman”; rural care for “the occupations of the shepherd”; the social shades for “the ghosts of two brothers,” may be traced to the same influence.[66]

But apart from these defects the criticisms of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and their ascribing of the “poetical diction,” which they wished to abolish, to the influence of Pope’s “Homer,” are to a large extent unjust. Many of the characteristics of this “spurious poetic language” were well established long before Pope produced his translation. It is probable that they are present to a much larger extent, for instance, in Dryden; painted, rural, finny, briny, shady, vocal, mossy, fleecy, come everywhere in his translations, and not only there. Some of his adjectives in y are more audacious than those of Pope: spongy clouds, chinky hives, snary webs, roomy sea, etc. Most of the periphrases used by Pope and many more are already to be found in Dryden: “summer” is the sylvan reign; “bees,” the frugal or industrious kind; “arrows,” the feathered wood or feathered fates; “sheep,” the woolly breed; “frogs,” the loquacious race! From all Pope’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries similar examples may be quoted, like Gay’s

When floating clouds their spongy fleeces drain

(“Rural Sports”)

or Ambrose Philips:

Hark: how they warble in the brambly bush

The gaudy goldfinch or the speckly thrush

(“Fourth Pastoral”)

and that “Epistle to a Friend,” in which he ridicules the very jargon so much used in his own Pastorals.[67]

Pope then may justly be judged “not guilty,” at least “in the first degree,” of having originated the poetic diction which Johnson praised and Wordsworth condemned; in using it, he was simply using the stock language for descriptive poetry, whether original or in translations, which had slowly come into being during the last decade of the seventeenth century. If it be traced to its origins, it will be found that most of it originated with that poet who may fairly be called the founder of the English “classical” school of poetry—to Milton, to whom in large measure is due, not merely the invention, but also, by the very potency of the influence exercised by his great works, its vogue in the eighteenth century.

Before the time of Milton, it is not too much to say, even when we remember the practice of Spenser and Donne and their followers, that there was no special language for poetry, little or nothing of the diction consecrated solely to the purposes of poets. The poets of the Elizabethan age and their immediate successors had access to all diction, upon which they freely drew. But it seems natural, indeed inevitable, that for Milton, resolved to sing of things “unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,” the ordinary language of contemporary prose or poetry should be found lacking. He was thus impelled, we may say, consciously and deliberately to form for himself a special poetical vocabulary, which, in his case, was abundantly justified, because it was so essentially fitted to his purpose, and bore the stamp of his lofty poetic genius.

This poetical vocabulary was made up of diverse elements. Besides the numerous “classical” words, which brought with them all the added charm of literary reminiscence, there were archaisms, and words of Latin origin, as well as words deliberately coined on Latin and Greek roots. But it included also most of the epithets of which the eighteenth century versifiers were so fond. Examples may be taken from any of the descriptive portions of the “Paradise Lost”:

On the soft downy bank damasked with flowers

(IV, 334)

or

About me round I saw

Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains,

And liquid lapse of murmuring streams.

(VIII, 260-263)

Other phrases, like “vernal bloom,” “lucid stream,” “starry sphere,” “flowery vale,” “umbrageous grots,” were to become the worn-out penny-pieces of the eighteenth century poetical mint. Milton indeed seems to have been one of the great inventors of adjectives ending in y, though in this respect he had been anticipated by Browne and others, and especially by Chapman, who has large numbers of them, and whose predilection for this method of making adjectives out of nouns amounts almost to an obsession.[68]

Milton was also perhaps the great innovator with another kind of epithet, which called forth the censure of Johnson, who described it as “the practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives the terminations of participles,” though the great dictator is here attacking a perfectly legitimate device freely used by the Jacobeans and by most of the poets since their time.[69] Nor are there wanting in Milton’s epic instances of the idle periphrases banned by Wordsworth: straw-built citadel for “bee-hive,” vernal bloom for “spring flowers,” smutty grain for “gunpowder,” humid train for the flowery waters of a river, etc.[70]

With Milton, then, may be said to have originated the “poetic diction,” which drew forth Wordsworth’s strictures, and which in the sequel proved a dangerous model for the swarm of versifiers who essayed to borrow or imitate it for the purpose of their dull and commonplace themes. How much the Miltonic language, as aped and imitated by the “landscape gardeners and travelling pedlars” of the eighteenth century, lost in originality and freshness, may be felt, rather than described, if we compare so well-known a passage as the following with any of the quotations given earlier:

Yet not the more

Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt

Clear Spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,

Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief

Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,

That wash thy hallowed feet and warbling flow.

(P.L. III, 26-30)

But the minor poets of the eighteenth century, who, by their mechanical imitations, succeeded in reducing Milton’s diction to the level of an almost meaningless jargon, had had every encouragement from their greater predecessors and contemporaries. The process of depreciation may be seen already in Dryden, and it is probably by way of Pope that much of the Miltonic language became part of the eighteenth century poetic stock-in-trade. Pope was a frequent borrower from Milton, and, in his “Homer” especially, very many reminiscences are to be found, often used in an artificial, and sometimes in an absurd, manner.[71] Moreover, Pope’s free and cheapened use of many of Milton’s descriptive epithets did much to reduce them to the rank of merely conventional terms, and in this respect the attack of Wordsworth and Coleridge was not without justice. But on the whole the proper conclusion would seem to be that what is usually labelled as “the Pope style” could with more justice and aptness be described as “the pseudo-Miltonic style.” It is true that the versifiers freely pilfered the “Homer,” and the vogue of much of the stock diction is thus due to that source, but so far as Pope himself is concerned there is justice in his plea that he left this style behind him when he emerged from “Fancy’s maze” and “moralized his song.”

To what extent this catalogue of lifeless words and phrases had established itself as the poetical thesaurus is to be seen in the persistency with which it maintained its position until the very end of the century, when Erasmus Darwin with a fatal certainty evolved from it all its worst features, and thus did much unconsciously to crush it out of existence. James Thomson is rightly regarded as one of the most important figures in the early history of the Romantic Revolt, and he has had merited praise for his attempts to provide himself with a new language of his own. In this respect, however, he had been anticipated by John Philips, whose “Splendid Shilling” appeared in 1705, followed by “Cyder” a year later. Philips, though not the first Miltonic imitator, was practically the first to introduce the Miltonic diction and phrases, whilst at the same time he acquired the knack of adding phrases of his own to the common stock. He was thus an innovator from whom Thomson himself learned not a little.

But though the “Seasons” is ample testimony to a new and growing alertness to natural scenery, Thomson found it hard to escape from the fetters of the current poetic language. We feel that he is at least trying to write with his eye steadily fixed upon the object, but he could perhaps hardly be expected to get things right from the very beginning. Thus a stanza from his “Pastoral Entertainment” is purely conventional:

The place appointed was a spacious vale

Fanned always by a cooling western gale

Which in soft breezes through the meadow stray

And steal the ripened fragrances away—

while he paraphrases a portion of the sixth chapter of St. Matthew into:

Observe the rising lily’s snowy grace,

Observe the various vegetable race,

They neither toil nor spin, but careless grow

Yet see how warm they blush, how bright they glow,

where the stock terms scarcely harmonize with the simple Biblical diction. He was well aware of the attendant dangers and difficulties, and in the first book of “The Seasons” he gives expression to the need he feels of a language fit to render adequately all that he sees in Nature.[72] But though there is much that is fresh and vivid in his descriptive diction, and much that reveals him as a bold pioneer in poetic outlook and treatment, the tastes and tendencies of his age were too strong entirely to be escaped. Birds are the plumy, or feathered people, or the glossy kind,[73] and a flight of swallows is a feathered eddy; sheep are the bleating kind, etc. In one passage (“Spring,” ll. 114-135) he deals at length with the insects that attack the crops without once mentioning them by name: they are the feeble race, the frosty tribe, the latent foe, and even the sacred sons of vengeance. He has in general the traditional phraseology for the mountains and the sea, though a few of his epithets for the mountains, as keen-air’d and forest-rustling, are new. He speaks of the Alps as dreadful, horrid, vast, sublime. Shaggy and nodding are also applied to mountains as well as to rocks and forests; winter is usually described in the usual classical manner as deformed and inverted. Leaves are the honours of trees, paths are erroneous, caverns sweat, etc., and he also makes large use of Latinisms.[74]

John Dyer (1700-1758), though now and then conventional in his diction, has a good deal to his credit, and is a worthy contemporary of the author of “The Seasons.” Thus in the “Country Walk” it is the old stock diction he gives us:

Look upon that flowery plain

How the sheep surround their swain;

And there behold a bloomy mead,

A silver stream, a willow shade;

and much the same thing is to be found in “The Fleece,” published in 1757:

The crystal dews, impearl’d upon the grass,

Are touched by Phœbus’ beams and mount aloft,

With various clouds to paint the azure sky;

whilst he has almost as many adjectives in y as Ambrose Philips. But these are more than redeemed by the new descriptive touches which appear, sometimes curiously combined with the stereotyped phrases, as in “The Fleece” (Bk. III):

The scatter’d mists reveal the dusky hills;

Grey dawn appears; the golden morn ascends,

And paints the glittering rocks and purple woods.

Nor must we forget “Grongar Hill,” which has justly received high praise for its beauties and felicities of description.

It is scarcely necessary to illustrate further the vogue of this sort of diction in the first half of the eighteenth century; it is to be found everywhere in the poetry of the period, and the conventional epithets and phrases quoted from Dyer and Thomson may be taken as typical of the majority of their contemporaries. But this lifeless, stereotyped language has also invaded the work of some of the best poets of the century, including not only the later classicists, but also those who have been “born free,” and are foremost among the Romantic rebels. The poetic language of William Collins shows a strange mixture of the old style and the new. That it was new and individual is well seen from Johnson’s condemnation, for Johnson recognized very clearly that the language of the “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands” did not conform to what was probably his own view that the only language fit and proper for poetry was such as might bear comparison with the polish and elegance of Pope’s “Homer.” It is not difficult to make due allowance for Johnson when he speaks of Collins’s diction as “harsh, unskilfully laboured, and injudicially selected”; we deplore the classical bias, and are content enough to recognize and enjoy for ourselves the matchless beauty and charm of Collins’s diction at its best. Yet much of the language of his earlier work betrays him as more or less a poetaster of the eighteenth century. The early “Oriental Eclogues” abound in the usual descriptive details, just as if the poet had picked out his words and phrases from the approved lists. Thus,

Yet midst the blaze of courts she fixed her love

On the cool fountain or the shady grove

Still, with the shepherd’s innocence her mind

To the sweet vale and flowery mead inclined;

and even in the “Ode on the Popular Superstitions” there were expressions like watery surge, sheeny gold, though now and then the “new” diction is strikingly exemplified in a magnificent phrase such as gleamy pageant.

When Collins has nothing new to say his poetic language is that of his time, but when his inspiration is at its loftiest his diction is always equal to the task, and it is then that he gives us the unrivalled felicities of “The Ode to Evening.”

Amongst all the English poets there has probably never been one, even when we think of Tennyson, more careful and meticulous (or “curiously elaborate,” as Wordsworth styled it) about the diction of his verses, the very words themselves, than Gray. This fact, and not Matthew Arnold’s opinion that it was because Gray had fallen on an “age of prose,” may perhaps be regarded as sufficient to explain the comparative scantiness of his literary production. He himself, in a famous letter, has clearly stated his ideal of literary expression: “Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of lyrical poetry.”[75] Hence all his verses bear evidence of the most painstaking labour and rigorous self-criticism, almost as if every word had been weighed and assessed before being allowed to appear. His correspondence with Mason and Beattie, referred to in the previous chapter, shows the same fastidiousness with regard to the work of others. Gray indeed, drawing freely upon Milton and Dryden, created for himself a special poetic language which in its way can become almost as much an abuse as the otiosities of many of his predecessors and contemporaries—the “cumbrous splendour” of which Johnson complained. Yet he is never entirely free from the influence of the “classical” diction which, for Johnson, represented the ideal. His earliest work is almost entirely conventional in its descriptions, the prevailing tone being exemplified in such phrases as the purple year, the Attic Warbler pours her throat (Ode on “The Spring”), whilst in the “Progress of Poesy,” lines like

Through verdant vales and Ceres’ golden reign

are not uncommon, though of course the possibility of the direct influence of the classics, bringing with it the added flavour of reminiscence, is not to be ignored in this sort of diction. Moreover, a couplet from the fragmentary “Alliance of Education and Government”:

Scent the new fragrance of the breathing rose

And quaff the pendent vintage as it grows—

is almost typical, apart from the freshness of the epithet breathing, of what Wordsworth wished to abolish. Even the “Elegy” has not escaped the contagion: storied urn or animated bust is perilously akin to the pedantic periphrases of the Augustans.

Before passing to a consideration of the work of Johnson and Goldsmith, who best represent the later eighteenth century development of the “classical” school of Pope, reference may be made to two other writers. The first of these is Thomas Chatterton. In that phase of the early Romantic Movement which took the form of attempts to revive the past, Chatterton of course played an important part, and the pseudo-archaic language which he fabricated for the purpose of his “Rowley” poems is interesting, not only as an indication of the trend of the times towards the poetic use of old and obsolete words, but also as reflecting, it would seem, a genuine endeavour to escape from the fetters of the conventional and stereotyped diction of his day. On the other hand, in his avowedly original work, Chatterton’s diction is almost entirely imitative. He has scarcely a single fresh image or description; his series of “Elegies” and “Epistles” are clothed in the current poetic language. He uses the stock expressions, purling streams, watery bed, verdant vesture of the smiling fields, along with the usual periphrases, such as the muddy nation or the speckled folk for “frogs.” One verse of an “Elegy” written in 1768 contains in itself nearly all the conventional images:

Ye variegated children of the Spring,

Ye blossoms blushing with the pearly dew;

Ye birds that sweetly in the hawthorn sing;

Ye flowery meads, lawns of verdant hue.

It can be judged from these examples how a stereotyped mode of expression may depreciate to a large extent the value of much of the work of a poet of real genius. Chatterton is content in most of his avowedly “original” work to turn his poetic thoughts into the accepted moulds, which is all the more surprising when we remember his laborious methods of manufacturing an archaic diction for his mediaeval “discoveries,”[76] even if we may assume that it reflected a strong desire for something fresh and new.

A poet of much less genius, but one who enjoyed great contemporary fame, was William Falconer, whose “Shipwreck,” published in 1762, was the most popular sea-poem of the eighteenth century. The most striking characteristic of the descriptive parts of the poem is the daring and novel use of technical sea-terms, but apart from this the language is purely conventional. The sea is still the same desert-waste, faithless deep, watery way, world, plain, path, or the fluid plain, the glassy plain, whilst the landscape catalogue is as lifeless as any of the descriptive passages of the early eighteenth century:

on every spray

The warbling birds exalt their evening lay,

Blithe skipping o’er yon hill the fleecy train

Join the deep chorus of the lowing plain.

When he leaves this second-hand description, and describes scenes actually experienced and strongly felt, Falconer’s language is correspondingly fresh and vivid, the catastrophe of the shipwreck itself, for example, being painted with extraordinary power.[77]

When we come to Johnson and Goldsmith, here again a distinction must be made between the didactic or satiric portion of their work and that which is descriptive. Johnson’s didactic verse, marked as it is by a free use of inversion and ellipsis, rarely attains the clearness and simplicity of Goldsmith’s, whilst he has also much more of the stock descriptive terms and phrases. His “Odes” are almost entirely cast in this style. Thus in “Spring”:

Now o’er the rural Kingdom roves

Soft Pleasure with her laughing train,

Love warbles in the vocal groves

And vegetation plants the plains,

whilst exactly the same stuff is turned out for a love poem, “To Stella”:

Not the soft sighs of vernal gales

The fragrance of the flowery vales

The murmurs of the crystal rill

The vocal grove, the verdant hill.

Though there is not so much of this kind of otiose description in the poems of Goldsmith, yet Mr. Dobson’s estimate of his language may be accepted as a just one: “In spite of their beauty and humanity,” he says, “the lasting quality of ‘The Traveller’ and ‘The Deserted Village’ is seriously prejudiced by his half-way attitude between the poetry of convention and the poetry of nature—between the gradus epithet of Pope and the direct vocabulary of Wordsworth.”[78] Thus when we read such lines as

The slow canal, the yellow-blossomed vale,

The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail

(“Traveller,” ll. 293-4)

we feel that Goldsmith too has been writing with his eye on the object, and even in such a line as

The breezy covert of the warbling grove

(Ibid., 360)

there is a freshness of description that compensates for the use of the hackneyed warbling grove. On the other hand, there are in both pieces passages which it is difficult not to regard as purely conventional in their language. Thus in “The Traveller,” the diction, if not entirely of the stock type, is not far from it:

Ye glittering towns, with wealth and splendour crowned

Ye fields, where summer spreads profusion round

Ye lakes, whose vessels catch the busy gale

Ye bending swains, that dress the flowery vale,

and so on for another dozen lines.[79]

Only the slightest traces, however, of this mechanical word-painting appear in “The Deserted Village,” almost the only example of the stereotyped phrase being in the line

These simple blessings of the lowly train

(l. 252).

Thus whilst Goldsmith in much of his work continues the classical school of Pope, alike in his predilection for didactic verse and his practice of the heroic couplet, in his poetic language he is essentially individual. In his descriptive passages he rarely uses the conventional jargon, and the greater part of the didactic and moral observations of his two most famous poems is written in simple and unadorned language that would satisfy the requirements of the Wordsworthian canon.

That pure and unaffected diction could be employed with supreme effect in other than moral and didactic verse was soon to be shown in the lyric poetry of William Blake, who, about thirty years before Wordsworth launched his manifestoes, evolved for himself a poetic language, wonderful alike in its beauty and simplicity. In those of the “Songs of Innocence” and “The Songs of Experience,” which are concerned with natural description, the epithets and expressions that had long been consecrated to this purpose find little or no place. Here and there we seem to catch echoes of the stock diction, as in the lines,

the starry floor

the watery shore

of the Introduction to the “Songs of Experience,” or the

happy, silent, moony beams

of “The Cradle Song”; but in each case the expressions are redeemed and revitalized by the pure and joyous singing note of the lyrics of which they form part. Only once is Blake to be found using the conventional epithet, when in his “Laughing Song” he writes

the painted birds laugh in the shade,

whilst with his usual unerring instinct he marks down the monotonous smoothness of so much contemporary verse in that stanza of his ode “To the Muses” in which, as has been well said, the eighteenth century dies to music:[80]

How have you left the ancient love

That bards of old enjoyed in you!

The languid strings do scarcely move,

The sound is forced, the notes are few.

Not that he altogether escaped the blighting influence of his time. In the early “Imitation of Spenser,” we get such a couplet as

To sit in council with his modern peers

And judge of tinkling rhimes and elegances terse,

whilst the “vicious diction” Wordsworth was to condemn is also to be seen in this line from one of the early “Songs”:

and Phœbus fir’d my vocal rage.

Even as late as 1800 Blake was capable of writing

Receive this tribute from a harp sincere.[81]

But these slight blemishes only seem to show up in stronger light the essential beauty and nobility of his poetical style.

But the significance of Blake’s work in the purging and purifying of poetic diction was not, as might perhaps be expected, recognized by his contemporaries and immediate successors. For Coleridge, writing some thirty years later, it was Cowper, and his less famous contemporary Bowles, who were the pioneers in the rejecting of the old and faded style and the beginning of the new, the first to combine “natural thoughts with natural diction.”[82] Coleridge’s opinion seems to us now to be an over-statement, but we rather suspect that Cowper was not unwilling to regard himself as an innovator in poetic language. In his correspondence he reveals himself constantly pre-occupied with the question of poetic expression, and especially with the language fit and proper for his translation of Homer. His opinion of Pope’s attempt has already been referred to, but he himself was well aware of the inherent difficulties.[83] He had, it would seem, definite and decided opinions on the subject of poetic language; he recognized the lifelessness of the accepted diction, which, rightly or wrongly, he attributed especially to the influence of Pope’s “Homer,” and tried to escape from its bondage. His oft-quoted thesis that in the hands of the eighteenth century poets poetry had become a “mere mechanic art,” he developed at length in his ode “Secundum Artem,” which comprises almost a complete catalogue of the ornaments which enabled the warblers to have their tune by heart. What Cowper in that ode pillories—“the trim epithets,” the “sweet alternate rhyme,” the “flowers of light description”—were in the main what were to be held up to ridicule in the Lyrical Ballads prefaces; Wordsworth’s attack is here anticipated by twenty years.

But, as later in the case of Wordsworth, Cowper in his early work has not a little of the language which he is at such pains to condemn. Thus Horace again appears in the old familiar guise,

Now o’er the spangled hemisphere,

Diffused the starry train appear

(“Fifth Satire”)

whilst even in “Table Talk” we find occasional conventional descriptions such as

Nature...

Spreads the fresh verdure of the fields and leads

The dancing Naiads through the dewy meads.

But there is little of this kind of description in “The Task.” Now and then we meet with examples of the old periphrases, such as the pert voracious kind for “sparrows,” or the description of kings as the arbiters of this terraqueous swamp, though many of these pseudo-Miltonic expressions are no doubt used for playful effect. In those parts of the poem which deal with the sights and sounds of outdoor life the images are new and fresh, whilst in the moral and didactic portions the language is, as a rule, uniformly simple and direct. But for the classical purity of poetical expression in which the poet is at times pre-eminent, it is perhaps best to turn to his shorter poems, such as “To Mary,” or to the last two stanzas of “The Castaway,” and especially to some of the “Olney Hymns,” of the language of which it may be said that every word is rightly chosen and not one is superfluous. Indeed, it may well be that these hymns, together with those of Watts and Wesley,[84] which by their very purpose demanded a mode of expression severe in its simplicity, but upon which were stamped the refinement and correct taste of the scholars and gentlemen who wrote them—it may well be that the more natural mode of poetic diction which thus arose gave to Wordsworth a starting point when he began to expound and develop his theories concerning the language of poetry.[85]

Whilst Cowper was thus at once heralding, and to a not inconsiderable extent exemplifying, the Romantic reaction in form, another poet, George Crabbe, had by his realism given, even before Cowper, an important indication of one characteristic aspect of the new poetry.

But though the force and fidelity of his descriptions of the scenery of his native place, and the depth and sincerity of his pathos, give him a leading place among those who anticipated Wordsworth, other characteristics stamp him as belonging to the old order and not to the new. His language is still largely that perfected by Dryden and Pope, and worked to death by their degenerate followers. The recognized “elegancies” and “flowers of speech” still linger on. A peasant is still a swain, poets are sons of verse, fishes the finny tribe, country folk the rural tribe. The word nymph appears with a frequency that irritates the reader, and how ludicrous an effect it could produce by its sudden appearance in tales of the realistic type that Crabbe loved may be judged from such examples as

It soon appeared that while this nymph divine

Moved on, there met her rude uncivil kine.

Whilst he succeeds in depicting the life of the rustic poor, not as it appears in the rosy tints of Goldsmith’s pictures, but in all its reality—sordid, gloomy and stern, as it for the most part is—the old stereotyped descriptions are to be found scattered throughout his grimly realistic pictures of the countryside. Thus when Crabbe writes of

tepid meads

And lawns irriguous and the blooming field

(“Midnight”)

or

The lark on quavering pinion woo’d the day

Less towering linnets fill’d the vocal spray

(“The Candidate”)

we feel that he has not had before his eyes the real scenes of his Suffolk home, but that he has been content to recall and imitate the descriptive stock-in-trade that had passed current for so many years; even the later “Tales,” published up to the years when Shelley and Keats were beginning their activities, are not free from this defect.

About ten years before Wordsworth launched his manifestoes, there were published the two works of Erasmus Darwin, to which reference has already been made, and in which this stock language was unconsciously reduced to absurdity, not only because of the themes on which it was employed, but also because of the fatal ease and facility with which it was used. It is strange to think that but a few years before the famous sojourn of Coleridge and Wordsworth on the Quantocks, “The Loves of the Plants,” and its fellow, should have won instant and lasting popularity.[86]

That Darwin took himself very seriously is to be seen from “The Interludes,” in which he airs his views,[87] whilst in his two poems he gave full play to his “fancy” (“‘theory’ we cannot call it,” comments De Quincey) that nothing was strictly poetic except what is presented in visual image. This in itself was not bad doctrine, as it at least implied that poetry should be concrete, and thus reflected a desire to escape from the abstract and highly generalized diction of his day. But Darwin so works his dogma to death that the reader is at first dazzled, and finally bewildered by the multitude of images presented, in couplets of monotonous smoothness, in innumerable passages, such as

On twinkling fins my pearly nations play

Or wind with sinuous train their trackless way:

My plumy pairs in gay embroidery dressed

Form with ingenious bill the pensile nest.

(“Botanic Garden,” I)

Still there is something to be said for the readers who enjoyed having the facts and theories of contemporary science presented to them in so coloured and fantastic a garb.

Nor must it be forgotten that the youthful Wordsworth was much influenced by these poems of Darwin, so that his early work shows many traces of the very pseudo-poetic language which he was soon to condemn. Thus in “An Evening Walk”[88] there are such stock phrases as “emerald meads,” “watery plains,” the “forest train.”

In “Descriptive Sketches” examples are still more numerous. Thus:

Soft bosoms breathe around contagious sighs

And amorous music on the water dies,

which might have come direct from Pope, or

Here all the seasons revel hand-in-hand

’Mid lawns and shades by breezy rivulets fanned.

The old epithet purple is frequently found (purple lights and vernal plains, the purple morning, the fragrant mountain’s purple side), and there are a few awkward adjectives in y (“the piny waste”), whilst a gun is described as the thundering tube.

Few poems indeed are to be found in the eighteenth century with so many fantastic conceits as these 1793 poems of Wordsworth. Probably, as has been suggested, the poet was influenced to an extent greater than he himself imagined by “The Botanic Garden,” so that the poetical devices freely employed in his early work may be the result of a determination to conform to the “theory” of poetry which Darwin in his precept and practice had exemplified. Later, the devices which had satisfied him in his first youthful productions must have appeared to him as more or less vicious, and altogether undesirable, and in disgust he resolved to exclude at one stroke all that he was pleased to call “poetic diction.” But, little given to self-criticism, when he penned his memorable Prefaces, he fixed the responsibility for “the extravagant and absurd diction” upon the whole body of his predecessors, unable or unwilling to recognize that he himself had begun his poetic career with a free use of many of its worst faults.[89]

Of the stock diction of eighteenth century poetry we may say, then, that in the first place it is in large measure a reflection of the normal characteristic attitude of the poets of the “neo-classical” period towards Nature and all that the term implies. The “neo-classical” poets were but little interested in Nature; the countryside made no great appeal to them, and it was the Town and its teeming life that focused their interest and attention. Man, and his life as a social being, was their “proper study”; and this concentration of interest finds its reflection in the new and vivid language of the “essays,” satires, and epistles, whilst in the “nature poetry” the absence of genuine feeling is only too often betrayed by the dead epithets of the stock diction each poet felt himself at liberty to draw upon according to his needs. It is scarcely necessary to remind ourselves that it is in Pope’s “Pastorals” and the “Homer,” not in the “Dunciad” or “The Essay on Man,” that the stock words, phrases, and similes are to be found, and the remark is equally true of most of the poets of his period. But Pope has been unjustly pilloried, for the stock diction did not originate with him. It is true that the most masterly and finished examples of what is usually styled “the eighteenth century poetic diction” are to be found in his work generally, and no doubt the splendour of his translation of Homer did much to establish a vogue for many of the set words and phrases. At the same time the supremacy of the heroic couplet which he did so much to establish played its part in perpetuating the stock diction, the epithets of which were often technically just what was required to give the decasyllabic verse the desired “correctness” and “smoothness.” But it is unjust to saddle him with the responsibility for the lack of originality evident in many of his successors and imitators.

The fact that this stock language is not confined to the neo-classical poets proper, but is found to a large extent persisting to the very end of the eighteenth century, and even invading the early work of the writer who led the revolt against it, is indicative of another general cause of its widespread prevalence. Briefly, it may be said that not only did the conventional poetic diction reflect in the main the average neo-classical outlook on external nature; it reflected also the average eighteenth century view as to the nature of poetical language, which regarded its words and phrases as satisfying the artistic canon, not in virtue of the degree in which they reflected the individual thought or emotion of the poet, but according as they conformed to a standard of language based on accepted models.

CHAPTER IV
LATINISM IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY

There is now to be noticed another type of eighteenth century poetic diction which was in its way as prevalent, and, it may be added, as vicious, as the stock diction which has been discussed in the previous chapter. This was the use of a latinized vocabulary, from the early years of the century down to the days when the work of Goldsmith, Cowper, and Crabbe seemed to indicate a sort of interregnum between the old order and the new.

This fashion, or craze, for “latinity” was not of course a sudden and special development which came in with the eighteenth century: it was rather the culmination of a tendency which was not altogether unconnected with the historic development of the language itself. As a factor in literary composition, it had first begun to be discussed when the Elizabethan critics and men of letters were busying themselves with the special problem of diction. Latinism was one of the excesses to which poets and critics alike directed their attention, and their strictures and warnings were such as were inevitable and salutary in the then transitional confusion of the language.[90] In the early years of the seventeenth century this device for strengthening and ornamenting the language was adopted more or less deliberately by such poets as Phineas and Giles Fletcher, especially the latter, who makes free use of such coinages as elamping, appetence, elonging, etc.[91]

The example of the Fletchers in thus adding to their means of literary expression was soon to be followed by a greater poet. When Milton came to write his epics, it is evident, as has been said, that he felt the need for a diction in keeping with the exalted theme he had chosen, and his own taste and temperament, as well as the general tendencies of his age, naturally led him to make use of numerous words of direct or indirect “classical” origin. But his direct coinages from Latin and Greek are much less than has often been supposed.[92] What he seems to have done in many cases was to take words the majority of which had been recently formed, usually for scientific or philosophic purposes, and incorporate them in his poetical vocabulary. Thus Atheous, attrite, conflagrant, jaculation, myrrhine, paranymph, plenipotent, etc., are instances of classical formations which in most cases seem, according to “The New English Dictionary,” to have made their first literary appearance shortly before the Restoration. In other instances Milton’s latinisms are much older.[93] What is important is the fact that Milton was able to infuse these and many similar words with a real poetic power, and we may be sure that the use of such words as ethereal, adamantine, refulgent, regal, whose very essence, as has been remarked, is suggestiveness, rather than close definition, was altogether deliberate.[94] In addition to this use of a latinized vocabulary, there is a continuous latinism of construction, which is to be found in the early poems, but which, as might be expected, is most prominent in the great epics, where idioms like after his charge received (P.L., V 248), since first her salutation heard (P.R., II, 107) are frequent.[95]

Milton, we may say, of purpose prepense made or culled for himself a special poetical vocabulary which was bound to suffer severely at the hands of incompetent and uninspired imitators. But though the widespread use of latinized diction is no doubt largely to be traced to the influence of Milton at a time when “English verse went Milton mad,” it may perhaps also be regarded as a practice that reflected to a certain extent the general literary tendencies of the Augustan age.

When Milton was writing his great epics Dryden was just beginning his literary career, but though there are numerous examples of latinisms in the works of the latter, they are not such as would suggest that he had been influenced to any extent by the Miltonic manner of creating a poetical vocabulary. There is little or no coinage of the “magnificent” words which Milton used so freely, though latinized forms like geniture, irremeable, praescious, tralineate, are frequent. Dryden, however, as might be expected, often uses words in their original etymological sense. Thus besides the common use of prevent, secure, etc., we find in the translation of the “Metamorphoses”:

He had either led

Thy mother then,

where led is used in the sense of Latin ducere (marry) and “refers the limbs,” where “refers” means “restores.”[96] Examples are few in Dryden’s original works, but “Annus Mirabilis” furnishes instances like the ponderous ball expires, where “expires” means “is blown forth,” and “each wonted room require” (“seek again”), whilst there is an occasional reminiscence of such Latin phrases as “manifest of crimes” for manifestus sceleris (“Ab. and Achit.”).

What has been said of the latinisms of Dryden applies also to those of Pope. Words like prevent, erring, succeed, devious, horrid, missive, vagrant, are used with their original signification, and there are passages like

For this he bids the nervous artists vie.

Imitations of Latin constructions are occasionally found:

Some god has told them, or themselves survey

The bark escaped.

Phrases like “fulgid weapons,” “roseate unguents,” “circumfusile gold,” “frustrate triumphs,” etc., are probably coinages imposed by the necessities of translation. Other similar phrases, such as (tears) “conglobing on the dust,” “with unctuous fir foment the flame,” seem to anticipate something of the absurdity into which this kind of diction was later to fall.[97]

On the whole, the latinisms found in the works of Dryden and Pope are not usually deliberate creations for the purpose of poetic ornament. They are such as would probably seem perfectly natural in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, when the traditions of classical study still persisted strongly, and when the language of prose itself was still receiving additions from that source. Moreover, the large amount of translation done by both poets from the classics was bound to result in the use of numerous classical terms and constructions.

In 1705 there appeared the “Splendid Shilling” of John Philips, followed by his “Cyder” and other poems a year later. These poems are among the first of the Miltonic parodies or imitations, and, being written in blank verse, they may be regarded as heralding the struggle against the tyranny of the heroic couplet. Indeed, blank verse came to be distinctly associated with the Romantic movement, probably because it was considered that its structure was more encouraging to the unfettered imagination than the closed couplets of the classicists. It is thus interesting to note that the reaction in form, which marks one distinct aspect of Romanticism, was really responsible for some of the excesses against which the manifestoes afterwards protested; for it is in these blank verse poems especially that there was developed a latinism both of diction and construction that frequently borders on the ludicrous, even when the poet’s object was not deliberately humorous.

In “Blenheim” terms and phrases such as globous iron, by chains connexed, etc., are frequent, and the attempts at Miltonic effects is seen in numerous passages like

Upborne

By frothy billows thousands float the stream

In cumbrous mail, with love of farther shore;

Confiding in their hands, that sed’lous strive

To cut th’ outrageous fluent.

In “Cyder” latinisms are still more abundant: the nocent brood (of snails), treacle’s viscuous juice, with grain incentive stored, the defecated liquour, irriguous sleep, as well as passages like

Nor from the sable ground expect success

Nor from cretacious, stubborn or jejune,

or

Bards with volant touch