Title: Poetic diction: A study of eighteenth century verse
Author: Quayle, Thomas
Language: English
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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


    CHAPTER                                   PAGE

       I. THE AGE OF PROSE AND REASON            1

      II. THE THEORY OF DICTION                  5

     III. THE “STOCK” DICTION                   25

      IV. LATINISM                              56

       V. ARCHAISM                              80

      VI. COMPOUND EPITHETS                    102

     VII. PERSONIFICATION AND ABSTRACTION      132

    VIII. THE DICTION OF POETRY                181

          INDEX                                207



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
    Traverse loquacious strings.

This kind of thing became extremely common and persisted throughout the
eighteenth century.

Incidentally, it may here be remarked that the publication of Philips’s
poems probably gave to Lady Winchilsea a hint for her poem “Fanscombe
Barn.”[98] Philips, as has been noted, was one of the very first to
attempt to use Milton’s lofty diction, and his latinized sentence
structure for commonplace and even trivial themes, and no doubt his
experiment, having attracted Lady Winchilsea’s attention, inspired her
own efforts at Miltonic parody, though it is probably “Cyder” and “The
Splendid Shilling,” rather then “Paradise Lost,” that she takes as her
model. Thus the carousings of the tramps forgathered in Fanscombe Barn
are described:

          the swarthy bowl appears,
    Replete with liquor, globulous to fight,
    And threat’ning inundation o’er the brim;

and the whole poem shows traces of its second-hand inspiration.

Even those who are now remembered chiefly as Spenserian imitators indulge
freely in a latinized style when they take to blank verse. Thus William
Thompson, who in his poem “Sickness” has many phrases like “the arm
_ignipotent_,” “_inundant_ blaze” (Bk. I), “terrestrial stores medicinal”
(Bk. III), with numerous passages, of which the following is typical:

                              the poet’s mind
    (Effluence essential of heat and light)
    Now mounts a loftier wing when Fancy leads
    The glittering track, and points him to the sky
    Excursive.

                                                                 (Bk. IV)

William Shenstone, the author of one of the most successful of the
Spenserian imitations, is more sparing in this respect, but even in his
case passages such as

              Of words indeed profuse,
    Of gold tenacious, their torpescent soul
    Clenches their coin, and what electric fire
    Shall solve the frosty grip, and bid it flow?

                                                      (“Economy,” Part I)

are not infrequent.

But it is not only the mere versifiers who have succumbed to this
temptation. By far the most important of the early blank verse poems
was Thomson’s “Seasons,” which, first appearing from 1726-1730, was
subsequently greatly revised and altered up to the edition of 1746,
the last to be issued in the author’s lifetime.[99] The importance and
success of “The Seasons” as one of the earliest indications of the
“Return to Nature” has received adequate recognition, but Thomson was
an innovator in the style, as well as in the matter, of his poem. As
Dr. Johnson remarked, he saw things always with the eyes of a poet,
and the quickened and revived interest in external nature which he
reflects inevitably impelled him to search for a new diction to give it
expression. We can see him, as it were, at work trying to replace the
current coinage with a new mintage of his own, or rather with a mixed
currency, derived partly from Milton, and partly from his own resources.
His diction is thus in some degrees as artificial as the stock diction
of his period, especially when his attempts to emulate or imitate the
magnificence of Milton betray him into pomposity or even absurdity; but
his poetical language as a whole is leavened with so much that is new and
his very own as to make it clear that the Romantic revival in the style,
as well as in the contents, of poetry has really begun. The resulting
peculiarities of style did not escape notice in his own time. He was
recognized as the creator of a new poetical language, and was severely
criticized even by some of his friends. Thus Somerville urged with
unusual frankness a close revision of the style of “The Seasons”:

    Read Philips much, consider Milton more
    But from their dross extract the purer ore:
    To coin new words or to restore the old
    In southern lands is dangerous and bold;
    But rarely, very rarely, will succeed
    When minted on the other side of Tweed.[100]

Thomson’s comment on this criticism was emphatic: “Should I alter my
ways I should write poorly. I must choose what appears to be the most
significant epithet or I cannot proceed.”[101] Hence, though lines and
whole passages of “The Seasons” were revised, and large additions made,
the characteristics of the style were on the whole preserved. And one
of the chief characteristics, due partly to the influence of Milton,
and partly to the obvious fact that for Thomson with new thoughts and
impressions to convey to his readers, the current and conventional
vocabulary of poetry needed reinforcement, is an excessive use of
latinisms.[102]

Thus in “Spring” we find, e.g., “_prelusive_ drops,” “the _amusive_ arch”
(the rainbow), “the torpid sap _detruded_ to the root,” etc., as well as
numerous passages such as

              Joined to these
    Innumerous songsters in the freshening shade
    Of new-sprung leaves, their modulations mix
    Mellifluous.

                                                    (“Spring,” 607 foll.)

In “Summer” the epithet _gelid_ appears with almost wearisome iteration,
with other examples like _flexile_ wave, _the fond sequacious bird_,
etc., while the cloud that presages a storm is called “the small
prognostic” and trees are “the noble sons of potent heat and floods.”
Continuous passages betray similar characteristics:

    From thee the sapphire, solid ether, takes
    Its hue cerulean and of evening tinct.

                                                    (“Summer,” 149 foll.)

_Autumn_ furnishes even more surprising instances: the stag “_adhesive_
to the track,” the sands “strowed _bibulous_ above,” “forests huge
_incult_,” etc., as well as numerous passages of sustained latinism.[103]

In “Winter,” which grew from an original 405 lines in 1726 to 1,069 lines
in 1746, latinism of vocabulary is not prominent to the same extent as in
the three previous books, but the following is a typical sample:

    Meantime in sable cincture shadows vast
    Deep-tinged, and damp and congregated clouds
    And all the vapoury turbulence of heaven
    Involves the face of things.

                                                      (ll. 54 foll.)[104]

The revisions after 1730 do not show any great pruning, or less
indulgence in these characteristics; rather the contrary, for many of
them are additions which did not appear until 1744. Now and then Thomson
has changed his terms and epithets. Thus in the lines

                the potent sun
    _Melts into_ limpid air the high-raised clouds

                                                          (“Summer,” 199)

the expression “melts into” has replaced the earlier “attenuates
to.”[105] One of the best of the emendations, at least as regards the
disappearance of a latinism, is seen in “Summer” (48-9), where the second
verse of the couplet,

    The meek-eyed morn appears, mother of dews,
    At first _faint-gleaming_ in the dappled east

has replaced the

    _Mildly elucent_ in the streaky east

of the earlier version. Often Thomson’s latinisms produce no other effect
on the reader than that of mere pedantry. Thus in passages such as

    See, where the winding vale its lavish stores
    _Irriguous_ spreads. See, how the lily drinks
    The _latent_ rill.

                                                          (“Spring,” 494)

or

                    the canvas smooth
    With glowing life _protuberant_.

                                                          (“Autumn,” 136)

or

    The fallow ground laid open to the sun
    _Concoctive_.

                                                           (_Ibid._, 407)

or the description of the tempest

    Struggling through the _dissipated_ grove

                                                     (“Winter,” 185)[106]

(where there is Latin _order_ as well as diction), it is certain that
the terms in question have little or no poetic value, and that simpler
words in nearly every case would have produced greater effects. Now and
then, as later in the case of Cowper, the pedantry is, we may suppose,
deliberately playful, as when he speaks of the cattle that

    ruminate in the contiguous shade

                                                           (“Winter,” 86)

or indicates a partial thaw by the statement

          Perhaps the vale
    relents awhile to the reflected ray.

                                                           (_Ibid._, 784)

The words illustrated above are rarely, of course, Thomson’s own coinage.
Many of them (e.g. _detruded_, _hyperborean_, _luculent_, _relucent_,
_turgent_) date from the sixteenth century or earlier, though from the
earliest references to them given in the “New English Dictionary” it
may be assumed that Thomson was not always acquainted with the sources
where they are first found, and that to him their “poetic” use is first
due. In some cases Milton was doubtless the immediate source from which
Thomson took such words, to use them with a characteristic looseness of
meaning.[107]

It would be too much to say that Thomson’s use of such terms arises
merely out of a desire to emulate the “grand style”; it reflects rather
his general predilection for florid and luxurious diction. Moreover, it
has been noted that an analysis of his latinisms seems to point to a
definite scheme of formation. Thus there is a distinct preference for
certain groups of formations, such as adjectives in “-ive” (_affective_,
_amusive_, _excursive_, etc.), or in “-ous” (_irriguous_, _sequacious_),
or Latin participle forms, such as _clamant_, _turgent_, _incult_, etc.
In additions Latin words are frequently used in their original sense,
common instances being _sordid_, _generous_, _error_, _secure_, _horrid_,
_dome_, while his blank verse line was also characterized by the free use
of latinized constructions.[108] Thomson’s frequent use of the sandwiched
noun, “flowing rapture bright” (“Spring,” 1088), “gelid caverns
woodbine-wrought,” (“Summer,” 461), “joyless rains obscure” (“Winter,”
712), often with the second adjective used predicatively or adverbially,

    High seen the Seasons lead, _in sprightly dance_
      _Harmonious knit_, the rosy-fingered hours

                                                         (“Summer,” 1212)

is also worthy of note.

Yet it can hardly be denied that the language of “The Seasons” is in
many respects highly artificial, and that Thomson was to all intents
and purposes the creator of a special poetic diction, perhaps even more
so than Gray, who had to bear the brunt of Wordsworth’s fulminations.
But on the whole his balance is on the right side; at a time when the
majority of his contemporaries were either content to draw drafts on
the conventional and consecrated words, phrases, and similes, or were
sedulously striving to ape the polished plainness of Pope, he was able to
show that new powers of expression could well be won from the language.
His nature vocabulary alone is sufficient proof of the value of his
contributions to the poetic wealth of the language, not a few of his
new-formed compounds especially being expressive and beautiful.[109] His
latinisms are less successful because they can hardly be said to belong
to any diction, and for the most part they must be classed among the
“false ornaments” derided by Wordsworth;[110] not only do they possess
none of that mysterious power of suggestion which comes to words in
virtue of their employment through generations of prose and song, but
also not infrequently their meaning is far from clear. They are never the
spontaneous reflection of the poet’s thought, but, on the contrary, they
appear only too often to have been dragged in merely for effect.

This last remark applies still more forcibly to Somerville’s “Chase,”
which appeared in 1735. Its author was evidently following in the wake of
Thomson’s blank verse, and with this aim freely allows himself the use of
an artificial and inflated diction, as in many passages like

    Cull each salubrious plant, with bitter juice
    Concoctive stored, and potent to allay
    Each vicious ferment.

About the same time Edward Young was probably writing his “Night
Thoughts,” though the poem was not published until 1742. Here again
the influence of Thomson is to be seen in the diction, though no
doubt in this case there is also not a little that derives direct
from Milton. Young has Latin formations like _terraqueous_, _to
defecate_, _feculence_, _manumit_, as well as terms such as _avocation_,
_eliminate_, and _unparadize_, used in their original sense. In the
second instalment of the “Night Thoughts” there is a striking increase in
the number of Latin terms, either borrowed directly, or at least formed
on classical roots, some of which must have been unintelligible to many
readers. Thus _indagators_ for “seekers,” _fucus_ for “false brilliance,”
_concertion_ for “intimate agreement,” and _cutaneous_ for “external,”
“skin deep”:

    All the distinctions of this little life
    Are quite cutaneous.[111]

It is difficult to understand the use of such terms when simple native
words were ready at hand, and the explanation must be that they were
thought to add to the dignity of the poem, and to give it a flavour of
scholarship; for the same blemishes appear in most of the works published
at this time. Thus in Akenside’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” (1744)
there is a similar use of latinized terms: _pensile planets_, _passion’s
fierce illapse_, _magnific praise_, though the tendency is best
illustrated in such passages as

                    that trickling shower
    Piercing through every crystalline convex
    Of clustering dewdrops to their flight opposed,
    Recoil at length where, concave all behind
    The internal surface of each glassy orb
    Repels their forward passage into air.

In “The Poet” there is a striking example of what can only be the
pedantic, even if playful, use of a cumbrous epithet:

    On shelves _pulverulent_, majestic stands
    His library.

Similar examples are to be found in “The Art of Preserving Health” by
John Armstrong, published in the same year as Akenside’s “Pleasures.”
The unpoetical nature of this subject may perhaps be Armstrong’s excuse
for such passages as

    Mournful eclipse or planets ill-combined
    Portend disastrous to the vital world;

but this latinizing tendency was perhaps never responsible for a more
absurd periphrasis than one to be found in the second part of the poem,
which treats of “Diet”:

    Nor does his gorge the luscious bacon rue,
    Nor that which Cestria sends, tenacious paste
    Of solid milk.[112]

The high Miltonic manner was likewise attempted by John Dyer in “The
Fleece,” which appeared in 1757, and by James Grainger in “The Sugar
Cane” (1764), to mention only the most important. Dyer, deservedly
praised for his new and fresh descriptive diction, has not escaped this
contagion of latinism: _the globe terraqueous_, _the cerule stream_,
_rich sapinaceous loam_, _detersive bay salt_, etc., while elsewhere
there are obvious efforts to recapture the Miltonic cadence. In “The
Sugar Cane” the tendency is increased by the necessity thrust upon the
poet to introduce numerous technical terms. Thus

                though all thy mills
    Crackling, o’erflow with a redundant juice
    Poor tastes the liquor; coction long demands
    And highest temper, ere it saccharize.

Meanwhile Joseph Warton had written his one blank verse poem “The
Enthusiast” (1740), when he was only eighteen years old. But though both
he and his brother Thomas are among the most important of the poets
who show the influence of Milton most clearly, that influence reveals
itself rather in the matter of thought than of form, and there is in
“The Enthusiast” little of the diction that marred so many of the blank
verse poems. Only here and there may traces be seen, as in the following
passage:

                  fairer she
    In innocence and homespun vestments dress’d
    Than if cerulean sapphires at her ears
    Shone pendent.

There is still less in the poems of Thomas Warton, who was even a more
direct follower of Milton than his elder brother. There is scarcely one
example of a Latinism in “The Pleasures of Melancholy,” which is really
a companion piece to “The Enthusiast.” The truth is that it was Milton’s
early work—and especially “Il Penseroso”—that affected most deeply these
early Romanticists, and even their blank verse is charged with the
sentiments and phrases of Milton’s octosyllabics. Thus the two poets, who
were among the first to catch something of the true spirit of Milton,
have little or nothing of the cumbersome and pedantic diction found so
frequently in the so-called “Miltonics” of the eighteenth century, and
this in itself is one indication of their importance in the earlier
stages of the Romantic revival.

This is also true in the case of Collins and Gray, who are the real
eighteenth century disciples of Milton. Collins’s fondness for
personified abstractions may perhaps be attributed to Milton’s influence,
but there are few, if any, traces of latinism in his pure and simple
diction. Gray was probably influenced more than he himself thought by
Milton, and like Milton he made for himself a special poetical language,
which owes not a little to the works of his great exemplar. But Gray’s
keen sense of the poetical value of words, and his laborious precision
and exactness in their use, kept him from any indulgence in coinages.
Only one or two latinisms are to be found in the whole of his work, and
when these do occur they are such as would come naturally to a scholar,
or as were still current in the language of his time. Thus in “The
Progress of Poesy” he has

    this _pencil_ take,

where “pencil” stands for “brush” (Latin, _pensillum_); whilst in a
translation from Statius he gives to _prevent_ its latinized meaning

    the champions, trembling at the sight
    _Prevent_ disgrace.

There is also a solitary example in the “Elegy” in the line

    Can Honour’s voice _provoke_ the silent dust.

The contemporary fondness for blank verse had called forth the strictures
of Goldsmith in his “Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning,”
and his own smooth and flowing couplets have certainly none of the
pompous epithets which he there condemns. His diction, if we except an
occasional use of the stock descriptive epithets, is admirable alike in
its simplicity and directness, and the two following lines from “The
Traveller” are, with one exception,[113] the only examples of latinisms
to be found in his poems:

    While sea-born gales their _gelid_ wings expand,

and

    Fall blunted from each _indurated_ heart.

Dr. Johnson, who represented the extreme classicist position with regard
to blank verse and other tendencies of the Romantic reaction, had a
good deal to say in the aggregate about the poetical language of his
predecessors and contemporaries. But the latinism of the time, which
was widespread enough to have attracted his attention, does not seem to
have provoked from him any critical comment. His own poetical works,
even when we remember the “Vanity of Human Wishes,” where plenty of
instances of Latin idiom are to be found, are practically free from this
kind of diction, though this does not warrant the inference that he
disapproved of it. We know that his prose was latinized to a remarkable
extent, so that his “sesquipedalian terminology” has been regarded as
the fountain-head of that variety of English which delights in “big,”
high-sounding words. But his ideal, we may assume, was the polished and
elegant diction of Pope, and his own verse is as free from pedantic
formations as is “The Lives of the Poets,” which perhaps represents his
best prose.

It is in the works of a poet who, though he continues certain aspects of
neo-classicism, yet announces unmistakably the coming of the new age,
that we find a marked use of a deliberately latinized diction. Cowper has
always received just praise for the purity of his language; he is, on the
whole, singularly free from the artificialities and inversions which had
marked the accepted poetic diction, but, on the other hand, his language
is latinized to an extent that has perhaps not always been fully realized.

This is, however, confined to “The Task” and to the translation of
the “Iliad.” In the former case there is first a use of words freely
formed on Latin roots, for most of which Cowper had no doubt abundant
precedents,[114] but which, in some cases, must have been coined by
him, perhaps playfully in some instances; _twisted form vermicular_,
_the agglomerated pile_, _the voluble and restless earth_, etc. Other
characteristics of this latinized style are perhaps best seen in
continuous passages such as

                  he spares me yet
    These chestnuts ranged in corresponding lines;
    And, though himself so polished, still reprieves
    The obsolete prolixity of shade

                                                   (Bk. I, ll. 262 foll.)

or in such a mock-heroic fling as

    The stable yields a stercoraceous heap
    Impregnated with quick fermenting salts
    And potent to resist the freezing blast.

                                                      (Bk. III, 463)[115]

On these and many similar occasions Cowper has turned his predilection to
playful account, as also when he diagnoses the symptoms of gout as

    pangs arthritic that infest the toe
    Of libertine excess,

or speaks of monarchs and Kings as

    The arbiters of this terraqueous swamp.

There is still freer use of latinisms in the “Homer”:[116] _her eyes
caerulean_, _the point innocuous_, _piercing accents stridulous_, _the
triturated barley_, _candent lightnings_, _the inherent barb_, _his
stream vortiginous_, besides such passages as

    nor did the Muses spare to add
    Responsive melody of vocal sweets.

The instances given above fully illustrate on the whole the use of
a latinized diction in eighteenth century poetry.[117] It must not,
however, be supposed that the fashion was altogether confined to the
blank verse poems. Thus Matthew Prior in “Alma,” or “The Progress of the
Mind,” has passages like

            the word obscene
    Or harsh which once elanced must ever fly
    Irrevocable,

whilst Richard Savage in his “Wanderer” indulges in such flights as

                            his breath
    A nitrous damp that strikes petrific death.

One short stanza by William Shenstone, from his poem “Written in Spring,
1743,” contains an obvious example in three out of its four lines:

        Again the labouring hind inverts the soil,
    Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave,
    Another spring renews the soldier’s toil,
    And finds me vacant in the rural cave.

But it is in the blank verse poems that the fashion is most prevalent,
and it is there that it only too often becomes ludicrous. The blind
Milton, dying, lonely and neglected, a stranger in a strange land, is
hardly likely to have looked upon himself as the founder of a “school,”
or to have suspected to what base uses his lofty diction and style were
to be put, within a few decades of his death, by a swarm of poetasters
who fondly regarded themselves as his disciples.[118] The early writers
of blank verse, such as John Philips, frankly avowed themselves imitators
of Milton, and there can be little doubt that in their efforts to
catch something of the dignity and majesty of their model the crowd of
versifiers who then appeared on the scene had recourse to high-sounding
words and phrases, as well as to latinized constructions by which they
hoped to elevate their style. The grand style of “Paradise Lost” was
bound to suffer severely at the hands of imitators, and there can be
little doubt but that much of the preposterous latinizing of the time
is to be traced to this cause. At the same time the influence of the
general literary tendencies of the Augustan ages is not to be ignored in
this connexion. When a diction freely sprinkled with latinized terms is
found used by writers like Thomson in the first quarter, and Cowper at
the end of the century, it may perhaps also be regarded as a mannerism
of style due in some degree to influences which were still powerful
enough to affect literary workmanship. For it must be remembered that in
the eighteenth century the traditional supremacy of Latin had not yet
altogether died out: pulpit and forensic eloquence, as well as the great
prose works of the period, still bore abundant traces of the persistency
of this influence.[119] Hence it need not be at all surprising to find
that it has invaded poetry. The use of latinized words and phrases gave,
or was supposed to give, an air of culture to verse, and contemporary
readers did not always, we may suppose, regard such language as a mere
display of pedantry.

In this, as in other respects of the poetic output of the period, we may
see a further reflex of the general literary atmosphere of the first half
or so of the eighteenth century. There was no poetry of the highest
rank, and not a great deal of _poetical_ poetry; the bulk of the output
is “poetry without an atmosphere.” The very qualities most admired in
prose—lucidity, correctness, absence of “enthusiasm”—were such as were
approved for poetry; even the Romantic forerunners, with perhaps the
single exception of Blake, felt the pressure of the prosaic atmosphere of
their times. No doubt had a poet of the highest order appeared he would
have swept away much of the accumulated rubbish and fashioned for himself
a new poetic language, as Thomson tried, and Wordsworth later thought to
do. But he did not appear, and the vast majority of the practitioners
were content to ring the changes on the material they found at hand, and
were not likely to dream of anything different.

It is thus not sufficient to say that the “rapid and almost simultaneous
diffusion of this purely cutaneous eruption,” to borrow an appropriate
description from Lowell, was due solely to the potent influence of
Milton. It reflects also the average conception of poetry held throughout
a good part of the eighteenth century, a conception which led writers
to seek in mere words qualities which are to be found in them only when
they are the reflex of profound thought or powerful emotion. In short,
latinism in eighteenth century poetry may be regarded as a literary
fashion, akin in nature to the stock epithets and phrases of the
“descriptive” poetry, which were later to be unsparingly condemned as the
typical eighteenth century poetical diction.

Of the poetic value of these latinized words little need be said. Whether
or no they reflect a conscious effort to extend, enrich, or renew the
vocabulary of English poetry, they cannot be said to have added much
to the expressive resources of the language. This is not, of course,
merely because they are of direct Latin origin. We know that around
the central Teutonic core of English there have slowly been built up
two mighty strata of Latin and Romance formations, which, in virtue of
their long employment by writers in prose and verse, as well as on the
lips of the people, have slowly acquired that force and picturesqueness
which the poet needs for his purpose. But the latinized words of the
eighteenth century are on a different footing. To us, nowadays, there
is something pretentious and pedantic about them: they are artificial
formations or adoptions, and not living words. English poets from time
to time have been able to give a poetical colouring to such words,[120]
and the eighteenth century is not without happy instances of this power.
James Thomson here and there wins real poetic effects from his latinized
vocabulary, as in such a passage as

    Here lofty trees to ancient song unknown
    The noble sons of potent heat and floods
    Prone-rushing from the clouds, rear high to heaven
    Their thorny stems, and broad around them throw
    Meridian gloom.

                                               (“Summer,” 653 foll.)[121]

The “return to Nature,” of which Thomson was perhaps the most noteworthy
pioneer, brought back all the sights and sounds of outdoor life as
subjects fit and meet for the poet’s song, and it is therefore of some
interest, in the present connexion, to note that Wordsworth himself, who
also knew how to make excellent use of high-sounding Latin formations,
has perhaps nowhere illustrated this faculty better than in the famous
passage on the Yew Trees of Borrowdale:

    Those fraternal Four of Borrowdale
    Joined in one solemn and capacious grove:
    Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth
    Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
    Upcoiling, and inveterately convolved;
    Nor uninformed with Phantasy, and looks
    That threaten the profane.

But the bulk of eighteenth century latinisms fall within a different
category; rarely do they convey, either in themselves or in virtue
of their context, any of that mysterious power of association which
constitutes the poetic value of words and enables the writer, whether in
prose or verse, to convey to his reader delicate shades of meaning and
suggestion which are immediately recognized and appreciated.



CHAPTER V

ARCHAISM IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY


One of the earliest and most significant of those literary manifestations
which were to culminate in the triumph of Romanticism was a new enkindled
interest in the older English writers. The attitude of the great body
of the so-called “Classicists” towards the earlier English poetry was
not altogether one of absolute contempt: it was rather marked by that
indifference which is the outcome of ignorance. Readers and authors, with
certain illustrious exceptions, were totally unacquainted with Chaucer,
and though Spenser fared better, even those who did know him did not at
first consider him worthy of serious study.[122] Yet the Romantic rebels,
by their attempts to imitate Spenser, and to reveal his poetic genius to
a generation of unbelievers, did work of immediate and lasting value.

It is perhaps too much to claim that some dim perception of the poetic
value of old words contributed in any marked degree to this Spenserian
revival in the eighteenth century. Yet it can hardly be doubted that
Spenser’s language, imperfectly understood and at first considered
“barbarous,” or “Gothic,” or at best merely “quaint,” came ultimately to
be regarded as supplying something of that atmosphere of “old romance”
which was beginning to captivate the hearts and minds of men. This
is not to say that there was any conscious or deliberate intention of
freshening or revivifying poetic language by an infusion of old or
“revived” words. But the Spenserian and similar imitations naturally
involved the use of such words, and they thus made an important
contribution to the Romantic movement on its purely formal side; they
played their part in destroying the pseudo-classical heresy that the
best, indeed the only, medium for poetic expression was the polished
idiom of Pope and his school.

The poets and critics of Western Europe, who, as we have seen, in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had busied themselves with the
question of refining and embellishing their mother tongue, had advocated
among other means the revival of archaic and obsolete words. Spenser
himself, we know, had definitely adopted this means in the “Shepherds
Kalendar,” though the method of increasing his poetical vocabulary
had not been approved by all of his contemporaries and successors.
Milton, when forming the special poetical language he needed for his
immense task, confined himself largely to “classical” coinages, and
his archaisms, such as _swinkt_, _rathe_, _nathless_, _frore_, are
comparatively few in number.[123]

Dryden’s attitude towards old words was stated with his customary
good sense, and though his modernization of Chaucer gave him endless
opportunities of experimenting with them, he never abused the advantage,
and indeed in all his work there is but little trace of the deliberate
revival of obsolete or archaic words. In the “Fables” may be found a few
words such as _sounded_[124] (swounded) which had been used by Malory
and Spenser, _laund_ for (lawn), _rushed_ (cut-off), etc., and he has
also Milton’s _rathe_. Dryden, however, is found using a large number of
terms which were evidently obsolete in the literary language, but which,
it may be supposed, still lingered in the spoken language, and especially
in the provincial dialects. He is fond of the word _ken_ (to know), and
amongst other examples are _stead_ (place), _to lease_ (glean), _shent_
(rebuked), _hattered_ (worn out), _dorp_ (a village), _buries_ (burrows),
etc. Dryden is also apparently responsible for the poetic use of the term
“_doddered_,” a word of somewhat uncertain meaning, which, after his time
and following his practice, came into common use as an epithet for old
oaks, and, rarely, for other trees.[125]

As might be expected, there are few traces of the use of obsolete or
archaic words in the works of Pope. The “correct” style did not favour
innovations in language, whether they consisted in the formation of
new words or in the revival of old forms. Pope stated in a letter to
Hughes, who edited Spenser’s works (1715), that “Spenser has been ever a
favourite poet to me,”[126] but among the imitations “done by the Author
in his Youth,” there is “The Alley,” a very coarse parody of Spenser,
which does not point to any real appreciation or understanding on the
part of Pope. In the first book of the “Dunciad” as we have seen, he
indulged in a fling at the antiquaries, especially Hearne and those who
took pleasure in our older literature, by means of a satiric stanza
written in a pseudo-archaic language.[127] But his language is much
freer than that of Dryden from archaisms or provincialisms. He has forms
like _gotten_, _whelm_ (overwhelm), _rampires_ (ramparts), _swarths_,
_catched_ (caught), _thrice-ear’d_ (ploughed), etc. Neither Dryden nor
Pope, it may be said, would ever have dreamed of reviving an archaic
word simply because it was an old word, and therefore to be regarded as
“poetical.” To imagine this is to attribute to the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries a state of feeling which is essentially modern,
and which lends a glamour to old and almost forgotten words. Dryden
would accept any word which he considered suitable for his purpose, but
he always insisted that old words had to prove their utility, and that
they had otherwise no claim to admission to the current vocabulary.
Pope, however, we may suspect, would not admit any words not immediately
intelligible to his readers, or requiring a footnote to explain them.

Meanwhile, in the year 1715, there had appeared the first attempt to
give a critical text of Spenser, when John Hughes published his edition
of the poet’s works in six volumes, together with a biography, a
glossary, and some critical remarks.[128] The obsolete terms which Hughes
felt himself obliged to explain[129] include many, such as _aghast_,
_baleful_, _behest_, _bootless_, _carol_, _craven_, _dreary_, _forlorn_,
_foray_, _guerdon_, _plight_, _welkin_, _yore_, which are now for the
most part familiar words, though forty years later Thomas Warton in his
“Observations on The Faerie Queene” (1754) is found annotating many
similar terms. The well-known “Muses’ Library,” published thirteen years
previously, had described itself as “A General Collection of almost all
the old and valuable poetry extant, now so industriously inquir’d after”;
it begins with Langland and reflects the renewed interest that was
arising in the older poets. But there is as yet little evidence of any
general and genuine appreciation of either the spirit or the form of the
best of the earlier English poetry. The Spenserian imitators undoubtedly
felt that their diction must look so obsolete and archaic as to call for
a glossary of explanation, and these glossaries were often more than
necessary, not only to explain the genuine old words, but also because
of the fact that in many cases the supposedly “Spenserian” terms were
spurious coinages devoid of any real meaning at all.

Before considering these Spenserian imitations it must not be forgotten
that there were, prior to these attempts and alongside of them, kindred
efforts to catch the manner and style of Chaucer. This practice received
its first great impulse from Dryden’s famous essay in praise of Chaucer,
and the various periodicals and miscellanies of the first half of the
eighteenth century bear witness to the fact that many eminent poets, not
to mention a crowd of poetasters, thought it their duty to publish a
poetical tribute couched in the supposed language and manner of Chaucer.

These attempts were nearly all avowedly humorous,[130] and seemed based
on a belief that the very language of Chaucer was in some respects
suitable comic material for a would-be humorous writer. Such an attitude
was obviously the outcome of a not unnatural ignorance of the historical
development of the language. Chaucer’s language had long been regarded
as almost a dead language, and this attitude had persisted even to
the eighteenth century, so that it was felt that a mastery of the
language of the “Canterbury Tales” required prolonged study. Even Thomas
Warton, speaking of Chaucer, was of the opinion that “his uncouth and
unfamiliar language disgusts and deters many readers.”[131] Hence it
is not surprising that there was a complete failure to catch, not only
anything of the real spirit of Chaucer, but also anything that could
be described as even a distant approach to his language. The imitators
seemed to think that fourteenth century English could be imitated by the
use of common words written in an uncommon way, or of strange terms with
equally strange meanings. The result was an artificial language that
could never have been spoken by anybody, often including words to which
it is impossible to give any definite sense. It would seem that only two
genuine Chaucerian terms had really been properly grasped, and this pair,
ne and eke, is in consequence worked to death. Ignorance of the earlier
language naturally led to spurious grammatical forms, of which the most
favoured was a singular verb form ending in -_en_. Gay, for instance,
has, in a poem of seventeen lines, such phrases as “It maken doleful
song,” “There _spreaden_ a rumour,”[132] whilst Fenton writes,

    If in mine quest thou _falsen_ me.[133]

The general style and manner of these imitations, with their “humorous”
tinge, their halting verse, bad grammar, and impossible inflections
are well illustrated in William Thompson’s “Garden Inscription—Written
in Chaucer’s Bowre,” though more serious efforts were not any more
successful.

The death of Pope, strangely enough, called forth more than one attempt,
among them being Thomas Warton’s imitation of the characterization of the
birds from the “Parliament of Fowles.”[134] Better known at the time
was the monody “Musæus,” written by William Mason, “To the memory of Mr.
Pope.” Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton are represented as coming to mourn
the inevitable loss of him who was about to die, and Mason endeavoured to
reproduce their respective styles, “Tityrus” (Chaucer) holding forth in
this strain:

    Mickle of wele betide thy houres last
    For mich gode wirke to me don and past.
    For syn the days whereas my lyre ben strongen,
    And deftly many a mery laie I songen,
    Old Time which alle things don maliciously,
    Gnawen with rusty tooth continually,
    Grattrid my lines, that they all cancrid ben
    Till at the last thou smoothen hem hast again.

It is astonishing to think that this mechanical imitation, with its
harsh and forced rhythm, and its almost doggerel language, was regarded
at the time as a successful reproduction of Chaucer’s manner and style.
But probably before 1775, when Tyrwhitt announced his rediscovery of the
secret of Chaucer’s rhythm, few eighteenth century readers suspected its
presence at all.

But the Chaucerian imitations were merely a literary fashion predoomed
to failure. It was not in any way the result of a genuine influence
of the early English poetry on contemporary taste, and thus it was
not even vitalized, as was the Spenserian revival, by a certain vague
and undefined desire to catch something at least of the spirit of the
“Faerie Queene.” The Spenserian imitations had a firmer foundation, and
because the best of them did not confine their ambition altogether to
the mechanical imitation of Spenser’s style in the narrower sense they
achieved a greater measure of success.

It is significant to note that among the first attempts at a Spenserian
imitation was that made by one of the foremost of the Augustans. This
was Matthew Prior, who in 1706 published his “Ode, Humbly Inscribed to
the Queen on the Glorious success of Her Majesty’s Arms, Written in
Imitation of Spenser’s Style.”[135] We are surprised, however, to find
when we have read his Preface, that Prior’s aim was in reality to write
a poem on the model of Horace and of Spenser. The attitude in which he
approached Spenser’s language is made quite clear by his explanation.
He has “avoided such of his words as I found too obsolete. I have
however retained some few of them to make the colouring look more like
Spenser’s.” Follows then a list of such words, including “_behest_,
command; _band_, army; _prowess_, strength; _I weet_, I know; _I ween_, I
think; _whilom_, heretofore; and two or three more of that kind.” Though
later in his Preface Prior speaks of the _curiosa felicitas_ of Spenser’s
diction, it is evident that there is little or no real understanding or
appreciation.

Now began a continuous series of Spenserian imitations,[136] of which,
with a few exceptions, the only distinguishing characteristic was a small
vocabulary of obsolete words, upon which the poetasters could draw for
the “local colour” considered necessary. In the majority of cases the
result was a purely artificial language, probably picked haphazard from
the “Faerie Queene,” and often used without any definite idea of its
meaning or appropriateness.[137] Fortunately, one or two real poets were
attracted by the idea, and in due course produced their “imitations.”

William Shenstone (1714-1763) is perhaps worthy of being ranked amongst
these, in virtue at least of “The Schoolmistress,” which appeared in its
final shape in 1742. Shenstone himself confesses that the poem was not
at first intended to be a serious imitation, but his study of Spenser
led him gradually to something like a real appreciation of the earlier
poet.[138]

“The Schoolmistress” draws upon the usual common stock of old words:
_whilom_, _mickle_, _perdie_, _eke_, _thik_, etc., but often, as in the
case of Spenser himself, the obsolete terms have a playful and humorous
effect:

    For they in gaping wonderment abound
    And think, no doubt, she been the greatest wight on ground.

Nor is there lacking a quaint, wistful tenderness, as in the description
of the refractory schoolboy, who, after being flogged,

    Behind some door, in melancholy thought,
    Mindless of food, he, dreary caitiff, pines,
    Ne for his fellows joyaunce careth aught,
    But to the wind all merriment resigns.

Hence “The Schoolmistress” is no mere parody or imitation: there is
a real and tender humanity in the description of the village school
(adumbrating, it would seem, Goldsmith’s efforts with a similar theme),
whilst the judicious use of Spenser’s stanza and the sprinkling of his
old words help to invest the whole poem with an atmosphere of genuine and
unaffected humour.

The next Spenserian whose work merits attention is William Thompson, who,
it would seem, had delved not a little into the Earlier English poetry,
and who was one of the first to capture something of the real atmosphere
of the “Faerie Queene.” His “Epithalamium”[139] and “The Nativity,”[140]
which appeared in 1736, are certainly among the best of the imitations.
It is important to note that, while there is a free use of supposedly
archaic words, with the usual list of _certes_, _perdie_, _sikerly_,
_hight_, as well as others less common, such as _belgards_ (“beautiful
looks”), _bonnibel_ (“beautiful virgin”), there is no abuse of the
practice. Not a little of the genuine spirit of Spenser’s poetry, with
its love of nature and outdoor life, has been caught and rendered without
any lavish recourse to an artificial and mechanical diction, as a stanza
from “The Nativity,” despite its false rhymes, will perhaps show:

    Eftsoons he spied a grove, the Season’s pride,
    All in the centre of a pleasant glade,
    Where Nature flourished like a virgin bride,
        Mantled with green, with hyacinths inlaid,
    And crystal-rills o’er beds of lilies stray’d:
    The blue-ey’d violet and King-cup gay,
    And new blown roses, smiling sweetly red,
    Out-glow’d the blushing infancy of Day
    While amorous west-winds kist their fragrant souls away.

This cannot altogether be said of the “Hymn to May” published over twenty
years later,[141] despite the fact that Thompson himself draws attention
to the fact that he does not consider that a genuine Spenserian imitation
may be produced by scattering a certain number of obsolete words through
the poem. Nevertheless, we find that he has sprinkled his “Hymn”
plentifully with “obsolete” terms, though they include a few, such as
_purfled_, _dispredden_, _goodlihead_, that were not the common property
of the poetasters. His explanations of the words so used show that not a
few of them were used with little knowledge of their original meaning, as
when he defines _glen_[142] as “a country hamlet,” or explains _perdie_
as “an old word for saying anything.” It is obvious also that many
obsolete terms are often simply stuck in the lines when their more modern
equivalents would have served equally well, as for instance,

    Full suddenly the seeds of joy _recure_ (“recover”),

or

    Myrtles to Venus _algates_ sacred been.

With these reservations the diction of Thompson’s poems is pure and
unaffected, and the occasional happy use of archaism is well illustrated
in more than one stanza of “The Nativity.”

It is generally agreed that the best of all the Spenserian imitations
is “The Castle of Indolence,” which James Thomson published two months
before his death in 1748.[143] Yet even in this case there is evident a
sort of quiet condescension, as if it were in Thompson’s mind that he
was about to draw the attention of his eighteenth century audience to
something quaint and old-fashioned, but which had yet a charm of its
own. “The obsolete words,” he writes in his “advertisement” to the poem,
“and a simplicity of diction in some of the lines, which borders on the
ludicrous, were necessary to make the imitation more perfect.” Hence
he makes use of a number of words intended to give an archaic air to
his poem, including the usual _certes_, _withouten_, _sheen_, _perdie,_
_weet_, _pleasaunce_, _ycleped_, etc. To the first edition was appended
a page of explanation of these and other “obsolete words used in this
poem”: altogether between seventy and eighty such words are thus glossed,
the large majority of which are familiar enough nowadays, either as part
of the ordinary vocabulary, or as belonging especially to the diction of
poetry.

Though the archaisms are sometimes scattered in a haphazard manner, they
are not used with such mechanical monotony as is obvious in the bulk
of the Spenserian imitations. In both cantos there are long stretches
without a single real or pseudo-archaism, and indeed, when Thomson is
indulging in one of the moral or the didactic surveys characteristic
of his age, as, for instance, when the bard, invoked by Sir Industry,
breaks into a long tirade on the Supreme Perfection (Canto II, 47-61)
his diction is the plain and unadorned idiom perfected by Pope.[144] Yet
Thompson occasionally yields to the fascination of the spurious form in
_-en_,[145] as

    But these I _passen_ by with nameless numbers moe

                                                           (Canto I., 56)

or

    And taunts he _casten_ forth most bitterly.

                                                           (Canto II, 78)

Sometimes it would seem that his archaisms owe their appearance to the
necessities of rhyme, as in

    So worked the wizard wintry storms to swell
    As heaven and earth they would together _mell_

                                                            (Canto I, 43)

and

    Or the brown fruit with which the woodlands teem:
    The same to him glad summer, or the winter _breme_.

                                                            (Canto II, 7)

There are lines too where we feel that the archaisms have been dragged
in; for example,

    As _soot_ this man could sing as morning lark

                                                            (Canto I, 57)

(though there is here perhaps the added charm of a Chaucerian
reminiscence); or

                        _replevy_ cannot be
    From the strong, iron grasp of vengeful destiny.

                                                           (Canto II, 32)

But, on the whole, he has been successful in his efforts, half-hearted
as they sometimes seem, to give an old-world atmosphere to his poem by
a sprinkling of archaisms, and it is then that we feel in _The Castle
of Indolence_ something at least of the beauty and charm of “the poet’s
poet,” as in the well-known stanza describing the valley of Idlesse with
its

                                      waters sheen
    That, as they bickered[146] through the sunny glade,
    Though restless still, themselves a lulling murmur made.

                                                             (Canto I, 3)

Though the Spenserian imitations continued beyond the year which saw
the birth of Wordsworth,[147] it is not necessary to mention further
examples, except perhaps that of William Mickle, who, in 1767, published
“The Concubine,” a Spenserian imitation of two cantos, which afterwards
appeared in a later edition (1777) under the title “Sir Martyn.” Like
his predecessors, Mickle made free use of obsolete spellings and words,
while he added the usual glossary, which is significant as showing at
the end of the eighteenth century, about the time when Tyrwhitt was
completing his edition of Chaucer, not only the artificial character of
this “Spenserian diction,” but also the small acquaintance of the average
man of letters with our earlier language.[148]

It must not be assumed, of course, that all the “obsolete” words used by
the imitators were taken directly from Spenser. Words like _nathless_,
_rathe_, _hight_, _sicker_, _areeds_, _cleeped_, _hardiment_, _felly_,
etc., had continued in fairly common use until the seventeenth century,
though actually some of them were regarded even then as archaisms.
Thus _cleoped_, though never really obsolete, is marked by Blount in
1656 as “Saxon”; _sicker_, extensively employed in Middle English, is
rarely found used after 1500 except by Scotch writers, though it still
remains current in northern dialects. On the other hand, not a few words
were undoubtedly brought directly back into literature from the pages
of Spenser, among them being _meed_, _sheen_ (boasting an illustrious
descent from _Beowulf_ through Chaucer), _erst_, _elfin_, _paramour_.
Others, like _scrannel_, and apparently also _ledded_, were made familiar
by Milton’s use the former either being the poet’s own coinage or his
borrowing from some dialect or other. On the other hand, very many of the
“revived” words failed to take root at all, such as _faitours_, which
Spenser himself had apparently revived, and also his coinage _singult_,
though Scott is found using the latter form.

As has been said, the crowd of poetasters who attempted to reproduce
Spenser’s spirit and style thought to do so by merely mechanical
imitation of what they regarded as his “quaint” or “ludicrous” diction.
Between them and any possibility of grasping the perennial beauty
and charm of the “poet’s poet” there was a great gulf fixed, whilst,
altogether apart from this fatal limitation, then parodies were little
likely to have even ephemeral success, for parody presupposes in its
readers at least a little knowledge and appreciation of the thing
parodied. But there were amongst the imitators one or two at least who,
we may imagine, were able to find in the melody and romance of “The
Faerie Queene” an avenue of escape from the prosaic pressure of their
times. In the case of William Thompson, Shenstone, and the author of
the “Castle of Indolence,” the influence of Spenser revealed itself as
in integral and vital part of the Romantic reaction, for these, being
real poets, had been able to recapture something at least of the colour,
music, and fragrance of their original. And not only did these, helped
by others whose names have all but been forgotten restore a noble stanza
form to English verse. Even their mechanical imitation of Spenser’s
language was not without its influence, for it cannot be doubted that
these attempts to write in an archaic or pseudo-archaic style did not a
little to free poetry from the shackles of a conventional language.

This process was greatly helped by that other aspect of the eighteenth
century revival of the past which was exemplified in the publication of
numerous collections of old ballads and songs.[149] There is, of course,
as Macaulay long ago noted, a series of conventional epithets that is
one mark of the genuine ballad manner, but the true ballad language
was not a lifeless stereotyped diction. It consisted of “plain English
without any trimmings.” The ballads had certain popular mannerisms
(_the good greenwood_, _the wan water_, etc.), but they were free from
the conventional figures of speech, or such rhetorical artifices as
personification and periphrasis.

Hence it is not surprising that at first their fresh and spontaneous
language was regarded, when contrasted with the artificial and refined
diction of the time, as “barbarous” or “rude.” Thus Prior thought it
necessary to paraphrase the old ballad of the “Nut Brown Maid” into his
insipid “Henry and Emma” (1718), but a comparison of only a few lines of
the original with the banality of the modernized version is sufficient
testimony to the refreshing and vivifying influence of such collections
as the “Reliques.”

The tendency to present the old ballads in an eighteenth century dress
had soon revealed itself; at least, the editors of the early collections
often felt themselves obliged to apologize for the obsolete style of
their material.[150] But in 1760 the first attempt at a critical text
appeared when Edward Capell, the famous Shakespearian editor, published
his “Prolusions”; or “Select Pieces of Antient Poetry—compil’d with
great Care from their several Originals, and offer’d to the Publick as
specimens of the Integrity that should be found in the Editions of worthy
Authors.” Capell’s care was almost entirely directed to ensuring textual
accuracy, but the “Nut-Browne Maid,” the only ballad included, receives
sympathetic mention in his brief _Preface_.[151]

Five years later, the most famous of all the ballad collections appeared,
Thomas Percy’s “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” (1765). The nucleus
of Percy’s collection was a certain manuscript in a handwriting of
Charles I’s time, containing 191 songs and ballads, but he had also had
access to various other manuscript collections, whilst he was quite ready
to acknowledge that he had filled gaps in his originals with stanzas and,
in some cases, with nearly entire poems of his own composition. Much
censure has been heaped upon Percy for his apparent lax ideas on the
functions of an editor, but in decking out his “parcel of old ballads”
in the false and affected style of his age, he was only doing his best
to meet the taste of his readers. He himself passes judgment on his own
labours, when, alongside of the genuine old ballads, with their freshness
and simplicity of diction, he places his own “pruned” or “refined”
versions, or additions, garbed in a sham and sickly idiom.

It was not until over a century later, when Percy’s folio manuscript was
copied and printed,[152] that the extent of his additions, alterations,
and omissions were fully realized, though at the same time it was
admitted that the pruning and refining was not unskilfully done.

Nevertheless the influence of the “Reliques,” as a vital part of the
Romantic revival, was considerable:[153] it was as if a breath of “the
wind on the heath” had swept across literature and its writers, bringing
with it an invigorating fragrance and freshness, whilst, on the purely
formal side, the genuine old ballads, which Percy had culled and printed
untouched, no doubt played their part in directing the attention of
Wordsworth to the whole question of the language of poetry. And when the
great Romantic manifestoes on the subject of “the language of metrical
composition” were at length launched, their author was not slow to bear
witness to the revivifying influence of the old ballads on poetic form.
“Our poetry,” he wrote, “has been absolutely redeemed by it. I do not
think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would
not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the “Reliques.”[154]

The year before the appearance of the “Reliques,” Thomas Chatterton had
published his “Rowley Poems,” and this attempt of a poet of genius to
pass off his poems as the work of a mediaeval English writer is another
striking indication of the new Romantic spirit then asserting itself. As
for the pseudo-archaic language in which Chatterton with great labour
clothed his “revivals,” there is no need to say much. It was a thoroughly
artificial language, compiled, as Skeat has shown, from various sources,
such as John Kersey’s “Dictionarium Anglo-Brittanicum,” three editions
of which had appeared before 1721. In this work there are included a
considerable number of obsolete words, chiefly from Spenser and his
contemporaries, marked “O,” and in some cases erroneously explained. This
dictionary was the chief source of Chatterton’s vocabulary, many words of
which the young poet took apparently without any definite idea of their
meaning.[155]

Yet in the Rowley poems there are passages where the pseudo-archaic
language is quite in keeping with the poet’s theme and treatment, whilst
here and there we come across epithets and lines which, even in their
strange dress, are of a wild and artless sweetness, such as

    Where thou mayst here the sweete night-lark chant,
      Or with some mocking brooklet sweetly glide,

or the whole of the first stanza of the famous “An Excelente Balade
of Charitie,” where the old words help to transport us at once into
the fictitious world which Chatterton had made for himself. Perhaps,
as has been suggested, the “Rowley dialect” was not, as we nowadays,
with Skeat’s analysis in our minds, are a little too apt to believe, a
deliberate attempt to deceive, but rather reflected an attempt to escape
from the dead abstract diction of the period.[156]

Apart from this special aspect of the Romantic revival marked by a
tendency to look back lovingly to the earlier English poetry, there are
few traces of the use of archaic and obsolete words, at least of such
words used consciously, in eighteenth century poetry. The great poets of
the century make little or no use of them. Collins has no examples, but
Gray, who began by advocating the poet’s right to use obsolete words,
and later seemed to recant, now and then uses an old term, as when in his
translation from Dante he writes:

    The anguish that unuttered _nathless_ wrings
    My inmost heart.

Blake, however, it is interesting to note, often used archaic forms, or
at least archaic spellings,[157] as _Tyger_, _antient_ (“To the Muses”),
“the _desart_ wild” (“The Little Girl Lost”), as well as such lines as

    In lucent words my darkling verses dight

                                                 (“Imitation of Spenser”)

or

    So I piped with merry _chear_.

                                   (Introduction to “Songs of Innocence”)

Perhaps by these means the poet wished to give a quaint or old-fashioned
look to his verses, though it is to be remembered that most of them occur
in the “Poetical Sketches,” which are avowedly Elizabethan.

The use of archaic and obsolete words in the eighteenth century was
then chiefly an outcome of that revival of the past which was one of
the characteristics of the new Romantic movement, and which was later
to find its culmination in the works of Scott. The old words used by
the eighteenth century imitators of Spenser were not often used, we may
imagine, because poets saw in them poetical beauty and value; most often
they were the result of a desire to catch, as it were, something of the
“local colour” of the “Faerie Queene,” just as modern writers nowadays,
poets and novelists alike, often draw upon local dialects for new means
of expression. The Spenserian imitations recovered not a few words,
such as _meed_, _sheen_, _dight_, _glen_,[158] which have since been
regarded as belonging especially to the diction of poetry, and when the
Romantic revival had burst into life the impulse, which had thus been
unconsciously given, was continued by some of its great leaders. Scott,
as is well known, was an enthusiastic lover of our older literature,
especially the ballads, from which he gleaned many words full of a beauty
and charm which won for them immediate admission into the language of
poetry; at the same time he was able to find many similar words in the
local dialects of the lowlands and the border. Perhaps in this work he
had been inspired by his famous countryman, Robert Burns, who by his
genius had raised his native language, with its stores of old and vivid
words and expressions, to classical rank.[159]

Nevertheless it is undoubted that the main factor in the new Romantic
attitude towards old words had been the eighteenth century imitations
and collections of our older English literature. Coleridge, it is to
be remembered, made free use of archaisms; in the “Ancient Mariner,”
there are many obsolete forms: _loon_, _eftsoons_, _uprist_, _gramercy_,
_gossameres_, _corse_, etc., besides those which appeared in the first
edition, and were altered or omitted when the poem reappeared in
1800. Wordsworth, it is true, made no use of archaic diction, whether
in the form of deliberate revivals, or by drafts on the dialects,
which, following the great example of Burns, and in virtue of his
own “theories,” he might have been expected to explore. Nevertheless
the “theories” concerning poetical language which he propounded and
maintained are not without their bearing on the present question.
Reduced to their simplest terms, the manifestoes, while passing judgment
on the conventional poetical diction, conceded to the poet the right of
a style in keeping with his subject and inspiration, and Wordsworth’s
successors for the most part, so far as style in the narrower sense of
_vocabulary_ is concerned, did not fail to reap the benefits of the
emancipation won for them. And among the varied sources upon which they
began to draw for fresh reserves of diction were the abundant stores of
old words, full of colour and energy, to be gleaned from the pages of
their great predecessors.



CHAPTER VI

COMPOUND EPITHETS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY


It is proposed in this chapter to examine in some detail the use of
compound epithets in the poetry of the eighteenth century. For this
purpose the following grammatical scheme of classification has been
adopted from various sources:[160] _First Type_, noun _plus_ noun;
_Second Type_, noun _plus_ adjective; _Third Type_, noun _plus_ present
participle; _Fourth Type_, noun _plus_ past participle; _Fifth Type_,
adjective, or adjective used adverbially, _plus_ another part of speech,
usually a participle; _Sixth Type_, true adverb _plus_ a participle;
_Seventh Type_, adjective _plus_ noun plus -_ed_. Of these types it
will be evident in many cases that the first (noun _plus_ noun) and the
sixth (true adverb _plus_ participle) are not compounds at all, for the
hyphen could often be removed without any change or loss of meaning.
Occasionally the compounds will be regarded from the point of view of the
logical relation between the two elements, when a formal classification
may usually be made as follows: (_a_) _Attributive_, as in “anger-glow”;
(_b_) _Objective_, as in “anger-kindling”; (_c_) _Instrumental_, as in
“anger-boiling.” This scheme of classification permits of an examination
of the compounds from the formal point of view, whilst at the same time
it does not preclude an estimate of the æsthetic value of the new words
thus added to the language of poetry.[161]

It may be said, to begin with, that the formation and use of compound
epithets has always been one of the distinguishing marks of the special
language of poetry in English, as distinct from that of prose. The very
ease with which they can be formed out of the almost inexhaustible
resources of the English vocabulary has been a constant source of
temptation to poets with new things to say, or new impressions to
describe. Moreover, the partial disappearance of inflections in modern
English has permitted of a vagueness in the formation of compound words,
which in itself is of value to the word-maker. Though, of course, it is
possible in most cases accurately to analyse the logical relation between
the elements of a compound, yet it sometimes happens, especially with the
compound epithets of poetry, that this cannot be done with certainty,
because the new formation may have been the result of a hasty but happy
inspiration, with no regard to the regular rules of composition.[162]
Hence, from one point of view, the free formation of compounds is
a legitimate device allowed to the poets, of which the more severe
atmosphere of prose is expected to take less advantage; from another
point of view, the greater prevalence of the compound in poetry may not
be unconnected with the rhythm of verse. Viewed in this light, the use
of compound epithets in our poetry at any period may well have been
conditioned, in part at least, by the metrical form in which that poetry
received expression; and thus in the poetry of the eighteenth century it
connects itself in some degree—first, with the supremacy of the heroic
couplet, and later with the blank verse that proved to be the chief rival
of the decasyllabic.

The freedom of construction which facilitates the formation of compounds
had already in the earliest English period contributed to that special
poetic diction which is a distinguishing mark of Anglo-Saxon verse, as
indeed of all the old Germanic poetry; of the large number of words not
used in Anglo-Saxon prose, very many are synonymous compounds meaning
the same thing.[163] During the Middle English period, and especially
before the triumph of the East Midland dialect definitely prepared
the way for Modern English, it would seem that the language lost much
of its old power of forming compounds, one explanation being that the
large number of French words, which then came into the language, drove
out many of the Old English compounds, whilst at the same time these
in-comers, so easily acquired, tended to discourage the formation of new
compounds.[164] It was not until the great outburst of literary activity
in the second half of the sixteenth century that a fresh impetus was
given to the formation of compound nouns and epithets. The large number
of classical translations especially exercised an important influence in
this respect: each new translation had its quota of fresh compounds, but
Chapman’s “Homer” may be mentioned as especially noteworthy.[165] At
the same time the plastic state of Elizabethan English led to the making
of expressive new compounds of native growth, and from this period date
some of the happiest compound epithets to be found in the language.[166]
From the Elizabethans this gift of forming imaginative compounds was
inherited, with even greater felicity by Milton, many of whose epithets,
especially those of Type VII such as “_grey-hooded even_,” “_coral-paven
floor_,” “_flowery-kirtled_ Naiades” reveal him as a consummate master of
word-craft.

With Dryden begins the period with which we are especially concerned,
for it is generally agreed that from nearly every point of view the
advent of what is called eighteenth century literature dates from the
Restoration. During the forty years dominated by Dryden in practically
every department of literature, the changes in the language, both of
prose and poetry, which had been slowly evolving themselves, became
apparent, and, as the sequel will show, this new ideal of style, with its
passion for “correctness,” and its impatience of innovation, was not one
likely to encourage or inspire the formation of expressive compounds; the
happy audacities of the Elizabethans, of whose tribe it is customary to
seal Milton, are no longer possible.

The compounds in the poems of Dryden show this; of his examples of Type
I—the substantive compounds—the majority are merely the juxtaposition of
two appositional nouns, as _brother-angels_ (“Killigrew,” 4); or, more
rarely, where the first element has a descriptive or adjectival force,
as _traitor-friend_ (“Palamon,” II, 568). Not much more imaginative
power is reflected in Dryden’s compound epithets; his instances of Types
III and IV include “_cloud-dispelling_ winds” (“Ovid,” Met. I, 356),
“_sun-begotten_ tribe” (_ibid._, III, 462), with more original examples
like “_sleep-procuring_ wand.” Next comes a large number of instances
of Types V and VI: “_thick-spread_ forest” (“Palamon,” II, 123),
“_hoarse-resounding_ shore” (“Iliad” I, 54), as well as many compounded
with _long_-, _well_-, _high_-, etc. Most of these examples of Types V
and VI are scarcely compounds at all, for after such elements as “long,”
“well,” “much,” the hyphen could in most cases be omitted without any
loss of power. Of Dryden’s compound epithets it may be said in general
that they reflect admirably his poetic theory and practice; they are
never the product of a “fine frenzy.” At the same time not a few of them
seem to have something of that genius for satirical expression with which
he was amply endowed. Compounds like _court-informer_ (“Absalom,” 719),
“the rebels’ _pension-purse_” (_ibid._, Pt. II, 321),

    Og, from a _treason-tavern_ rolling home

                                                           (_Ibid._, 480)

play their part in the delivery of those “smacks in the face” of which
Professor Saintsbury speaks in his discussion of Dryden’s satiric
manipulation of the heroic couplet.[167]

In the verse of Pope, compound formations are to be found in large
numbers. This may partly be attributed, no doubt, to the amount of
translation included in it, but even in his original poetry there
are many more instances than in the work of his great predecessor.
When engaged on his translation of Homer the prevalence of compounds
naturally attracted his attention, and he refers to the matter more
than once in his Preface.[168] As might be expected from the apostle
of “correctness,” he lays down cautious and conservative “rules” of
procedure. Such should be retained “as slide easily of themselves into an
English compound, without violence to the ear, or to the received rules
of composition, as well as those which have received the sanction from
the authority of our best poets, and are become familiar through their
use of them.”[169]

An examination of Pope’s compounds in the light of “the received rules of
composition,” shows his examples to be of the usual types. Of noun _plus_
noun combinations he has such forms as “_monarch-savage_,” (“Odyss.”
IV), whilst he is credited with the first use of “the _fury-passions_”
(Epistle III). More originality and imagination is reflected in his
compound epithets; of those formed from a noun and a present participle,
with the first element usually in an objective relation to the second,
his instances include “_love-darting_-eyes” (“Unfortunate Lady”), as well
as others found before his time, like the Elizabethan “_heart-piercing_
anguish” (_ibid._, XII) and “_laughter-loving_ dame” (_ibid._, III).
He has large numbers of compounded nouns and past-participles, many of
which—“_moss-grown_ domes” (“Eloisa”), “_cloud-topped_ hills” (“Essay
on Man,” I, 100), “_Sea-girt_ isles” (“Iliad,” III)—were common in
the seventeenth century, as well as “borrowed” examples, such as
“_home-felt_ joys” (Epistle II) or “_air-bred_ people” (“Odyss.,” LX,
330), presumably from Milton and Drayton respectively. But he has a few
original formations of this type, such as “_heaven-directed_ spire”
(Epistle III), “_osier-fringed_ bank,” (“Odyss.,” XIII), the latter
perhaps a reminiscence of Sabrina’s song in “Comus,” as well as happier
combinations, of which the best examples are “_love-born_ confidence”
(“Odyss.,” X) and “_love-dittied_ airs” (“Odyss.,” II).

Pope, however, makes his largest use of that type of compound which
can be formed with the greatest freedom—an adjective, or an adjective
used adverbially, joined to a present or past participle. He has
dozens of examples with the adverbial _long_, _wide_, _far_, _loud_,
_deep_, _high_, etc., as the first element, most of the examples
occurring in the Homer translations, and being attempts to reproduce
the Greek compounds.[170] Other instances have a higher æsthetic
value: “_fresh-blooming_ hope” (“Eloisa”), “_silver-quivering_ rills”
(Epistle IV), “_soft-trickling_ waters” “Iliad,” IX), “sweet airs
_soft-circling_” (_ibid._, XVII), etc. Of the formations beginning with
a true adverb, the most numerous are the quasi-compounds beginning
with “_ever_”—“_ever-during_ nights,” “_ever-fragrant_ bowers”
(“Odyss.,” XII), etc.; or “_well_”—“_well-sung_ woes” (“Eloisa”) or
“_yet_”—“_yet-untasted_ food” (“Iliad,” XV), etc. These instances do
not reveal any great originality, for the very ease with which they can
be formed naturally discounts largely their poetic value. Occasionally,
however, Pope has been more successful; perhaps his best examples of
this type are “_inly-pining_ hate” (“Odyss.,” VI—where the condensation
involved in the epithet does at least convey some impression of power—and
“the _softly-stealing_ space of time,” (“Odyss.,” XV), where the compound
almost produces a happy effect of personification.

Of the irregular type of compound, already mentioned in connexion with
Dryden, Pope has a few instances—“_white-robed_ innocence” (“Eloisa”),
etc. But perhaps Pope’s happiest effort in this respect is to be seen in
that quatrain from the fourth book of the “Dunciad,” containing three
instances of compound epithets, which help to remind us that at times he
had at his command a diction of higher suggestive and evocative power
than the plain idiom of his satiric and didactic verse:

    To isles of fragrance, _lily-silver’d_ vales
    Diffusing languor in the panting gales;
    To lands of singing or of dancing slaves
    _Love-whisp’ring_ woods and _lute-resounding_ waves.

Of the poets contemporary with Pope only brief mention need be made from
our present point of view. The poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea
contain few instances and those of the ordinary type, a remark which is
equally applicable to the poems of Parnell and John Phillips. John Gay
(1685-1732), however, though he has many formations found in previous
writers, has also some apparently original compound epithets which have
a certain charm: “_health-breathing_ breezes” (“A Devonshire Hill,” 10),
“_dew-besprinkled_ lawn” (“Fables,” 50), and “the lark _high-poised_ in
the air” (“Sweet William’s Farewell,” 13). More noteworthy is John Dyer;
“Grongar Hill” has no very striking examples, but his blank verse poems
have one or two not devoid of imaginative value: “_soft-whispering_
waters” (“Ruins of Rome”) and “_plaintive-echoing_ ruins” (_ibid._); he
has been able to dispense with the “classical” descriptive terms for
hills and mountains (“shaggy,” “horrid,” “terrible,” etc.), and his new
epithets reflect something at least of that changing attitude towards
natural scenery, of which he was a foremost pioneer: “_slow-climbing_
wilds” (“Fleece,” I), “_cloud-dividing_ hill” (_ibid._), and his
irregular “_snow-nodding_ crags” (_ibid._, IV).

Neglecting for the moment the more famous of the blank verse poems,
we may notice Robert Blair’s “Grave” (published 1743), with a few
examples, which mainly allow him to indulge in “classical” periphrases,
such as the “_sight-invigorating_ tube” for “a telescope.” David
Mallet, who imitated his greater countryman James Thomson, has one
or two noteworthy instances: “pines _high-plumed_” (“Amyntor,” II),
“_sweetly-pensive_ silence” (“Fragment”), “spring’s _flower-embroidered_
mantle” (“Excursion,” I)—suggested, no doubt, by Milton’s
“violet-embroidered”—“the morn _sun-tinctured_” (_ibid._), compound
epithets which betray the influence of the “Seasons.” Of the other minor
blank verse poems their only aspect noteworthy from our present point of
view is their comparative freedom from compounds of any description. John
Armstrong’s “Art of Preserving Health” (1744) has only a few commonplace
examples, and the same may be said of the earlier “The Chase” (1735)
by William Somerville, though he finds a new epithet in his expression
“the strand _sea-lav’d_” (Bk. III, 431). James Grainger’s “The Sugar
Cane” (1764) shows a similar poverty, but the “_green-stol’d_ Naiad,
of the tinkling rill” (Canto I), “_soft-stealing_ dews” (Canto III),
“_wild-careering_ clouds” (Canto II), and “_cane-crowned_ vale” (Canto
IV) are not without merit. These blank verse poems, avowedly modelled
on Milton, might have been expected to attempt the “grandeur” of their
original by high-sounding compounds; but it was rather by means of
latinized words and constructions that the Miltonic imitators sought to
emulate the grand style; and moreover, as Coleridge pointed out, Milton’s
great epics are almost free from compound epithets, it being in the
early poems that “a superfluity” is to be found.[171]

Before turning to the more famous blank verse poems of the first half
of the eighteenth century it will be convenient at this point to notice
one or two poets whose work represents, on its formal side at least, a
continuation or development of the school of Pope. The first of these
is Richard Savage, whose only poem of any real merit, “The Wanderer”
(apart perhaps from “The Bastard”), appeared in 1729. He has only one
or two new compounds of noun and part-participle, such as “the robe
_snow-wrought_” (“The Wanderer,” I, 55), his favourite combination being
that of an adjective or adverb with a participle, where, amidst numerous
examples of obvious formations, he occasionally strikes out something
new: “eyes _dim-gleaming_” (Canto I), “_soft-creeping_ murmurs” (Canto
V), etc. Of his other types the only other noteworthy compound is the
“past-participle” epithet in his phrase “the _amber-hued_ cascade” (Canto
III), though a refreshing simplicity of expression is found in such lines
as

    The bull-finch whistles soft his _flute-like_ note.

The poetical work of Dr. Johnson contains scarcely any instances of
compounds, and none either newly invented or applied. “London” and “The
Vanity of Human Wishes” have each not more than two or three instances,
and even the four poems, in which he successively treats of the seasons,
are almost destitute of compound epithets, “_snow-topped_ cot” (“Winter”)
being almost the only example.

There are many more instances of compound formations in the works of
Oliver Goldsmith, most of which, like “_nut-brown_ draughts” (“Deserted
Village,” II), “_sea-borne_ gales” (“Traveller,” 121), “_grass-grown_
footway” (“Deserted Village,” 127), had either been long in the language,
or had been used by earlier eighteenth century poets. There are,
however, instances which testify to a desire to add to the descriptive
power of the vocabulary; in “The Traveller” we find mention of “the
_hollow-sounding_ bittern” (l. 44), “the _rocky-crested_ summits” (l.
85), “the _yellow-blossomed_ vale” (l. 293), and the “_willow-tufted_
bank” (l. 294). For the rest, Goldsmith’s original compounds are,
like so many of this type, mere efforts at verbal condensation, as
“_shelter-seeking_ peasant” (“Traveller,” 162), “_joy-pronouncing_ eye”
(_ibid._, 10), etc.

Of the more famous blank verse poems of the eighteenth century the first
and most important was “The Seasons” of James Thomson, which appeared in
their original form between 1726 and 1730. The originality of style, for
which Johnson praised him,[172] is perhaps to be seen especially in his
use of compound formations; probably no other poet has ever used them so
freely.

As a general rule, Thomson’s compounds fall into the well-defined groups
already mentioned. He has a number of noun _plus_ noun formations (Type
I), where the first element has usually a purely adjectival value;
“_patriot-council_” (“Autumn,” 98), “_harvest-treasures_” (_ibid._,
1217), as well as a few which allow him to indulge in grandiose
periphrasis, as in the “_monarch-swain_” (“Summer,” 495) for a shepherd
with his “_sceptre-crook_” (_ibid._, 497). These are all commonplace
formations, but much more originality is found in his compound epithets.
He frequently uses the noun _plus_ present participle combinations
(Type III), “_secret-winding_, _flower-enwoven_ bowers” (“Spring,”
1058) or “_forest-rustling_ mountains” (“Winter,” 151), etc. Moreover,
the majority of his compounds are original, though now and then he
has taken a “classical” compound and given it a somewhat curious
application, as in “_cloud-compelling_ cliffs” (“Autumn,” 801). A few of
this class are difficult to justify logically, striking examples being
“_world-rejoicing_ state” (“Summer,” 116) for “the state of one in whom
the world rejoices,” and “_life-sufficing_ trees” (_ibid._, 836) for
“trees that give sustenance.”

Thomson has also numerous instances of the juxtaposition of nouns
and past-participles (Type IV): “_love-enlivened_ cheeks” (“Spring,”
1080), “_leaf-strewn_ walks” (“Autumn,” 955), “_frost-concocted_ glebe”
(“Winter,” 706); others of this type are somewhat obscure in meaning,
as “_mind-illumined_ face” (“Spring,” 1042), and especially “_art
imagination-flushed_” (“Autumn,” 140), where economy of expression is
perhaps carried to its very limit.

Thomson’s favourite method of forming compounds however is that of
Type V, each book of “The Seasons” containing large numbers, the first
element (_full_, _prone_, _quick_, etc.) often repeated with a variant
second element. Sometimes constant repetition in this way produces
the impression of a tiresome mannerism. Thus “many” joined to present
and past-participles is used irregularly with quasi-adverbial force,
apparently meaning “in many ways,” “many times,” or even “much,” as
“_many-twinkling_ leaves” (“Spring,” 158), “_many-bleating_ flock”
(_ibid._, 835), etc. In the same way the word “mazy” seems to have had
a fascination for Thomson. Thus he has “the _mazy-running_ soul of
melody” (“Spring,” 577), “the _mazy-running_ brook” (“Summer,” 373),
“and _mazy-running_ clefts” (“Autumn,” 816), etc. Not all of this
type, however, are mere mechanical formations; some have real poetic
value and bear witness to Thomson’s undoubted gift for achieving happy
expressive effects. Thus the “_close-embowering_ wood” (“Autumn,” 208),
“the lonesome muse _low-whispering_” (_ibid._, 955), “the _deep-tangled_
copse” (“Spring,” 594), “the _hollow-whispering_ breeze” (_ibid._,
919), “the _grey-grown_ oaks” (“Summer,” 225), “_flowery-tempting_
paths” (“Spring,” 1109), “the morn _faint-gleaming_” (“Summer,” 48),
“_dark-embowered_ firs” (“Winter,” 813), “the winds _hollow-blustering_”
(_ibid._, 988), “the _mossy-tinctured_ streams” (“Spring,” 380), as well
as such passages as

          the long-forgotten strain
    At first _faint-warbled_

                                                          (“Spring,” 585)

and

    Ships _dim-discovered_ dropping from the clouds.

                                                          (“Summer,” 946)

Thomson’s compound epithets with a true adverb as the first element
(Sixth Type), such as “_north-inflated_ tempest” (“Autumn,” 892), are not
particularly striking, and some of them are awkward and result in giving
a harsh effect to the verse, as

            goodness and wit
    In _seldom-meeting_ harmony combined.

                                                         (“Summer,” 25-6)

Finally, in “The Seasons” there are to be found many examples of the
type of compound epithet, already referred to, modelled on the form
of a past-participle; here Thomson has achieved some of his happiest
expressions, charged with real suggestive power.[173] Among his instances
are such little “word-pictures” as “_rocky-channelled_ maze” (“Spring,”
401), “the _light-footed_ dews” (“Summer,” 123); “the _keen-aired_
mountain” (“Autumn,” 434) “the _dusky-mantled_ lawn” (_ibid._, 1088),
“the _dewy-skirted_ clouds” (_ibid._, 961) Even when he borrows a
felicitous epithet he is able to apply it without loss of power, as when
he gives a new setting to Milton’s “meek-eyed” applied to “Peace” as
an epithet for the quiet in-coming of the dawn; the “_meek-eyed_ Morn”
(“Summer,” 47).

Thomson makes good and abundant use of compound epithets, and in this
respect, as in others he was undoubtedly a bold pioneer. His language
itself, from our present point of view, apart from the thought and
outlook on external nature it reflects, entitles him to that honourable
position as a forerunner in the Romantic reaction with which he is
usually credited. He was not content to accept the stereotyped diction
of his day, and asserted the right of the poet to make a vocabulary for
himself. There is thus justice in the plea that it is Thomson, rather
than Gray, whom Wordsworth should have marked down for widening the
breach between the language of poetry and that of prose.

No doubt the prevalence of the compound epithets in “The Seasons” is
due, to some extent at least, to the requirement of his blank verse
line; they helped him, so to speak, to secure the maximum of effect with
the minimum of word-power; and at times we can almost see him trying
to give to his unrhymed decasyllabics something of the conciseness and
polish to which Pope’s couplet had accustomed his generation. But they
owe their appearance, of course, to other causes than the mere mechanism
of verse. Thompson’s fondness for “swelling sound and phrase” has often
been touched upon, and this predilection finds full scope in the compound
epithets; they play their part in giving colour and atmosphere to “The
Seasons,” and they announce unmistakably that the old dead, descriptive
diction is doomed.

Of the blank verse poems of the period only “The Seasons” has any real
claim to be regarded as announcing the Romantic revolt that was soon to
declare itself unmistakably. But three years after the appearance of
Thomson’s final revision of his poem the first odes of William Collins
were published, at the same time as those of Joseph Warton, whilst the
work of Thomas Gray had already begun.

There are some two score of compound formations in the poems of
Collins, but many of these—as “_love-darting_” (“Poetic Character,” 8),
“_soul-subduing_” (“Liberty,” 92)—date from the seventeenth century. One
felicitous compound Collins has borrowed from James Thomson, but in doing
so he has invested it with a new and beautiful suggestiveness. Thomson
had written of

    Ships _dim-discovered_ dropping from the clouds.

                                                          (“Summer,” 946)

The compound is taken by Collins and given a new beauty in his
description of the landscape as the evening shadows gently settle upon it:

    Hamlets brown and _dim-discovered_ spires

                                                          (“Evening,” 37)

where the poetic and pictorial force of the epithet is perhaps at its
maximum.[174]

Collins, however, has not contented himself with compounds already in the
language; he has formed himself, apparently, almost half of the examples
to be found in his poems. His instances of Types I, as of Types V and
VI, are commonplace, and he has but few examples of Type II, the most
noteworthy being “_scene-full_ world” (“Manners,” 78), where the epithet,
irregularly formed, seems to have the meaning of “abounding in scenery.”
Most of his instances of Type III are either to be found in previous
writers, or are obvious formations like “_war-denouncing_ trumpets”
(“Passions,” 43).

Much more originality is evident in his examples of Type IV, which
is apparently a favourite method with him. He has “_moss-crowned_
fountain” (“Oriental Ecl.,” II, 24), “_sky-worn_ robes” (“Pity,”
II), “_sedge-crowned_ sisters” (“Ode on Thomson,” 30), “_elf-shot_
arrows” (“Popular Superstitions,” 27), etc. Some instances here are,
strictly speaking, irregular formations, for the participles, as in
“_sphere-descended_,” are from intransitive verbs; in other instances the
logical relation must be expressed by a preposition such, as “_with_”
in “_moss-crowned_,” “_sedge-crowned_”; or “_by_” in “_fancy-blest_,”
“_elf-shot_”; or “_in_” in “_sphere-found_,” “_sky-worn_.” He has some
half-dozen examples of Type VII, three at least of which—“_gay-motleyed_
pinks” (“Oriental Eclogues,” III, 17), “_chaste-eyed_ Queen” (“Passions,”
75), and “_fiery-tressed_ Dane” (“Liberty,” 97)—are apparently his own
coinage, whilst others, such as “_rosy-lipp’d_ health” (“Evening,” 50)
and “_young-eyed_ wit,” have been happily used in the service of the
personifications that play so great a part in his Odes.

There is some evidence that the use of compounds by certain writers
was already being noticed in the eighteenth century as something of an
innovation in poetical language. Thus Goldsmith, it would seem, was
under the impression that their increasing employment, even by Gray,
was connected in some way with the revived study of the older poets,
especially Spenser.[175] This supposition is unfounded. Gray, it is
true, uses a large number of compounds, found in previous writers, but
it is chiefly from Milton—e.g. “_solemn-breathing_ airs” (“Progress
of Poesy,” 14; cp. “Comus,” 555), “rosy-bosomed hours” (“Spring,” I),
or from Pope—e.g. “_cloud-topped_ head” (“Bard,” 34) that he borrows.
Moreover, he has many compounds which presumably he made for himself.
Of Type I he has such instances as “the _seraph-wings_ of Ecstasy”
(“Progress,” 96), “the _sapphire-blaze_” (_ibid._, 99), etc.; he has one
original example of Type II in his “_silver-bright_ Cynthia” (“Music,”
32), and two of Type III, when he speaks of the valley of Thames as a
“_silver-winding_ way” (“Eton Ode,” 10), and he finds a new epithet
for the dawn in his beautiful phrase “the _incense-breathing_ Morn”
(Elegy XVII). Of Type IV, he has some half-dozen examples, only two of
which, however, owe their first appearance to him—the irregularly formed
“_feather-cinctured_ chiefs” (“Progress,” 62) and “the _dew-bespangled_
wing” (“Vicissitude,” 2). The largest number of Gray’s compound
epithets belong to Type V, where an adjective is used adverbially with
a participle: “_rosy-crowned_ loves” (“Progress,” 28) and “_deep-toned_
shell” (“Music,” 23). One of Gray’s examples of this class of compound,
evidently formed on a model furnished by Thomson, came in for a good
deal of censure. He speaks of “_many-twinkling_ feet” (“Progress,” 35),
and the compound, which indeed is somewhat difficult to defend, aroused
disapproval in certain quarters. Lyttleton was one of the first to object
to its use, and he communicated his disapproval to Walpole, who, however,
at once took sides for the defence. “In answer to your objection,” he
wrote,[176] “I will quote authority to which you will yield. As Greek as
the expression is, it struck Mrs. Garrick; and she says that Mr. Gray
is the only poet who ever understood dancing.” Later, the objection was
revived in a general form by Dr. Johnson. “Gray,” he says,[177] “is too
fond of words arbitrarily compounded. ‘Many-twinkling’ was formerly
censured as not analogical: we may say ‘_many-spotted_’ but scarcely
‘_many_-spotting.’” The incident is not without its significance;
from the strictly grammatical point of view the epithet is altogether
irregular, unless the first element is admitted to be an adverb meaning
“very much” or “many times.” But Gray’s fastidiousness of expression is
a commonplace of criticism, and we may be sure that even when he uses
compounds of this kind he has not forgotten his own clearly expressed
views on the language fit and proper for poetry.

Johnson also objected to another device by which Gray had sought
to enrich the vocabulary of poetry, as reflected in his use of the
“participal” epithet in -_ed_.[178] If this device for forming new
epithets cannot be grammatically justified, the practice of the best
English poets at least has always been against Johnson’s dictum, and,
as we have seen, it has been a prolific source of original and valuable
compound epithets. Of this type Gray has some six or seven examples, the
majority of which, however, had long been in the language, though in the
new epithet of “the _ivy-mantled_ tower” (Elegy IX) we may perhaps see
an indication of the increasing Romantic sensibility towards old ruins.

Though not admitted to the same high rank of poets as Collins and Gray,
two of their contemporaries, the brothers Warton, are at least of as
great importance in the history of the Romantic revival.[179] From our
present point of view it is not too fanciful to see a reflection of
this fact in the compound epithets freely used by both of the Wartons.
Thomas Warton is especially noteworthy; probably no other eighteenth
century poet, with the exception of James Thomson, has so many instances
of new compound formations, and these are all the more striking in that
few of them are of the mechanical type, readily formed by means of a
commonplace adjective or adverb. Instances of compound substantives
(Type I) are almost entirely lacking, and the same may be said of the
noun _plus_ adjective epithets (Type II). There are, however, a few
examples of Type III (noun _plus_ present participle), some of which, as
“_beauty-blooming_ isle” (“Pleasures of Melancholy”), “_twilight-loving_
bat” (_ibid._), and “the woodbines _elm-encircling_ spray” (“On a New
Plantation”), no doubt owe something to the influence of Thomson.
Instances of Type IV are plentiful, and here again there is a welcome
freshness in Warton’s epithets: “Fancy’s _fairy-circled_ shrine” (“Monody
Written near Stratford-on-Avon”), “morning’s _twilight-tinctured_
beam” (“The Hamlet”), “_daisy-dappled_ dale” (“Sonnet on Bathing”).
One instance of this class of compound epithet, “the _furze-clad_
dale,” is certainly significant as indicative of the changes that were
going on from the “classical” to the Romantic outlook towards natural
scenery.[180]

Of the other class of compound epithets, Warton has only a few instances,
but his odes gave plenty of scope for the use of the “participial
epithet” (Type VII), and he has formed them freely: “Pale Cynthia’s
_silver-axled_ car” (“Pleasures of Melancholy”), “the _coral-cinctured_
stole” (“Complaint of Cherwell”), “Sport, the _yellow-tressed_ boy”
(_ibid._). No doubt many of Thomas Warton’s compound formations were the
result of a conscious effort to find “high-sounding” terms, and they
have sometimes an air of being merely rhetorical, as in such instances
as “_beauty-blooming_,” “_gladsome-glistering_ green,” “_azure-arched_,”
“_twilight-tinctured_,” “_coral-cinctured_,” “_cliff-encircled_,”
“_daisy-dappled_,” where alliterative effects have obviously been sought.
Yet he deserves great credit for his attempts to find new words at a time
when the stock epithets and phrases were still the common treasury of the
majority of his contemporaries.

His brother, Joseph Warton, is less of a pioneer, but there is evident
in his work also an effort to search out new epithets. His compounds
include (Type II) “_marble-mimic_ gods” (“The Enthusiast”); (Type III)
“_courage-breathing_ songs” (“Verses, 1750”), with many instances of Type
IV, some commonplace, as “_merchant-crowded_ towns” (“Ode to Health”),
others more original, as “mirth and youth nodding _lily-crowned_ heads”
(“Ode to Fancy”), joy, “the _rose-crowned, ever-smiling_ boy” (“Ode
Against Despair”), “the _beech-embowered_ cottage” (“On The Spring”).
Moreover, there are a number in “The Enthusiast,” which reflect a genuine
love of Nature (“_thousand-coloured_ tulips,” “_pine-topp’d_ precipice”)
and a keen observation of its sights and sounds.

It is not forcing the evidence of language too much to say that a similar
increasing interest in external nature finds expression in some of the
compound epithets to be found in much of the minor poetry of the period.
Thus Moses Mendez (_d._ 1758)[181] has in his poem on the various seasons
(1751) such conventional epithets as

    On every hill the _purple-blushing_ vine,

but others testify to first hand observation as

    The _pool-sprung_ gnat on sounding wings doth pass.

Richard Jago (1715-1781)[182], in his “Edgehill” (1767), has such
instances as “the _woodland-shade_,” “the _wave-worn_ face,” and “the
tillag’d plain _wide-waving_.” The Rev. R. Potter,[183] who imitated
Spenser in his “Farewell Hymn to the Country” (1749), has happy examples
like “_mavis-haunted_ grove” and “this _flowre-perfumed_ aire.” In
William Whitehead’s poems[184] there are numerous formations like
“_cloud-enveloped_ towers” (“A Hymn”) and “_rock-invested_ shades”
(“Elegy,” IV). A few new descriptive terms appear in the work of John
Langhorne (1735-1779),[185] “_flower-feeding_ rills” (“Visions of
Fancy,” I), “_long-winding_ vales” (“Genius and Valour”), etc. Michael
Bruce (1746-1767) in his “Lochleven”[186] has, e.g., “_cowslip-covered_
banks,” and fresh observation of bird life is seen in such phrases
as “_wild-shrieking_ gull” and “_slow-wing’d_ crane.” James Graeme
(1749-1772)[187] has at least one new and happy compound in his line

    The _blue-gray_ mist that hovers o’er the hill.

                                              (“Elegy written in Spring”)

John Scott (1730-1783)[188] makes more use of compound formations than
most of his minor contemporaries. He has many instances of Type IV (noun
_plus_ participle), including “_rivulet-water’d_ glade” (Eclogue I),
“_corn-clad_ plain,” “_elder-shaded_ cot” (“Amwell”). His few instances
of Type VI (e.g. “_wildly-warbled_ strain,” (“Ode” IV)), and of Type VII
(e.g. “_trefoil-purpled_ field” (“Elegy,” III)); “_may-flower’d_ hedges”
(“Elegy,” IV); and “_golden-clouded_ sky,” (“Ode,” II), are also worthy of
notice.

Meanwhile another aspect of the rising Romantic movement was revealing
itself in the work of Chatterton. With the “antiquarianism” of the
Rowley poems we are not here concerned, but the language of both the
“original” work and of the “discovered” poems contains plenty of material
relevant to our special topic. Chatterton, indeed, seems to have had a
predilection for compound formations, though he has but few instances of
compound substantives (e.g. “_coppice-valley_” (“Elegy”), and instances
of Type II (noun _plus_ adjective) are also rare. The other types of
epithets are, however, well represented: “_echo-giving_ bells” (“To Miss
Hoyland”), “_rapture-speaking_ lyre” (“Song”), etc. (Type III), though it
is perhaps in Type IV that Chatterton’s word-forming power is best shown:
“_flower-bespangled_ hills” (“Complaint”), “_rose-hedged_ vale” (“Elegy
at Stanton-Drew”), etc., where the first compound epithet is a new and
suggestive descriptive term. His examples of Type V are also worth
noting: “_verdant-vested_ trees” (“Elegy,” V), “_red-blushing_ blossom”
“Song”), whilst one of the best of them is to be found in those lines,
amongst the most beautiful written by Chatterton, which reflect something
of the new charm that men were beginning to find in old historic churches
and buildings:

    To view the cross-aisles and the arches fair
    Through the half-hidden _silver-twinkling_ glare
    Of yon bright moon in foggy mantle dress’d.

                                     (“Parliament of Sprites,” Canto XXI)

The remaining examples of Chatterton’s compound formations do not
call for much attention, though “_gently-plaintive_ rill” (“Elegy on
Phillips”) and “_loudly-dinning_ stream” (“Ælla,” 84) are new and fresh.
Chatterton has much of the conventional poetical language and devices of
his time throughout his work, and his compound epithets do not in the
mass vary much from contemporary usage in this respect. But some of them
at least are significant of the position which he occupies in the history
of the Romantic revival.

The greatest figure in this revival, as it appears to us now, was William
Blake, but from our present point of view he is almost negligible. It
may safely be said that few poets of such high rank have made less
use of compound formations: in his entire poetical work scarcely half
a dozen instances are to be found. Yet the majority of these, such
as “_angel-guarded bed_” (“A Dream,” 2), “_mind-forg’d_ manacles”
(“London,” 8), “Winter’s _deep-founded_ habitation” (“Winter,” 3),
“_softly-breathing_ song” (“Song,” 2: “Poetical Sketches”) are a
sufficiently striking tribute to his ability to form expressive compounds
had he felt the need. But in the beautiful purity and simplicity of his
diction, for which he has in our own time at least received adequate
praise, there was no place for long compound formations, which, moreover,
are more valuable and more appropriate for descriptive poetry, and likely
to mar the pure singing note of the lyric.

It is curious to find a similar paucity of compound formations in the
poems of George Crabbe, the whole number being well represented by
such examples as “_dew-press’d_ vale” (“Epistle to a Friend,” 48),
“_violet-wing’d_ Zephyrs” (“The Candidate,” 268), and “_wind-perfuming_
flowers” (“The Choice”). No doubt the narrative character of much of
Crabbe’s verse is the explanation of this comparative lack of compounds,
but the descriptions of wild nature that form the background for many of
“The Tales” might have been expected to result in new descriptive terms.

Two lesser poets of the time are more noteworthy as regards our especial
topic. William Mickle (1735-1788), in his “Almada Hill” (1781) and
his “May Day,” as well as in his shorter poems, has new epithets for
hills and heights, as in such phrases as “_thyme-clad_ mountains” and
“_fir-crown’d_ hill” (“Sorcerers,” 4). His Spenserian imitation “Syr
Martyn,” contains a few happy epithets:

    How bright emerging o’er yon _broom-clad_ height
    The silver empress of the night appears

                                                           (Canto II, 31)

and “_daisie-whitened_ plain,” “_crystal-streamed_ Esk” are among his new
formations in “Eskdale Braes.”

James Beattie has a large number of compounds in his poems, and though
many of these are mechanical formations, he has a few new “nature”
epithets which are real additions to the vocabulary of poetical
description, as “_sky-mixed_ mountain” (“Ode to Peace,” 38), the lake
“_dim-gleaming_” (“Minstrel,” 176), “the _wide-weltering_ waves”
(_ibid._, 481), the wave “_loose-glimmering_” (“Judgment of Paris,” 458).
He has also a few instances of Type VII chiefly utilized, as often with
compounds of this type, as personifying epithets: “the frolic moments
_purple_-pinioned” (“Judgment of Paris,” 465) and “_loose-robed_ Quiet”
(“Triumph of Melancholy,” 64).

The “Pleasures of Memory” (1792) by Samuel Rogers has one or two
compound formations: “_moonlight-chequered_ shade” (Part II). Hope’s
“_summer-visions_” (_ibid._) and “the _fairy-haunts_ of long-lost hours”
(_ibid.)_, have a trace at least of that suggestive power with which
Keats and Shelley were soon to endow their epithets. Brief reference only
need be made to the works of Erasmus Darwin, which have already been
mentioned as the great example of eighteenth century stock diction used
to the utmost possible extent. He has plenty of instances of compound
epithets of every type, but his favourite formation appears to be that
of a noun _plus_ part-participle, as “_sun-illumined_ fane” (“Botanic
Garden,” I, 157), “_wave-worn_ channels” (_ibid._, I, 362), and as seen
in such lines as

    Her _shell-wrack_ gardens and her _sea-fan_ bowers.

                                        (“Economy of Vegetation,” VI, 82)

Many of Darwin’s compounds have a certain charm of their own; in the mass
they contribute towards that dazzling splendour with which eighteenth
century diction here blazed out before it finally disappeared.

Cowper, like Blake and Crabbe, is not especially distinguished for his
compound epithets. Though he has a large number of such formations, very
few of them are either new or striking, a remark which applies equally to
his original work and his translations. Many instances of all the types
are to be found in the “Homer,” but scarcely one that calls for special
mention, though here and there we come across good epithets well applied:
“accents _ardour-winged_” (IV, 239) or “_silver-eddied_ Peneus” (II, 294).

Before attempting to sum up the use of compound epithets in eighteenth
century poetry, brief reference may be made to their use in the early
work of the two poets who announced the definite advent of the new age.
Wordsworth in his early poems has many instance of compound words,
most of which are either his own formations, or are rare before his
time. The original and final drafts both of the “Evening Walk” and the
“Descriptive Sketches” show some divergence in this respect, compounds
found in the 1793 version being omitted later, whilst on the other new
formations appear in the revised poems. Besides imitative instances
such as “_cloud-piercing_ pine trees” (D.S., 63), there are more
original and beautiful compounds, such as the “_Lip-dewing_ song and the
_ringlet-tossing_ dance” (_ibid._, 132), which does not appear until the
final draft.

Examples of Type IV are “_holly-sprinkled_ steeps” (E.W., 10), “The
sylvan cabin’s _lute-enlivened_ gloom” (D.S., 134, final); and of Types
V and VI, “_green-tinged_ margin” (D.S., 122), “_clear-blue_ sky” (D.S.,
113), “_dim-lit_ Alps” (D.S., 1793 only, 217), and “the _low-warbled_
breath of twilight lute” (D.S., 1793, 749). Wordsworth’s early poems,
it has been noted, are almost an epitome of the various eighteenth
century devices for producing what was thought to be a distinctively
poetical style,[189] but he soon shakes off this bondage, and “Guilt and
Sorrow,” perhaps the first poem in which his simplicity and directness
of expression are fully revealed, is practically without instances of
compound epithets.

The critics, it would appear, had already marked down as a fault a
“profusion of new coined double epithets”[190] in a “small volume of
juvenile poems” published by Coleridge in 1794. In replying to, or rather
commenting on, the charge, Coleridge makes an interesting digression on
the use of such formations, defending them on “the authority of Milton
and Shakespeare,” and suggesting that compound epithets should only be
admitted if they are already “denizens” of the language, or if the new
formation is a genuine compound, and not merely two words made one by
virtue of the hyphen. “A Language,” he adds, “which like the English
is almost without cases, is indeed in its very genius unfitted for
compounds. If a writer, every time a compounded word suggests itself
to him, would seek for some other mode of expressing the same sense,
the chances are always greatly in favour of his finding a better word.”
Though there is a good deal of sound sense in these remarks, we have only
to recall the wealth of beautiful compound epithets with which Keats, to
take only one example, was soon to enrich the language, to realize that
English poetry would be very much the poorer if the rule Coleridge lays
down had been strictly observed. It would perhaps be truer to say that
the imaginative quality of the compound epithets coined by a poet is a
good test of his advance in power of expression.[191]

As regards his own practice, Coleridge goes on to say[192] that
he “pruned the double epithets with no sparing hand”; but the
pruning was not very severe, judging from a comparison of the two
volumes. Yet these early poems are not without examples of good
compound epithets: “_zephyr-haunted_ brink,” (“Lines to a Beautiful
Spring”), “_distant-tinkling_ stream” (“Song of the Pixies,” 16),
“_sunny-tinctured_ hue” (_ibid._, 43), “_passion-warbled_ strain,” (“To
the Rev. W. J. H.”), etc.

When we review the use of compound epithets in the poetry of the
eighteenth century we are bound to admit that in this, as in other
aspects of the “purely poetical,” the eighteenth century stands apart
from other periods in our literary history. Most readers could probably
at will call to their mind half a dozen compound epithets of Shakespeare
and the Elizabethan period, of Milton, or of more modern writers, such as
Keats, that are, as it were, little poems in themselves, Shakespeare’s
“_young-eyed cherubim_,” or Milton’s “_grey-hooded even_,” or Keats’s
“_soft-conched shell_.” It is safe to say that few eighteenth century
words or phrases of this nature have captured the imagination to a
similar degree; Collins’s “_dim-discovered spires_” is perhaps the only
instance that comes readily to the mind.

There are, of course, as our study has shown, plenty of instances of
good compound epithets, but in the typical eighteenth century poetry
these are rarely the product of a genuine creative force that endows the
phrase with imaginative life. Even the great forerunners of the Romantic
revolt are not especially remarkable in this respect; one of the greatest
of them, William Blake, gave scarcely a single new compound epithet to
the language, and whilst this fact, of course, cannot be brought as a
reproach against him, yet it is, in some respects at least, significant
of the poetical atmosphere into which he was born. It has often been
remarked that when Latin influence was in the ascendant the formation of
new and striking compound epithets has been very rare in English poetry,
whilst it has been always stimulated, as we know from the concrete
examples of Chapman and Keats, by the influence of a revived Hellenism.

Another fact is worthy of attention. Many of the most beautiful compound
epithets in the English language are nature phrases descriptive of
outdoor sights and sounds. The arrested development, or the atrophy of
the sense of the beauty of the external world, which is a characteristic
of the neo-classical school, was an unconscious but effective bar to
the formation of new words and phrases descriptive of outdoor life. The
neo-classical poet, with his eye fixed on the town and on life as lived
there, felt no necessity for adding to the descriptive resources of his
vocabulary, especially when there was to his hand a whole _gradus_ of
accepted and consecrated words and phrases. It is in the apostles of “the
return to Nature” that we find, however inadequately, to begin with, a
new diction that came into being because these poets had recovered the
use of their eyes and could sense the beauty of the world around them.

And this fact leads to a further consideration of the use of compound
epithets from the formal viewpoint of their technical value. It has
already been suggested that their use may not be unconnected with the
mechanism of verse, and the æsthetic poverty of eighteenth century poetry
in this respect may therefore be not unjustly regarded as an outcome of
the two great prevailing vehicles of expression. In the first place,
there was the heroic couplet as brought to perfection by Pope. “The
uniformity and maximum swiftness that marked his manipulation of the
stopped couplet was achieved,” says Saintsbury, “not only by means of
a large proportion of monosyllabic final words, but also by an evident
avoidance of long and heavy vocables in the interior of the lines
themselves.”[193] Moreover, perhaps the commonest device to secure the
uniform smoothness of the line was that use of the “_gradus_ epithet”
which has earlier been treated; these epithets were for the most part
stock descriptive adjectives—_verdant_, _purling_, _fleecy_, _painted_,
and the like—which were generally regarded by the versifiers as the only
attendant diction of the couplet. If we compare a typical Pope verse such
as

    Let _vernal_ airs through trembling osiers play

with the line already quoted,

    Love-whisp’ring woods and lute-resounding waves

we may perhaps see that the free use of compound epithets was not
compatible with the mechanism of the couplet as illustrated in the
greater part of Pope’s practice; they would tend to weaken the balanced
antithesis, and thus spoil the swing of the line.

The most formidable rival of the heroic couplet in the eighteenth
century was blank verse, the advent of which marked the beginning of the
Romantic reaction in form. Here Thomson may be regarded as the chief
representative, and it is significant that the large number of compound
epithets in his work are terms of natural description, which, in addition
to their being a reflex of the revived attitude to natural scenery, were
probably more or less consciously used to compensate readers for the
absence of “the rhyme-stroke and flash” they were accustomed to look
for in the contemporary couplet. “He utilizes periodically,” to quote
Saintsbury again,[194] “the exacter nature-painting, which in general
poetic history is his glory, by putting the distinctive words for colour
and shape in notable places of the verse, so as to give it character
and quality.” These “distinctive words for colour and shape” were, with
Thomson, for the most part, compound epithets; almost by the time of
“Yardley Oak,” and certainly by the time of “Tintern Abbey,” blank verse
had been fully restored to its kingdom, and no longer needed such aid.



CHAPTER VII

PERSONIFICATION AND ABSTRACTION IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY


In the Preface of 1798, when Wordsworth formulated his theories with
regard to poetical language, the first “mechanical device of style”
against which he directed his preliminary attack was the use of
“personifications of abstract ideas.”[195] Such personifications, he
urged, do not make any natural or regular part of “the very language
of men,” and as he wished “to keep the reader in the company of flesh
and blood,” he had endeavoured “utterly to reject them.” He was ready
to admit that they were occasionally “prompted by passion,” but his
predecessors had come to regard them as a sort of family language, upon
which they had every right to draw. In short, in Wordsworth’s opinion,
abstractions and personifications had become a conventional method of
ornamenting verse, akin to the “vicious diction,” from the tyranny of
which he wished to emancipate poetry. The specific point on which he thus
challenged the practice of his predecessors could hardly be gainsaid, for
he had indicted a literary device, or artifice, which was not only worked
to death by the mere poetasters of the period, but which disfigures not a
little the work of even the great poets of the century.

The literary use of abstraction and personification was not, it is
needless to say, the invention of the eighteenth century. It is as old
as literature itself, which has always reflected a tendency to interpret
or explain natural phenomena or man’s relations with the invisible
powers that direct or influence human conduct, by means of allegory,
English poetry in the Middle Ages, especially that of Chaucer, Langland,
and their immediate successors, fitly illustrates the great world
of abstraction which had slowly come into being, a world peopled by
personified states or qualities—the Seven Deadly Sins, the Virtues, Love,
etc.—typifying or symbolizing the forces which help man, or beset and
ensnare him as he makes his pilgrim’s progress through this world.

Already the original motive power of allegory was considerably
diminished, even if it had not altogether disappeared, and, by the time
of the “Faerie Queene,” the literary form which it had moulded for itself
had become merely imitative and conventional, so that even the music
and melody of Spenser’s verse could not altogether vitalize the shadowy
abstractions of his didactic allegory. With “Paradise Lost” we come to
the last great work in which personified abstractions reflect to any real
extent the original allegorical motive in which they had their origin.
Milton achieves his supreme effects in personification in that his
figures are merely suggestive, strongly imagined impressions rather than
clean-cut figures. For nothing can be more dangerous, from the poetic
point of view, than the precise figures which attempt to depict every
possible point of similarity between the abstract notion and the material
representation imagined.[196]

It is sometimes considered that the mania for abstraction was due
largely to the influence of the two poets who are claimed, or regarded,
as the founders or leaders of the new classical school—Dryden and Pope.
As a matter of fact, neither makes any great use of personification.
Dryden has a few abstractions in his original works, such as,

    Far from her sight flew Faction, Strife and Pride
    And Envy did but look on

                                                        (“First Epistle”)

but his examples are mainly to be found in his modernizations or
translations, where of necessity he takes them from his originals.[197]

Pope makes a greater use of the figure, but even here there is no excess.
There is not a single personification in the four pastorals of “The
Seasons,” a subject peculiarly adapted to such treatment. In “Eloisa to
Abelard” there are two instances where some attempt at characterization
is made.[198] More instances, though none very striking, are to be found
in “Windsor Forest,” but the poem ends with a massed group, forming a
veritable catalogue of the personified vices which had done so much
service in poetry since the days of the Seven Deadly Sins.

In other poems Pope uses the device for humorous or satiric effect, as in
the “Pain,” “Megrim,” and “Ill nature like an ancient maid” (l. 24) of
“The Rape of the Lock;” or the “Science,” “Will,” “Logic,” etc., of “The
Dunciad,” where all are invested with capital letters, but with little
attempt to work up a definite picture, except, as was perhaps to be
expected, in the case of “Dullness,” which is provided with a bodyguard
(Bk. I, 45-52).

Though, as we have already said, there is no great use of such figures in
the works of Pope, they are present in such numbers in his satiric and
didactic works as to indicate one great reason for their prevalence in
his contemporaries and successors. After the Restoration, when English
literature entered on a new era, the changed and changing conditions
of English life and thought soon impressed themselves on poetry. The
keynote to the understanding of much that is characteristic of this new
“classical” literature has been well summed up in the formula that “the
saving process of human thought was forced for generations to beggar the
sense of beauty.”[199] The result was an invasion of poetry by ideas,
arguments, and abstractions which were regarded both as expressing
admirably the new spirit of rationalism, as well as constituting in
themselves dignified subjects and ornaments of poetry.

This is well illustrated in the case of several of Pope’s contemporaries.
In the works of Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) abstractions of the
conventional type are plentiful, usually accompanied by a qualifying
epithet: “Fortune fair-array’d” (“An Imitation”), “Impetuous Discord,”
“Blind Mischief,” (“On Queen Anne’s Peace”), “the soft Pathetic” (“On
the Different Styles of Poetry”). These are only a few of the examples
of the types favoured by Parnell, where only here and there are human
traits added by means of qualifying epithets or phrases. In one or two
instances, however, there are more detailed personifications. Thus,
in the “Epistle to Dr. Swift,” which abounds in shadowy abstractions,
Eloquence is fully described for us:

    Upon her cheek sits Beauty ever young
    The soul of music warbles on her tongue.

Moreover, already in Parnell it is evident that the influence of Milton
is responsible for some of his personifications. In the same poem we get
the invocation:

    Come! country Goddess come, nor thou suffice
    But bring thy mountain-sister Exercise,

figures which derive obviously from “L’Allegro.”

In the case of Richard Savage (1696-1743) there is still greater freedom
in the use of personified abstractions, which, as here the creative
instinct is everywhere subjected to the didactic purpose, become very
wearisome. The “Wanderer” contains long catalogues of them, in some
instances pursued for over fifty lines.[200]

The device continued to be very popular throughout the eighteenth
century, especially by those who continue or represent the “Ethical”
school of Pope. First amongst these may be mentioned Edward Young
(1681-1765), whose “Night Thoughts” was first published between
1742-1744. Young, like his contemporaries, has recourse to
personifications, both for didactic purposes and apparently to add
dignity to his style. It is probable, too, that in this respect he owes
something to “Paradise Lost”; from Milton no doubt he borrowed his
figure of Death, which, though poetically not very impressive, seems to
have captured the imagination of Blake and other artists who have tried
to depict it. The figure is at first only casually referred to in the
Fourth Book (l. 96), where there is a brief and commonplace reference to
“Death, that mighty hunter”; but it is not until the fifth book that the
figure is developed. Yet, though the characterization is carried to great
length, there is no very striking personification: we are given, instead,
a long-drawn-out series of abstractions, with an attempt now and then to
portray a definite human figure. Thus

    Like princes unconfessed in foreign courts
    Who travel under cover, Death assumes
    The name and look of life, and dwells among us.

And then the poet describes Death as being present always and everywhere,
and especially

        Gaily carousing, to his gay compeers
    Inly he laughs to see them laugh at him
    As absent far.

But Young has not, like Milton, been able to conjure up a definite and
convincing vision, and thus he never achieves anything approaching the
overwhelming effect produced by the phantom of Death in “Paradise Lost,”
called before us in a single verse:

    So spake the grisly Terror.

                                                          (P.L., II. 704)

For the rest, Young’s personifications, considering the nature of his
subject, are fewer than might be expected. Where they occur they often
seem to owe their presence to a desire to vary the monotony of his moral
reflections; as a result we get a number of abstractions, which may be
called personifications only because they are sometimes accompanied by
human attributes.

Young has also certain other evocations which can scarcely be called
abstractions, but which are really indistinct, shadowy beings, like the
figures of a dream, as when he describes the phantom of the past:

    The spirit walks of every day deceased
    And smiles an angel, or a fury frowns

                                                            (ll. 180-181)

or the grief of the poet as he ever meets the shades of joys gone for
ever:

                      The ghosts
    Of my departed joys: a numerous train.

Here the poet has come near to achieving that effect which in the hands
of the greatest poets justifies the use of personification as a poetic
figure. The more delicate process just illustrated is distinct both from
the lifeless abstraction and the detailed personification, for in these
cases there is a tinge of personal emotion which invests these shadowy
figures with something of a true lyrical effect.

The tendency, illustrated in the “Night Thoughts,” to make a purely
didactic use of personification and abstraction is found to a much
greater extent in Akenside’s “Pleasures of the Imagination,” first
published in 1744, to be considerably enlarged in 1767. The nature of
Akenside’s subject freely admitted of the use of these devices, and he
has not been slow to avail himself of them.

Large portions of the “Pleasures of the Imagination” resolve themselves
into one long procession of abstract figures. Very often Akenside
contents himself with the usual type of abstraction, accompanied by a
conventional epithet: “Wisdom’s form celestial” (I, 69), “sullen Pomp”
(III, 216), etc., though sometimes by means of human attributes or
characteristics we are given partial personifications such as:

    Power’s purple robes nor Pleasure’s flowery lap.

                                                                 (l. 216)

And occasionally there are traces of a little more imagination:

            thy lonely whispering voice
    O faithful Nature![201]

But on the whole it is clear that with Akenside abstraction and
personification are used simply and solely for moral and didactic
purposes, and not because of any perception of their potential artistic
value. Incidentally, an interesting side-light on this point is revealed
by one of the changes introduced by the poet into his revision of his
chief work. In the original edition of 1740 there is an invocation to
Harmony (Bk. I, ll. 20 foll.), with her companion,

    Majestic Truth; and where Truth deigns to come
    Her sister Liberty will not be far.

Before the publication of the revised edition, Akenside, who at one time
had espoused the cause of liberty with such ardour as to lead to his
being suspected of republicanism, received a Court appointment. In the
revised edition the concluding lines of the invocation became

                    for with thee comes
    The guide, the guardian of their majestic rites
    Wise Order and where Order deigns to come
    Her sister Liberty will not be far.

                                                              (138 foll.)

The same lavish use of abstractions is seen, not only in the philosophic
poetry proper, but also in other works, which might perhaps have been
expected to escape the contagion. Charles Churchill (1731-1764), if we
set aside Johnson and Canning, may be regarded as representing eighteenth
century satire in its decline, after the great figures of Pope and Swift
have disappeared from the scene, and among the causes which prevent his
verse from having but little of the fiery force and sting of the great
masters of satire is that, instead of the strongly depicted, individual
types of Pope, for example, we are given a heterogeneous collection
of human virtues, vices, and characteristics, most often in the form
of mere abstractions, sometimes personified into stiff, mechanical
figures.[202] Only once has Churchill attempted anything novel in the
way of personification, and this in humorous vein, when he describes the
social virtues:

    With belly round and full fat face,
    Which on the house reflected grace,
    Full of good fare and honest glee,
    The steward Hospitality.

Churchill had no doubt a genuine passion for poetry and independence,
but the _saeva indignatio_ of the professed censor of public morals and
manners cannot be conveyed to the reader through the medium of mechanical
abstractions which, compared with the flesh-and-blood creations of Dryden
and Pope, show clearly that for the time being the great line of English
satire has all but come to an end.

Eighteenth century ethical poetry was represented at this stage by
Johnson and Goldsmith, at whose work it will now be convenient to
glance. The universal truths which Johnson as a stern, unbending
moralist wished to illustrate in “London” (1738) and “The Vanity of
Human Wishes” (1749), might easily have resulted in a swarm of the
abstractions and personifications fashionable at the time.[203] From this
danger Johnson was saved by the depth of feeling with which he unfolds
the individual examples chosen to enforce his moral lessons. Not that
he escapes entirely; “London” has a few faint abstractions (“Malice,”
“Rapine,” “Oppression”); but though occasionally they are accompanied
by epithets suggesting human attributes (“surly Virtue,” “persecuting
Fate,” etc.), as a rule there is no attempt at definite personification,
a remark which also applies to the “Vanity of Human Wishes.” In his
odes to the different seasons he has not given, however, any elaborate
personifications, but has contented himself with slight human touches,
such as

    Now Autumn bends a cloudy brow.

Of Johnson’s poetical style, regarded from our present point of view, it
may be said to be well represented in the famous line from “London”:

    Slow rises Worth by Poverty depressed,

where there is probably no intention or desire to personify at all, but
which is a result of that tendency towards Latin condensation which the
great Doctor and his contemporaries had introduced into English prose.

Goldsmith’s poetry has much in common with that of Johnson, in that both
deal to some extent with what would now be called social problems. But it
is significant of Goldsmith’s historical position in eighteenth century
poetry as representing a sort of “half-way attitude,” in the matter of
poetical style, between the classical conventional language and the
free and unfettered diction advocated by Wordsworth, that there are few
examples of personified abstractions in his works, and these confined
mainly to one passage in “The Traveller”:

    Hence Ostentation here with tawdry Art
    Pants for the vulgar praise which fools impart, etc.

At this point it is necessary to hark back for the purpose of considering
other works which had been appearing alongside of the works just
discussed. It has already been remarked that in this matter of the use of
abstraction and personification the influence of Milton early asserted
itself, and there can be no doubt that a good deal of it may be traced
to the influence more especially of the early poems. Indeed, the blank
verse poems, which attempted to imitate or parody the “grand style” of
the great epics, furnish few examples of the personified abstraction.
The first of these, the “Splendid Shilling” and “Cyder” of John Philips
(1705-1706) contains but few instances. In Somerville’s “Chase” there is
occasionally a commonplace example, such as “brazen-fisted Time,” though
in his ode “To Marlborough” he falls into the conventional style quickly
enough. In the rest of the blank verse poems Mallet’s “Excursion” (1738),
and his “Amyntor and Theodora” (1744), comparatively little use is made
of the device, a remark also applicable to Dyer’s “Ruins of Rome” (1740),
and to Grainger’s “Sugar Cane” (1764).

The fashion for all these blank verse poems had been started largely by
the success of “The Seasons,” which appeared in its original form from
1726 to 1730, to undergo more than one revision and augmentation until
the final edition of 1744. Though Thomson’s work shows very many traces
of the influence of Milton, there is no direct external evidence that
his adoption of blank verse was a result of that influence. Perhaps, as
has been suggested,[204] he was weary of the monotony of the couplet,
or at least considered its correct and polished form incapable of any
further development. At the same time it is clear that having adopted
“rhyme-unfettered verse,” he chose to regard Milton as a model of
diction and style, though he was by no means a slavish imitator.

With regard to the special problems with which we are here concerned,
it must be noted that when Thomson was first writing “The Seasons,” the
device of personified abstraction had not become quite so conventional
and forced in its use as at a later date. Nevertheless examples of the
typical abstraction are not infrequent; thus, in an enumeration of the
passions which, since the end of the “first fresh dawn,” have invaded
the hearts and minds of men, we are given “Base Envy,” withering at
another’s joy; “Convulsive Anger,” storming at large; and “Desponding
Fear,” full of feeble fancies, etc. (“Spring,” 280-306). Other examples
are somewhat redeemed by the use of a felicitous compound epithet, “Art
imagination-flushed” (“Autumn,” 140), “the lonesome Muse, low-whispering”
(_ibid._, 955), etc. In “Summer” (ll. 1605 foll.) the poet presents one
of the usual lists of abstract qualities (“White Peace, Social Love,”
etc.), but there are imaginative touches present that help to vitalize
some at least of the company into living beings:

    The tender-looking Charity intent
    On gentle deeds, and shedding tears through smiles—

and the passage is thus a curious mixture of mechanical abstractions with
more vivid and inspired conceptions.

Occasionally Thomson employs the figure with ironical or humorous
intention, and sometimes not ineffectively, as in the couplet,

    Then sated Hunger bids his brother Thirst
    Produce the mighty bowl.

                                                          (“Autumn,” 512)

He is also fond of the apostrophic personification, often feebly, as
when, acting upon a suggestion from Mallet,[205] he writes:

    Comes, Inspiration, from thy hermit seat,
    By mortal seldom found, etc.

                                                        (“Summer,” l. 15)

As for the seasons themselves, we do not find any very successful
attempts at personification. Thomson gives descriptive impressions rather
than abstractions: “gentle Spring, ethereal mildness” (“Spring,” 1),
“various-blossomed Spring” (“Autumn,” 5); or borrowing, as often, an
epithet from Milton, “refulgent Summer” (“Summer,” 2); or “surly Winter”
(“Spring,” 11).

But in these, and similar passages, the seasons can hardly be said
to be distinctly pictured or personified. In “Winter,” however,
there is perhaps a more successful attempt at vague but suggestive
personification:[206]

    See Winter comes, to rule the varied year,
    Sullen and sad, with all his rising train
    Vapours, and clouds and storms.

But on the whole Thomson’s personifications of the seasons are not,
poetically, very impressive. There is little or no approach to the
triumphant evocation with which Keats conjures up Autumn for us, with
all its varied sights and sounds, and its human activities vividly
personified in the gleaner and the winnower

        sitting careless on a granary floor
    Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind,

or the couplet in which Coleridge brings before us a subtle suggestion
of the spring beauty, to which the storms and snows are but a prelude:

    And winter, slumbering in the open air
    Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring.

                                                    (“Work without Hope”)

Yet Thomson, as might be expected in a forerunner of the Romantic school,
is not altogether without a gift for these embryonic personifications,
as they have been called, when by means of a felicitous term or epithet
the whole conception which the poet has in mind is suddenly galvanized
into life and endowed with human feelings and emotions. Such evocations
are of the very stuff of which poetry is made, and at their highest
they possess the supreme power of stirring or awakening in the mind of
the reader other pictures or visions than those suggested by the mere
personification.[207]

Though some of Thomson’s instances are conventional or commonplace, as in
the description of

                the grey grown oaks
    That the calm village in their verdant arms
    Sheltering, embrace,

                                                      (“Summer,” 225-227)

and others merely imitative, as,

                  the rosy-footed May
    Steals blushing on,

                                                      (“Spring,” 489-490)

yet there are many which call up by a single word a vivid and picturesque
expression, such as the “hollow-whispering breeze” (“Summer,” 919) or the
poet’s description of the dismal solitude of a winter landscape

                  It freezes on
    Till Morn, late rising o’er the drooping world
    Lifts her pale eyes unjoyous

                                                          (“Winter,” 744)

or the beautiful description of a spring dawn:

    The meek-eyed Morn appears, mother of dews
    At first faint-gleaming in the dappled east.

                                                        (“Summer,” 48-49)

Adverting to the question of Milton’s influence on the prevalent mania
for personification, it is undoubted that the early poems may be held
largely responsible. Their influence first began noticeably to make
itself felt in the fifth decade of the century, when their inspiration
is to be traced in a great deal of the poetic output of the period,
including that of Joseph and Thomas Warton, as well as of Collins and
Gray. Neglecting for the moment the greater poets who drew inspiration
from this source, it will be as well briefly to consider first the
influence of Milton’s minor poems on the obscure versifiers, for it
is very often the case that the minor poetry of an age reflects most
distinctly the peculiarities of a passing literary fashion. As early as
1739 William Hamilton of Bangour[208] imitated Milton in his octosyllabic
poem “Contemplation,” and by his predilection for abstraction
foreshadowed one of the main characteristics of the Miltonic revival
among the lesser lights. A single passage shows this clearly enough:

    Anger with wild disordered pace
    And malice pale of famish’d face:
    Loud-tongued Clamour get thee far
    Hence, to wrangle at the bar:

and so on.

Five or six years later Mason’s Miltonic imitations appeared—“Il
Bellicoso” and “Il Pacifico”—which follow even more slavishly the style
of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” so that there is no need for Mason’s
footnote to “Il Bellicoso” describing the poem with its companion piece
as this “very, very juvenile imitation.”[209] “Il Bellicoso” begins with
the usual dismissal:

    Hence, dull lethargic Peace
    Born in some hoary beadsman’s cell obscure,

and subsequently we are introduced to Pleasure, Courage, Victory, Fancy,
etc. There is a similar exorcism in “Il Pacifico,” followed by a faint
personification of the subject of the ode, attended by a “social smiling
train” of lifeless abstractions.

The pages of Dodsley[210] furnish abundant testimony to the prevalence
of this kind of thing. Thus “Penshurst”[211] by F. Coventry is
another close imitation of Milton’s companion poems, with the usual
crowd of abstractions. The same thing is met with in the anonymous
“Vacation,”[212] and in the “Valetudinarian,” said to be written by Dr.
Marriott.[213]

It is unnecessary to illustrate further the Milton vogue, which thus
produced so large a crop of imitations,[214] except to say that there is
significant testimony to the widespread prevalence of the fashion in the
fact that a parody written “in the Allegoric, Descriptive, Alliterative,
Epithetical, Fantastic, Hyperbolical, and Diabolical Style of our
modern Ode writers and monody-mongers”[215] soon appeared. This was
the anonymous “Ode to Horror,” a humorous burlesque, especially of the
“Pleasures of Melancholy.” The Wartons stand high above the versifiers at
whose productions we have just looked, but nevertheless there was some
justification for the good-humoured parody called forth by their works.

In 1746 there appeared a small volume entitled “Odes on Various
Subjects,” a collection of fourteen odes by Joseph Warton.[216] The
influence of Milton is especially seen in the odes “To Fancy,” “To
Health,” and to “The Nightingale,” but all betray definitely the source
of their inspiration. Thus in the first named:

    Me, Goddess, by the right hand lead
    Sometimes thro’ the yellow mead
    Where Joy and White-robed Peace resort
    And Venus keeps her festive court.

All the odes of Warton betray an abundant use of abstractions, in the
midst of which he rarely displays anything suggestive of spontaneous
inspiration. His few personifications of natural powers are clearly
imitative. “Evening” is “the meek-eyed Maiden clad in sober gray” and
Spring comes

    array’d in primrose colour’d robe.

We feel all the time that the poet drags in his stock of personified
abstractions only because he is writing odes, and considers that such
devices add dignity to his subject.

At the same time it is worth noting that almost the same lavish use of
these lay figures occurs in his blank verse poem, “The Enthusiast,” or
“The Lover of Nature” (1740), likewise written in imitation of Milton,
and yet in its prophetic insight so important a poem in the history of
the Romantic revival.[217] Lines such as

            Famine, Want and Pain
    Sunk to their graves their fainting limbs

are frequent, while there is a regular procession of qualities, more
or less sharply defined, but not poetically suggestive enough to be
effective.

The younger of the two brothers, Thomas Warton, who by his critical
appreciation of Spenser did much in that manner to help forward the
Romantic movement, was perhaps still more influenced by Milton. His ode
on “The Approach of Summer” shows to what extent he had taken possession
of the verse, language, and imagery of Milton:

        Haste thee, nymph, and hand in hand
    With thee lead a buxom band
    Bring fantastic-footed Joy
    With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy;
    Leisure, that through the balmy sky,
    Chases a crimson butterfly.

But nearly all his poems provide numerous instances of personified
abstraction, especially the lines “Written at Vale Abbey,” which seems
to exhaust, and present as thin abstractions, the whole gamut of human
virtues and vices, emotions and desires.[218]

There is a certain irony in the fact that the two men who, crudely,
perhaps, but nevertheless unmistakably, adumbrated the Romantic doctrine,
should have been among the foremost to indulge in an excess against
which later the avowed champion of Romanticism was to inveigh with all
his power. This defect was perhaps the inevitable result of the fact
that the Wartons had apparently been content in this respect to follow
a contemporary fashion as revealed in the swarm of merely mechanical
imitations of Milton’s early poems. But their subjects were on the whole
distinctly romantic, and this fact, added to their critical utterances,
gives them real historical importance. Above all, it is to be remembered
that they have for contemporaries the two great poets in whom the
Romantic movement was for the first time adequately exemplified—William
Collins and Thomas Gray.

The first published collection of Collins’s work, “Odes on Several
Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects” (1746), was, as we have seen, if
not neglected or ignored by the public, at least received with marked
indifference, owing largely no doubt to the abstract nature of his
subjects, and the chiselled severity of his treatment.[219] In other
words, Collins was pure classical and not neo-classical; he had gone
direct back to the “gods of Hellas” for his inspiration, and his verse
had a Hellenic austerity and beauty which could make little or no appeal
to his own age. At the same time it was permeated through and through
with new and striking qualities of feeling and emotion that at once
aroused the suspicions of the neo-classicists, with Johnson as their
mentor and spokesman. The “Odes” were then, we may say, classical in form
and romantic in essence, and it is scarcely a matter for surprise that a
lukewarm reception should have been their lot.[220]

Collins has received merited praise for the charm and precision of his
diction generally, and the fondness for inverting the common order of
his words—Johnson’s chief criticism of his poetical style[221]—is to
the modern mind a venial offence compared with his use of personified
abstractions. On this point Johnson has nothing to say, an omission which
may be regarded as significant of the extent to which personification had
invaded poetry, for the critic, if we may judge from his silence, seems
to have considered it natural and legitimate for Collins also to have
made abundant use of this stock and conventional device.

It is probable, however, that the extensive use which Collins makes of
the figure is the result in a large measure of his predilection for the
ode—a form of verse very fashionable towards the middle of the century.
As has already been noted, odes were being turned out in large numbers
by the poetasters of the time, in which virtues and vices, emotions and
passions were invoked, apostrophized, and dismissed with appropriate
gestures, and it is probable that the majority of these turgid and
ineffective compositions owed their appearance to the prevalent mania for
personification. Young remarked with truth[222] that an ode is, or ought
to be, “more spontaneous and more remote from prose” than any other kind
of poetry; and doubtless it was some vague recognition of this fact, and
in the hope of “elevating” their style, that led the mere versifiers to
adopt the trick. But as they worked the mechanical personification to
death, they quickly robbed it of any impressiveness it may ever have had.

This might quite fairly be described as the state of affairs with regard
to the use of personified abstraction when Collins was writing his
“odes,” but while it is true that he indulges freely in personification,
it is scarcely necessary to add that he does so with a difference; his
Hellenic training and temperament naturally saved him from the inanities
and otiosities of so much contemporary verse. To begin with, there are
but few examples of the lifeless abstraction, and even in such cases
there is usually present a happy epithet, or brief description that sets
them on a higher level than those that swarm even in the odes of the
Wartons. Thus in the “Ode on the Poetical Character,” “the shadowy tribes
of mind,” which had been sadly overworked by Collins’s predecessors and
contemporaries, are brought before us with a new and fresh beauty that
wins instant acceptance for them:

    But near it sat ecstatic Wonder
    Listening the deep applauding thunder
    And truth in sunny vest arrayed
    By whom the tassel’s eyes were made
    All the shadowy tribes of mind
    In braided dance their murmurs joined.

Instances of the mechanical type so much in favour are, however, not
lacking, as in this stanza from the “Verses” written about bride-cake:

    Ambiguous looks that scorn and yet relent,
    Denial mild and firm unaltered truth,
    Reluctant pride and amorous faint consent
    And melting ardours and exulting youth.[223]

The majority of Collins’s personified abstractions are, however, vague
in outline, that is to say, they suggest, but do not define, and are
therefore the more effective in that the resulting images are almost
evanescent in their delicacy. Thus in the “Ode to Pity” the subject is
presented to us in magic words:

    Long pity, let the nations view
    Thy sky-worn robes of tender blue
        And eyes of dewy light,

whilst still another imaginative conception is that of “Mercy”:

        who sitt’st a smiling bride
    By Valour’s armed and awful side
    Gentlest of sky-born forms and best adorned.

The “Ode to the Passions” is in itself almost an epitome of the various
ways in which Collins makes use of personification. It is first to be
noted that he rarely attempts to clothe his personifications in long and
elaborate descriptions; most often they are given life and reality by
being depicted, so to speak, moving and acting:

    Revenge impatient rose,
    He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,
    And with a withering look
    The war-denouncing trumpet took;
    Yet still he kept his wild unaltered mien
    Whilst his strained ball of sight seemed bursting from his head.

Even the figures, seen as it were but for a moment, are flashed before us
in this manner:

        With woful measures wan Despair
    Low sullen sounds his grief beguiled

and

    Dejected Pity at his side
    Her soul-subduing voice applied

and the vision of hope with “eyes so fair” who

    smiled and waved her golden hair.

In this ode Collins gives us also imaginative cameos, we might call them,
vividly delineated and presented like the figures on the Grecian urn that
inspired Keats. Thus:

    While as his flying fingers kissed the strings,
    Love framed with mirth a gay fantastic round.

and, with its tinge of probably unconscious humour—

        Brown exercise rejoiced to hear,
    And Sport leapt up and seized his beechen spear.

From these and similar instances, we receive a definite impression of
that motion, which is at the same time repose, so characteristic of
classical sculptuary.

Most of the odes considered above are addressed to abstractions. In the
few instances where Collins invokes the orders or powers of nature even
greater felicity is shown in the art with which he calls up and clothes
in perfect expression his abstract images. The first of the seasons is
vaguely but subtly suggested to us in the beautiful ode beginning “How
sleep the brave”:

          When Spring with dewy fingers cold
    Returns to deck their hallowed mould,
        She there shall dress a sweeter sod
    Than fancy’s feet have ever trod.

This is rather a simile than a personification, but yet there is conveyed
to us a definite impression of a shadowy figure that comes to deck the
earth with beauty, like a young girl scattering flowers as she walks
along.

But the workmanship of Collins in this respect is seen in its perfection
in the “Ode to Evening.” There is no attempt to draw a portrait or chisel
a statue; the calm, restful influence of evening, its sights and sounds
that radiate peace and contentment, even the very soul of the landscape
as the shades of night gather around, are suggested by master touches,
whilst the slow infiltration of the twilight is beautifully suggested:

    Thy dewy fingers draw
    The gradual dusky veil.

The central figure is still the same evanescent being, the vision of a
maiden, endowed with all the grace of beauty and dignity, into whose lap
“sallow Autumn” is pouring his falling leaves, or who now goes her way
slowly through the tempest, while

    Winter, yelling through the troublous air
    Affrights thy shrinking train,
    And rudely rends thy robe.

If we had no other evidence before us, Collins’s use of personified
abstraction would be sufficient in itself to announce that the new poetry
had begun. He makes use of the device as freely, and even now and then
as mechanically, as the inferior versifiers of his period, but instead
of the bloodless abstractions, his genius enabled him to present human
qualities and states in almost ethereal form. Into them he has breathed
such poetic life and inspiration that in their suggestive beauty and
felicity of expression they stand as supreme examples of personification
used as a legitimate poetical device, as distinct from a mere rhetorical
figure or embellishment.

This cannot be said of Gray, in whose verse mechanical personifications
crowd so thickly that, as Coleridge observed in his remarks on the lines
from “The Bard,”

    In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes
    Youth at the prow and Pleasure at the helm

it depends “wholly on the compositors putting or not putting a small
Capital, both in this and in many other passages of the same poet,
whether the words should be personifications or mere abstractions.”[224]

It is difficult to account for this devotion of Gray to the “new
Olympus,” thickly crowded with “moral deities” that his age had brought
into being, except on the assumption that contemporary usage in this
respect was too strong for him to resist. For it cannot be denied that
very many of the beings that swarm in his odes do not differ in their
essential character from the mechanical figures worked to death by the
ode-makers of his days; even his genius was not able to clothe them
all in flesh and blood. In the “Eton College” ode there is a whole
stanza given over to a conventional catalogue of the “fury passions,”
the “vultures of the mind”; and similar thin abstractions people all
the other odes. Nothing is visualized: we see no real image before
us.[225] Even the famous “Elegy” is not without its examples of stiff
personification, though they are not present in anything like the excess
found elsewhere. The best that can be said for abstractions of this kind
is that in their condensation they represent an economy of expression
that is not without dignity and effectiveness, and they thus sometimes
give an added emphasis to the sentiment, as in the oft-quoted

        Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
    Their homely joys and destiny secure,
        Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
    The short and simple annals of the poor.

Gray rarely attempts to characterize his figures other than by the
occasional use of a conventional epithet, and only here and there has the
personification been to any extent filled in so as to form at least an
outline picture. In the “Hymn to Adversity,” Wisdom is depicted

          in sable garb arrayed
    Immersed in rapturous thought profound,

whilst other slight human touches are to be found here and there: as
in “Moody Madness, laughing wild” (“Ode on a Distant Prospect”). His
personifications, however, have seldom the clear-cut outlines we find
in Collins, nor do they possess more than a tinge of the vividness and
vitality the latter could breathe into his abstractions. Yet now and then
we come across instances of the friezes in which Collins excels, moving
figures depicted as in Greek plastic art

          Antic sports and blue-eyed Pleasures,
    Frisking light in frolic measures

                                                    (“Progress of Poesy”)

or the beautiful vision in the “Bard,”

        Bright Rapture calls and soaring as she sings,
    Waves in the eyes of heaven her many-coloured wings.

And in the “Ode on Vicissitude” Gray has one supreme example of the
embryonic personification, when the powers or orders of nature are
invested with human attributes, and thus brought before us as living
beings, in the form of vague but suggestive impressions that leave to the
imagination the task of filling in the details:

        Now the golden Morn aloft
    Waves her dew-bespangled wing
    With vernal cheek and whisper soft
        She woos the tardy spring.

But in the main, and much more than the poet with whom his name is
generally coupled, it is perhaps not too much to say that Gray was
content to handle the device in the same manner as the uninspired
imitators of the “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Not that he was
unaware of the danger of such a tendency in himself and others. “I
had rather,” he wrote to Mason[226] when criticizing the latter’s
“Caractacus,” “some of the personages—‘Resignation,’ ‘Peace,’ ‘Revenge,’
‘Slaughter,’ ‘Ambition’—were stripped of their allegorical garb. A
little simplicity here and there in the expression would better prepare
the high and fantastic harpings that follow.” In the light of this most
salutary remark, Gray’s own procedure is only the more astonishing. His
innumerable personifications may not have been regarded by Johnson as
contributory to “the kind of cumbrous splendour” he wished away from the
odes, but the fact that they are scarce in the “Elegy” is not without
significance. The romantic feeling which asserts itself clearly in the
odes, the new imaginative conceptions which these stock figures were
called upon to convey, the perfection of the workmanship—these qualities
were more than sufficient to counterweigh Gray’s licence of indulgence in
a mere rhetorical device. Yet Coleridge was right in calling attention
to this defect of Gray’s style, especially as his censure is no mere
diatribe against the use of personified abstraction: it is firmly and
justly based on the undeniable fact that Gray’s personifications are for
the most part cold and lifeless, that they are mere verbal abstractions,
utterly devoid of the redeeming vitality, which Collins gives to his
figures.[227] It is for this reason perhaps that his poetry in the
mass has never been really popular, and that the average reader, with
his impatience of abstractions, has been content, with Dr. Johnson, to
pronounce boldly for “The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

Before proceeding to examine the works of the other great poets who
announce or exemplify the Romantic revival, it will be convenient at
this point to look at some of the Spenserian imitations, which helped to
inspire and vitalize the revival.

Spenser was the poet of mediaeval allegory. In the “Faerie Queene,”
for the first time a real poet, endowed with the highest powers of
imagination and expression, was able to present the old traditional
abstractions wonderfully decked up in a new and captivating guise. The
personages that move like dream figures through the cantos of the poem
are thus no mere personified abstractions: they are rather pictorial
emblems, many of which are limned for us with such grandeur of conception
and beauty of execution as to secure for the allegorical picture a
“willing suspension of disbelief,” whilst the essentially romantic
atmosphere more than atones for the cumbrous and obsolete machinery
adopted by Spenser to inculcate the lessons of “virtuous and gentle
discipline.”

Though the eighteenth century Spenserians make a plentiful use of
personified abstraction, on the whole their employment of this device
differs widely from its mechanical use by most of their contemporaries:
in the best of the imitations there are few examples of the lifeless
abstraction. Faint traces at least of the music and melody of the “Faerie
Queene” have been caught and utilized to give a poetic charm even to
the personified virtues and vices that naturally appear in the work of
Spenser’s imitators. Thus in William Thompson’s “Epithalamium” (1736),
while many of the old figures appear before us, they have something of
the new charm with which Collins was soon to invest them. Thus,

    Liberty, the fairest nymph on ground
      The flowing plenty of her growing hair
    Diffusing lavishly ambrosia round
    Earth smil’d, and Gladness danc’d along the sky.

The epithets which accompany the abstractions are no longer conventional
(“Chastity meek-ey’d,” “Modesty sweet-blushing”) and help to give touches
of animation to otherwise inanimate figures. In the “Nativity” (1757)
there is a freer use of the mere abstraction that calls up no distinct
picture, but even here there are happy touches that give relief:

      Faith led the van, her mantle dipt in blue,
    Steady her ken, and gaining on the skies.

In the “Hymn to May” (1787) Thompson personified the month whose charms
he is singing, the result being a radiant figure, having much in common
with the classical personifications of the orders or powers of nature:

    A silken camus, em’rald green
    Gracefully loose, adown her shoulder flow.

In Shenstone’s “Schoolmistress” (1737-1742) instances of personification
are rare, and, where they do occur, are merely faint abstractions like
“Learning near her little dome.” It is noteworthy that one of the most
successful of the Spenserian imitations should have dispensed with the
cumbrous machinery of abstract beings that, on the model of the “Faerie
Queene,” might naturally have been drawn upon. The homely atmosphere of
the “Schoolmistress,” with its idyllic pictures and its gentle pathos,
would, indeed, have been fatally marred by their introduction.

The same sparing use of personification is evident in the greatest of
the imitations, James Thomson’s “Castle of Indolence” (1748). A theme
of this nature afforded plenty of opportunity to indulge in the device,
and Thomson, judging from its use of the figure in some of his blank
verse poems, might have been expected to take full advantage. But there
are less than a score of examples in the whole of the poem. Only vague
references are made to the eponymous hero: he is simply “Indolence” or
“tender Indolence” or “the demon Indolence.” For the rest Thomson’s few
abstractions are of the stock type, though occasionally more realistic
touches result, we may suppose, from the poet’s sense of humour as

    The sleepless Gout here counts the crowing cock.

Only here and there has Thomson attempted full-length portraits in the
Spenserian manner, as when Lethargy, Hydropsy, and Hypochondria are
described with drastic realism.[228]

The works of the minor Spenserians show a greater use of personified
abstraction, but even with them there is no great excess. Moreover,
where instances do occur, they show imaginative touches foreign to the
prevalent types. Thus in the “Vision of Patience” by Samuel Boyce (d.
1778),

    Silence sits on her untroubled throne
    As if she left the world to live and reign alone,

while Patience stands

    In robes of morning grey.

Occasionally the personified abstractions, though occurring in
avowedly Spenserian imitations, obviously owe more to the influence of
“L’Allegro”; as in William Whitehead’s “Vision of Solomon” (1730), where
the embroidered personifications are much more frequent than the detailed
images given by Spenser.[229]

The work of Chatterton represents another aspect of this revival of the
past, but it is curious to find that, in his acknowledged “original”
verse there are not many instances of the personified abstraction,
whilst they are freely used in the Rowley poems. Where they do occur
in his avowedly original work they are of the usual type, though more
imaginative power is revealed in his personification of Winter:

    Pale rugged Winter bending o’er his tread,
    His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew:
    His eyes a dusky light congealed and dead,
    His robe a tinge of bright ethereal blue.

From our special point of view the “antiquarianism” of the Rowley
poems might almost be disproved by the prevalence of abstractions and
personifications, which in most instances are either unmistakably of
the eighteenth century or which testify to the new Romantic atmosphere
now manifesting itself. The stock types of frigid abstraction are all
brought on the stage in the manner of the old Moralities, and each is
given an ample speaking part in order to describe his own characteristics.

But in addition to these lifeless abstractions, there are to be
found in the Rowley poems a large number of detailed and elaborate
personifications. Some of these are full length portraits in the
Spenserian manner, and now and then the resulting personification is
striking and beautiful, as when, in “Ælla” (59), Celmond apostrophizes
Hope, or the evocation of Truth in “The Storie of William Canynge.”

Chatterton has also in these poems a few personifications of natural
powers, but these are mainly imitative as in the lines (“Ælla,” 94)
reminiscent of Milton and Pope[230]:

    Bright sun had in his ruddy robes been dight
    From the red east he flitted with his train,
    The hours drew away the robe of night,
    Her subtle tapestry was rent in twain.

But the evocation of the seasons themselves, as in “Ælla” (32),

    When Autumn sere and sunburnt doth appear
      With his gold hand gilding the falling leaf
    Bringing up Winter to fulfil the year
      Bearing upon his back the ripened sheaf,

conveys a fresh and distinct picture that belongs to the new poetry, and
has in it a faint forecast of Keats.

It remains to look at the work of the later eighteenth century poets,
who announce that if the Romantic outburst is not yet, it is close at
hand. The first and greatest of these is William Blake. His use of
personification in the narrower sense which is our topic, is, of course,
formally connected with the large and vital question of his symbolism, to
treat of which here in any detail is not part of our scheme.

In its widest sense, however, Blake’s mysticism may be connected with
the great mediaeval world of allegory: it is “an eddy of that flood-tide
of symbolism which attained its tide-mark in the magic of the Middle
Ages.”[231] But the poet himself unconsciously indicates the vital
distinction between the new symbolism, which he inaugurates, and the
old, of which the personified abstractions of his eighteenth century
predecessors may be regarded as faint and faded relics. “Allegory
addressed to the intellectual powers,” he wrote to Thomas Butts,[232]
“while it is altogether hidden from the corporeal understanding, is my
definition of the most surprising poetry.”

On its formal side, and reduced to its simplest expression, we may narrow
down for our present purpose the whole system to the further distinction
drawn by Blake between Allegory and Vision. Allegory is “formed by the
daughters of Memory” or the deliberate reason; Vision “is surrounded by
the daughters of Inspiration.” Here we have a key to the classification
of personified abstractions in the eighteenth century, and, for that
matter, at any and every period. Abstractions formed by the deliberate
reason are usually more or less rhetorical embellishments of poetry, and
to this category belong the great majority of the personifications of
eighteenth century verse. They are “things that relate to moral virtues”
or vices, but they cannot truly be called allegorical, for allegory is a
living thing only so long as the ideas it embodies are real forces that
control our conduct. The inspired personification, which embodies or
brings with it a real vision, is the truly poetical figure.

In Blake’s own practice we find only a few instances of the typical
eighteenth century abstraction. In the early “Imitation of Spenser” there
are one or two examples:

      Such is sweet Eloquence that does dispel
    Envy and Hate that thirst for human gore,

whilst others are clearly Elizabethan reminiscences, like

    Mournful lean Despair
    Brings me yew to deck my grave,

or

    Memory, hither come
    And tune your merry notes.

“The Island in the Moon” furnishes grotesque instances, such as that
of old Corruption dressed in yellow vest. In “The Divine Image,” from
the “Songs of Innocence,” while commonplace virtues are personified,
the simple direct manner of the process distinguishes them from their
prototypes in the earlier moral and didactic poetry of the century:

    For Mercy has a human heart
    Pity a human face
    And Love, the human form divine
    And Peace the human dress.[233]

An instance of personification raised to a higher power is found in
Blake’s letter to Butts[234] beginning

    With Happiness stretch’d across the hills,
    In a cloud that dewy sweetness distils,

whilst elsewhere personified abstractions appear with new epithets, the
most striking example being in “Earth’s Answer,” from the “Songs of
Experience”:

    Prison’d on watry shore
    _Starry_ Jealousy does keep my den.

Moreover, Blake’s figures are often presented in an imaginative guise
that helps to emphasize the gulf fixed between him and the majority of
his contemporaries and predecessors. Thus “Joy” is twice depicted as a
bird:

    Joys upon our branches sit
    Chirping loud and singing sweet

                                             (“Song”—“Poetical Sketches”)

and

    Welcome, stranger, to this place
    Where Joy doth sit on every bough.

                                                   (“Song by a Shepherd”)

In Blake’s youthful work the personifications of natural powers, though
in most cases clearly imitative are yet striking in their beauty and
power of suggestion. The influence of “Ossian” is seen in such “prose”
personifications as “The Veiled Evening walked solitary down the Western
hills and Silence reposed in the valley” (“The Couch of Death”), and
“Who is this that with unerring step dares to tempt the wild where only
Nature’s foot has trod, ’Tis Contemplation, daughter of the Grey Morning”
(“Contemplation”). Here also are evocations of the seasons which,
whatever they may owe to Thomson or Collins, are new in that we actually
get a picture of Spring with “dewy locks” as she looks down

    Thro’ the clear windows of the morning

of summer with

    ruddy limbs and flourishing hair,

of the “jolly autumn,”

      laden with fruits and stained
    With the blood of the grape;

and of winter,

      a dreadful monster whose skin clings
    To her strong bones.

Thomson, we have seen, had not been altogether successful in his
personification of the seasons: here they are brought vividly and
fittingly before us. When we think of the hosts of puppets that in the
guise of personified abstractions move mechanically through so much of
eighteenth century verse, and compare them with the beautiful visions
evoked by Blake, we know from this evidence alone that the reign of
one of the chief excesses of the poetical language of the time is near
its end. It is not that Blake’s conceptions are all flesh and blood
creations: often they are rather ethereal beings, having something in
common with the evanescent images of Collins. But the rich and lofty
imagination that has given them birth is more than sufficient to secure
their acceptance as realities capable of living and moving before us; the
classical abstraction, cold and lifeless, has now become the Romantic
personification clothed in beauty and animated with life and inner
meaning.

In the year of the “Poetical Sketches” (1783) George Crabbe published
“The Village,” his first work to meet with any success. But whilst Blake
gloriously announces the emancipation of English poetry, Crabbe for the
most part is still writing on in the old dead style. The heroic couplets
of his earliest works have all the rhetorical devices of his predecessors
in that measure, and amongst these the prevalence of personified
abstractions is not the least noteworthy. The subject of his first poem
of any length, “Inebriety” (1775), afforded him plenty of scope in this
direction, and he availed himself fully of the opportunity.[235] The
absence of capital letters from some of the instances in this poem may
perhaps be taken to reflect a confusion in the poet’s mind as to whether
he was indulging in personification or in mere abstraction, to adopt
Coleridge’s remark anent Gray’s use of this figure.[236]

In “The Village,” Crabbe’s first poem of any real merit, there is a
more sparing use, yet instances are even here plentiful, whilst his
employment of the device had not died out when in the early years of the
nineteenth century he resumed his literary activities. Among the poems
published in the 1807 volume there is a stiff and cumbrous allegory
entitled “The Birth of Flattery,” which, introduced by three Spenserian
stanzas, depicts Flattery as the child of Poverty and Cunning, attended
by guardian satellites, “Care,” “Torture,” “Misery,” _et hoc omne genus_.
They linger on to the time of the “Posthumous Tales,” where there is a
sad, slow procession of them, almost, we might imagine, as if they were
conscious of the doom pronounced years before, and of the fact that they
were strangers in a strange land:

    Yet Resignation in the house is seen
    Subdued Affliction, Piety serene,
    And Hope, for ever striving to instil
    The balm for grief, “It is the heavenly will.”

                                                       (XVIII, 299 foll.)

It is not perhaps too fanciful to see in this lament a palinode of the
personifications themselves, sadly resigning themselves to an inevitable
fate.

Towards the ultimate triumph of the new poetry the work of William Cowper
represents perhaps the most important contribution, judging at least from
the viewpoint both of its significance as indicating new tendencies in
literature, and of its immediate influence on readers and writers. In
the narrow sense of style the “simplicity” which was Cowper’s ideal was
only occasionally marred by the conventional phraseology and bombastic
diction which he himself laid to the charge of the “classical” school,
and his gradual emancipation from the tenets and practices of that school
is reflected in his steady advance towards the purity of expression for
which he craved. And in this advance it is to be noted that the gradual
disappearance of personified abstractions is one of the minor landmarks.

The earlier work furnishes instances of the common type of mere
abstraction where there is no attempt to give any real personification.
Even in the “Olney Hymns” (1779) such verses as

    But unbelief, self-will
      Self-righteousness and pride,
    How often do they steal
      My weapon from my side

only seem to present the old mechanical figures in a new setting.[237]
The long series of satiric poems that followed draw freely upon the same
“mythology,” and indeed the satires that appear in this 1782 volume
recall to some extent the style of Churchill.[238] There is a somewhat
similar, though more restricted, use of personified abstraction, and, as
in Churchill’s satires, virtues and vices are invested with slight human
qualities and utilized to enforce moral and didactic truths. Thus,

      Peace follows Virtue as its sure reward
    And Pleasure brings as surely in her train
    Remorse and Sorrow and Vindictive Pain.

                                                    (“Progress of Error”)

Among the short pieces in this volume are the famous lines put into
the mouth of Alexander Selkirk, which contain a fine example of the
apostrophic personification, the oft-quoted

    O Solitude! where are thy charms
    That sages have seen in thy face,

where the passion and sincerity of the appeal give dignity and animation
to an otherwise lifeless abstraction, and, despite the absence of detail,
really call up a definite picture.

From the blank verse of his most famous work nearly every trace of the
mechanical abstraction has disappeared—a great advance when we remember
that “The Task” is in the direct line of the moral and didactic verse
that had occupied so many of Cowper’s predecessors.

The first Books (“The Sofa”) contain but one instance and that in a
playful manner:

    Ingenious Fancy, never better pleased
    Than when employed to accommodate the fair.

                                                           (ll. 72 foll.)

The Fourth Book (“The Winter Evening”) is entirely free from instances of
the mechanical abstraction, but the vision of Oriental Empire, and the
fascination of the East, is effectively evoked in the personification of
the land of the Moguls:

    Is India free? and does she wear her plumed
      And jewelled turban with a smile of peace.

                                                               (ll. 28-9)

“The Task,” however, has two examples of the detailed personification.
The first is an attempt, in the manner of Spenser, to give a full length
portrait of “a sage called Discipline”:

    His eye was meek and gentle and a smile
    Played on his lips, and in his speech was heard
    Paternal sweetness

                                                   (Bk. II, l. 702 foll.)

where there is a depth of feeling, as well as a gentle satiric touch in
the delineation, that animate it into something more than a mere stock
image; it embodies perhaps a reminiscence of one who at some time or
other had guided the destinies of the youthful Cowper.

The second instance is of a more imaginative kind. It is the
presentation, in the Fourth Book, of Winter, with

          forehead wrapt in cloud
    A leafless branch thy sceptre,

almost the only occasion on which Cowper, despite the nature of his
subject, has personified the powers and orders of nature.[239] Cowper
has also invested the Evening with human attributes, and despite the
imitative ring of the lines,[240] and the “quaintness” of the images
employed, there is a new beauty in the evocation:

    Come, Evening, once again, season of peace;
    Return, sweet Evening, and continue long!
    Methinks I see thee in the streaky west
    With matron step slow-moving, while the night
    Treads on thy sweeping train.

The darkness soon to fall over the landscape is suggested in the added
appeal to Evening to come

      Not sumptuously adorned, nor needing aid
    Like homely-featured Night, of clustering gems,

where the compound epithet emphasizes the contrast between the quiet
beauty of the twilight skyscape and the star-sprinkled gloom of the night.

Finally, one of the last instances of the personified abstraction to be
found in the work of Cowper may perhaps be taken to reflect something of
the changes that have been silently working underneath. This is in the
lines that suddenly bring “Yardley Oak” to an end:

          History not wanted yet
    Leaned on her elbow watching Time whose course
    Eventful should supply her with a theme.

At first glance we seem to have here but the old conventional figures,
but there is an imaginative touch that helps to suggest a new world of
romance. “History leaning on her elbow” has something at least of that
mysterious power of suggestion that Wordsworth himself was to convey by
means of the romantic personification, such as those shadowy figures—Fear
and Trembling Hope, and Death the Skeleton, and Time the Shadow—which
gathered round and hallowed the shade of the yew trees in Borrowdale.

But even while the old poetry was in its death agony a champion was at
hand, daring to maintain a lost cause both by precept and example. This
was Erasmus Darwin, whose once-famous work “The Botanic Garden,” with
its two parts, “The Loves of the Plants” (1789), and “The Economy of
Vegetation” (1791), has earlier been mentioned.

It met with immediate success. Darwin seems to have fascinated his
contemporaries, so that even Coleridge was constrained in 1802 to call
him “the first literary character in Europe.”[241] He had, however,
little real admiration for “The Botanic Garden,” and later expressed
his opinion unmistakably.[242] “The Botanic Garden” soon died a natural
death, hastened no doubt by the ridicule it excited, but inevitably
because of the fact that the poem is an unconscious _reductio ad
absurdum_ of a style already doomed.[243] The special matter with which
we are concerned in this chapter had for Darwin a marked significance,
since it fitted in admirably with his general doctrine or dogma that
nothing is strictly poetic except what is presented in visual image. His
“theory” was that, just as the old mythologies had created a whole world
of personified abstractions to explain or interpret natural phenomena
of every description, exactly by the same method the scientific thought
and developments of his own age could be poetically expounded so as
to captivate both the hearts and minds of his readers. It was his
ambition, he said, “to enlist imagination under the banner of science.”
This “theory” is expounded in one of the interludes placed between the
different cantos. “The poet writes principally to the eye,” and allegory
and personifications are to be commended because they give visible
form to abstract conceptions.[244] Putting his theory into practice,
Darwin then proceeds with great zeal to personify the varied and various
scientific facts or hypotheses of physics, botany, etc., metamorphosing
the forces of the air and other elements into sylphs and gnomes and so
on. Thus,

    Soon shall thy arm, Unconquered
            Steam afar
    Drag the slow barge or drive the
            Rapid car.

                                                (E.V., Canto I, 289, 290)

In the same way all the plants, as classified by Linnæus, are personified
as “swains” or “belles” who “love” and quarrel, and finally make it up
just as ordinary mortals do:

    All wan and shivering in the leafless glade
    The sad Anemone reclin’d her head

                                                   (L.P., Canto I, 315-6)

or

    Retiring Lichen climbs the topmost stone
    And drinks the aerial solitude alone.

                                                         (_Ibid._, 347-8)

The whole poem is thus one long series of mechanical personifications
which baffle and bewilder and finally wear out the reader. It is strange
now to think that “The Botanic Garden” was at the height of its vogue
when the “Lyrical Ballads” were being planned and written, but the
easy-flowing couplets of Darwin, and the “tinsel and glitter” of his
diction, together with most of the “science” he was at such pains to
expound (though he was a shrewd and even prophetic inquirer in certain
branches, such as medicine and biology), have now little more than a
faint historical interest. Yet his theory and practice of poetry—the
“painted mists that occasionally rise from the marshes at the foot of
Parnassus,” Coleridge called them—so dominated the literature of the last
decade of the eighteenth century as to be capable of captivating the mind
of the poet who was about to sound their death-knell.

While Wordsworth inveighed against “personification” in the great
manifesto, his earliest poetry shows clearly, as has been noted, that in
this as in other respects he had fallen under the spell and influence of
“The Botanic Garden.” The “Evening Walk” and the “Descriptive Sketches”
swarm with instances of personifications of the type that had flourished
apace for a hundred years, “Impatience,” “Pain,” “Independence,” “Hope,”
“Oppression,” and dozens similar.[245] There is thus a certain comic
irony in the fact that the poet, who was the first to sound the revolt
against “personifications” and similar “heightenings” of style, should
have embarked on his literary career with the theft of a good deal of
the thunder of the enemy. Later, when Wordsworth’s true ideal of style
had evolved itself, this feature of the two poems was in great measure
discarded. The first (1793) draft of the “Descriptive Sketches” contains
over seventy examples of more or less frigid abstractions; in the final
draft of the poem these have dwindled down to about a score.[246]

In our detailed examination of personification in eighteenth century
poetry we have seen that in general it includes three main types. There
is first the mere abstraction, whose distinctive sign is the presence
of a capital letter; it may be, and often is, qualified by epithets
suggestive of human attributes, but there is little or no attempt to give
a definite picture or evoke a distinctive image. This is the prevalent
type, and it is against these invertebrates that the criticism of
Wordsworth and Coleridge was really directed.

Their widespread use in the eighteenth century is due to various causes.
In the first place they represent a survival, however artificial and
lifeless, of the great mediaeval world of allegory, with its symbolic
representation derived from the pagan and classical mythologies, of
the attributes of the divine nature, and of the qualities of the human
mind, as living entities. But by now the life had departed from them;
they were hopelessly effete and had become consciously conventional and
fictitious.[247]

They also owed their appearance, as indicated above, to more definite
literary causes and “fashions”; they swarm especially, for instance, in
the odes of the mid-century, the appearance of which was mainly due to
the influence of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” The virtues and vices,
the “shadowy tribes of the mind,” which are there unceasingly invoked
and dismissed are mechanical imitations of the figures that the genius
of Milton had been able to inspire with real poetic value and life. They
play their part similarly and just as mechanically in the didactic and
satirical verse characteristic of the period.

But whether regarded as a sort of literary flotsam and jetsam, or as one
of the symptoms of “Milton-mad” verse, these personifications are nearly
all enfeebled by weaknesses inherent in their very genesis. Only a deep
and intense conception of a mental abstraction can justify any attempt
to personify it poetically; otherwise the inevitable result is a mere
rhetorical ornament, which fails because it conveys neither the “vast
vagueness” of the abstract, nor any clear-cut pictorial conception of the
person. Even with Gray, as with the mere poetasters who used this figure
to excess, it has the effect of a dull and wearisome mannerism; only
here and there, as in the sonorous lines in which Johnson personified
Worth held down by Poverty, does the display of personal emotion give any
dignity and depth to the image.

Again, the very freedom with which the conventional abstractions are
employed, allowing them to be introduced on every possible occasion,
tends to render the device absurd, if not ludicrous. For the versifiers
seemed to have at their beck and call a whole phantom army upon which
they could draw whenever they chose; for them they are veritable gods
from the machines. But so mechanical are their entrances and exits
that the reader rarely suspects them to be intended for “flesh and
blood creations,” though, it may be added, the poetaster himself
would be slow to make any such claim. To him they are merely part of
his stock-in-trade, like the old extravagances, the “conceits,” and
far-fetched similes of the Metaphysical school.

The second type of personification found in eighteenth century verse
needs but brief mention here. It is the detailed personification where
a full-length portrait is attempted. Like the mere abstraction it, too,
is a survival of mediaeval allegory, and it is also most often a merely
mechanical literary process, reflecting no real image in the poet’s mind.
It is not found to any large extent, and in a certain measure owes its
presence to the renewed interest in Spenser. The Spenserian imitations
themselves are comparatively free from this type, a sort of negative
indication of the part played by the revival in the new Romantic movement.

The third type is perhaps best described as the embryonic
personification. It consists in the attributing of an individual and
living existence to the visible forms and invisible powers of nature, a
disposition, deeply implanted in the human mind from the very dawn of
existence, which has left in the mythologies and creeds of the world a
permanent impress of its power. In eighteenth century literature this
type received its first true expression in the work of Thompson and
Collins, whilst its progress, until it becomes merged and fused in the
pantheism of Wordsworth and Shelley, may be taken as a measure of the
advance of the Romantic movement in one of its most vital aspects.

Regarded on its purely formal side, that is, as part and parcel of the
_language_ of poetry, the use of personification may then be naturally
linked up with the generally literary development of the period. In the
“classical” verse proper the figure employed is, as it were, a mere word
and no more; it is the reflex of precisely as much individual imagination
as the stock phrases of descriptive verse, _the flowery meads_, _painted
birds_, and so on. There was no writing with the inner eye on the
object, and the abstraction as a result was a mere rhetorical label,
corresponding to no real vision of things.

The broad line of advance in this, as in other aspects of eighteenth
century literature, passes through the work of those who are now looked
upon as the forerunners of the Romantic revolt. The frigid abstraction,
a mere word distinguished by a capital letter, is to be found in “The
Seasons,” but alongside there is also an approach to definite pictorial
representation of the object personified. In the odes of Collins the
advent of the pictorial image is definitely and triumphantly announced,
and though the mechanical abstractions linger on even until the new
poetry has well established itself, they are only to be found in the
work of those who either, like Johnson and Crabbe, belong definitely as
regards style to the old order, or like Goldsmith and, to a less extent,
Cowper, reflect as it were sort of half-way attitude towards the old and
the new.

With Blake the supremacy of the artistic personification is assured. His
mystical philosophy in its widest aspect leads him to an identification
of the divine nature with the human, but sometimes this signification
is to be seen merging into a more conscious symbolism, or even sinking
into that “totally distinct and inferior kind of poetry” known as
allegory. Yet with Blake the poet, as well as Blake the artist, the
use of personified abstraction is an integral part of the symbolism he
desired to perpetuate. His imagination ran strongly in that direction,
and it has been aptly pointed out that his most intense mental and
emotional experiences became for him spiritual persons. But even where
the presence of a capital letter is still the only distinguishing mark
of the personification, he is able, either by the mere context or by
the addition of a suggestive epithet, to transform and transfigure the
abstraction into a poetical emblem of the doctrine whose apostle he
believed himself to be.

It is hardly necessary to say that the use of personification and
abstraction, even in their narrower applications as rhetorical ornaments
or artifices of verse, were not banished from English poetry as a result
of Wordsworth’s criticism. Ruskin has drawn a penetrating distinction
between personification and symbolism,[248] and it was in this direction
perhaps that Wordsworth’s protest may be said to have been of the
highest value. His successors, for the most part, distrustful of mere
abstractions, and impatient of allegory, with its attendant dangers of
lifeless and mechanical personification, were not slow to recognize
the inherent possibilities of symbolism as an artistic medium for the
expression of individual moods and emotions, and it is not too much to
say that in its successful employment English poetry has since won some
of its greatest triumphs.



CHAPTER VIII

THE DICTION OF POETRY


After years of comparative neglect, and, it must be admitted, a good
deal of uncritical disparagement, the “age of prose and reason” would
seem at last to have come into its own. Or at any rate during recent
years there has become evident a disposition to look more kindly on a
period which has but seldom had justice done to it. The label which
Matthew Arnold’s dictum attached to a good portion, if not the whole,
of the eighteenth century seems to imply a period of arid and prosaic
rationalism in which “the shaping spirit of imagination” had no abiding
place, and this has no doubt been partly responsible for the persistency
of an unjust conception. But it is now more generally recognized that,
in prose and even in poetry, the seventy or eighty years, which begin
when Dryden died, and end when William Blake was probably writing down
the first drafts of his “Poetical Sketches,” had some definite and far
from despicable legacies to pass on to its successors, to the writers in
whom the Romantic revival was soon to be triumphantly manifested. The
standards in all branches of literature were to be different, but between
“classical” and “romantic” there was not to be, and indeed could not be,
any great gulf fixed. There was continuity and much was handed on. What
had to be transformed (and of course the process is to be seen at work in
the very height of the Augustan supremacy) were the aims and methods of
literature, both its matter in large measure, and its style.[249]

It is the poetry of the period with which we are specially concerned,
and it is in poetry that the distinction between the old order and the
new was to be sharpest; for the leaders of the revolt had been gradually
winning new fields, or re-discovering old ones, for poetry, and thus in
more than one sense the way had been prepared for both the theory and
practice of Wordsworth. Then came the great manifestoes, beginning with
the Preface of 1798, followed by an expansion in 1800 and again in 1802;
fifteen years later, Coleridge, with his penetrating analysis of the
theories advanced by his friend and fellow-worker, began a controversy,
which still to-day forms a fruitful theme of discussion.

Wordsworth, in launching his famous declaration of principle on the
language fit and proper for metrical composition, had no doubt especially
in mind the practice of his eighteenth century predecessors. But it has
to be remembered that the _Prefaces_ deal in reality with the whole
genesis of “what is usually called poetic diction,” and that the avowed
aim and object was to sweep away “a large portion of phrases and figures
of speech, which from father to son have long been regarded as the common
inheritance of poets.” The circumstances of the time, and perhaps the
examples chosen by Wordsworth to illustrate his thesis, have too often
led to his attack being considered as concerned almost entirely with the
poetical language of the eighteenth century. Hence, whenever the phrase
“poetic diction” is mentioned as a term of English literary history,
more often than not it is to the eighteenth century that the attention
is directed, and the phrase itself has taken on a derogatory tinge,
expressive of a stereotyped language, imitative, mechanical, lifeless.
For in the reaction against eighteenth century styles, and especially
against the polished heroic couplet, there arose a tendency to make the
diction of the period an object of undistinguishing depreciation, to
class it all in one category, as a collection of conventional words and
phrases of which all poets and versifiers felt themselves at liberty to
make use.

An actual analysis of eighteenth century poetry shows us that this
criticism is both deficient and misleading; it is misleading because it
neglects to take any account of that eighteenth century poetical language
which Pope, inheriting it from Dryden, brought to perfection, and which
was so admirable a vehicle for the satiric or didactic thought it had to
convey; it is deficient in that it concentrates attention mainly on one
type or variety of the language, used both by poets and poetasters, and
persists in labelling this type either as the “eighteenth century style
proper,” or, as if the phrases were synonymous, “the Pope style.”

One formula could no more suffice in itself for the poetic styles of the
eighteenth century than for those of the nineteenth century; we may say,
rather, that there are then to be distinguished at least four distinct
varieties or elements of poetical diction, in the narrow sense of the
term, though of course it is scarcely necessary to add that none of them
is found in complete isolation from the others. There is first the stock
descriptive language, the usual vehicle of expression for that large
amount of eighteenth century verse where, in the words of Taine, we can
usually find “the same diction, the same apostrophes, the same manner of
placing the epithet and rounding the period,” and “regarding which we
know beforehand with what poetic ornaments it will be adorned.”[250] In
reading this verse, with its lifeless, abstract diction, we seldom or
never feel that we have been brought into contact with the real thoughts
or feelings of living men. Its epithets are artificial, imitative,
conventional; though their glare and glitter may occasionally give
us a certain pleasure, they rarely or never make any appeal to our
sensibility. As someone has said, it is like wandering about in a land of
empty phrases. Only here and there, as, for instance, in Dyer’s “Grongar
Hill,” have the _gradus_ epithets taken on a real charm and beauty in
virtue of the spontaneity and sincerity with which the poet has been
inspired.

The received doctrine that it was due in the main to Pope’s “Homer”
is unjust; many of the characteristics of this conventional poetical
language were established long before Pope produced his translation.
They are found to an equal, if not greater, extent in Dryden, and if
it is necessary to establish a fountain-head, “Paradise Lost” will be
found to contain most of the words and phrases which the eighteenth
century versifiers worked to death. If Pope is guilty in any degree it
is only because in his work the heroic couplet was brought to a high
pitch of perfection; no doubt too the immense popularity of the “Homer”
translation led to servile imitation of many of its words, phrases, and
similes. Yet it is unjust to saddle Pope with the lack of original genius
of so many of his successors and imitators.

But the underlying cause of this conventional language must be sought
elsewhere than in the mere imitation of any poet or poets. A passage
from the “Prelude” supplies perhaps a clue to one of the fundamental
conditions that had enslaved poetry in the shackles of a stereotyped
language. It takes the form of a sort of literary confession by
Wordsworth as to the method of composing his first poems, which, we have
seen, are almost an epitome of the poetical vices against which his
manifestoes rebelled. He speaks of

                        the trade in classic niceties
    The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
    From languages that want the living voice
    To carry meaning to the natural heart.

                                         (“Prelude,” Bk. VI, ll. 109-112)

In these lines we have summed up one of the main Romantic indictments
against the practice of the “classical” poets, who were too wont to
regard the language of poetry as a mere collection or accepted aggregate
of words, phrases, and similes, empty of all personal feeling and
emotion.[251]

Wordsworth, too, in this passage not unfairly describes the sort of
atmosphere in which diction of the stock eighteenth century type
flourished. The neo-classical interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine
of poetry as an imitation had by the time of Pope and his school resulted
in a real critical confusion, which saw the essence of poetry in a
slavish adherence to accepted models, and regarded its ideal language as
choice flowers and figures of speech consecrated to poetry by traditional
use, and used by the poet very much as the painter uses his colours, that
is, as pigments laid on from the outside. That this doctrine of imitation
and parallelism directly encourages the growth of a set poetic diction
is obvious; the poet’s language need not be the reflection of a genuine
emotion felt in the mind: he could always find his words, phrases, and
figures of speech in accepted and consecrated models.

The reaction against this artificial diction is fundamental in the
Romantic revolt from another cause than that of poetic form. The stock
poetic language, we have seen, occurs mainly in what may be called the
“nature” poetry of the period, and its set words and phrases are for
the most part descriptive terms of outdoor sights and sounds. Among the
many descriptions or explanations of the Romantic movement is that it
was in its essence a “return to Nature,” which is sometimes taken to
imply that “Nature,” as we in the twentieth century think of it, was a
sudden new vision, of which glimpses were first caught by James Thomson,
and which finally culminated in Wordsworth’s “confession of faith.” Yet
there was, of course, plenty of “nature poetry” in the neo-classical
period; but it was for the most part nature from the point of view of the
Town, or as seen from the study window with a poetical “Thesaurus” at
the writer’s side, or stored in his memory as a result of his reading.
It was not written with “the eye on the object.” More fatal still, if
the neo-classical poets did look, they could see little beauty in the
external world; they “had lost the best of the senses; they had ceased to
perceive with joy and interpret with insight the colour and outline of
things, the cadence of sound and motion, the life of creatures.”[252]

This sterility or atrophy of the senses had thus a real connexion with
the question of a conventional poetical language, for the descriptive
diction with its stock words for the sea, the rivers, the mountains, the
sky, the stars, the birds of the air and their music, for all the varied
sights and sounds of outdoor life—all this is simply a reflex of the lack
of genuine feeling towards external nature. Keats, with his ecstatic
delight in Nature, quickly and aptly pilloried this fatal weakness in
the eighteenth century versifiers:

    The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’d
    Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue
    Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
    Of summer nights collected still to make
    The morning precious: beauty was awake!
    Why were ye not awake! But ye were dead
    To things ye knew not of—were closely wed
    To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
    And compass vile: so that ye taught a school
    Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip and fit
    Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit,
    Their verses tallied; Easy was the task
    A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
    Of Poesy.[253]

It is obvious that two great changes or advances were necessary, if
poetry was to be freed from the bondage of this conventional diction. In
the first place, the poet must reject root and branch the traditional
stock of words and phrases that may once have been inspiring, but had
become lifeless and mechanical long before they fell into disuse; he
must write with his eye on the object, and translate his impressions
into fresh terms endowed with real, imaginative power. And this first
condition would naturally lead to a second, requiring every word and
phrase to be a spontaneous reflection of genuine feeling felt in the
presence of Nature and her vast powers.

The neo-classical poetry proper was not without verse which partly
satisfied these conditions; direct contact with nature was never entirely
lost. Wordsworth, as we know, gave honourable mention[254] to “The
Nocturnal Reverie” of Anne, Countess Winchilsea, written at the very
height of the neo-classical supremacy, in which external nature is
described with simplicity and fidelity, though there is little trace
of any emotion roused in the writer’s mind by the sights and sounds
of outdoor life. And every now and then, amid the arid and monotonous
stretches of so much eighteenth century verse, we are startled into
lively interest by stumbling across, often in the most obscure and
unexpected corners, a phrase or a verse to remind us that Nature, and
all that the term implies, was still making its powerful appeal to the
hearts and minds of men, that its beauty and mystery was still being
expressed in simple and heartfelt language. Thomas Dyer’s “Grongar Hill”
has already been mentioned; it was written in 1726, the year of the
publication of Thompson’s “Winter.” Dyer, for all we know, may have the
priority, but in any case we see him here leading back poetry to the
sights and sounds and scents of external nature, which he describes, not
merely as a painter with a good eye for landscape, but as a lover who
feels the thrill and call of the countryside, and can give exquisite
expression to his thoughts and emotions. We have only to recall such
passages as

    Who, the purple evening lie,
    On the mountain’s lonely van;

or even his tree catalogue,

    The gloomy pine, the poplar blue,
    The yellow beech, the sable yew,
    The slender fir, that taper grows,
    The sturdy oak with broad-spread boughs;

or

    How close and small the hedges lie;
    What streaks of meadow cross the eye!

or

    A little rule, a little sway,
    A sun-beam on a winter’s day,
    Is all the proud and mighty have
    Between the cradle and the grave—

to recognize that already the supremacy of Pope and his school of town
poets is seriously threatened.

Here too is a short passage which might not unfairly be assigned to
Wordsworth himself.

    Would I again were with you, O ye dales
    Of Tyne, and ye most ancient woodlands, where,
    Oft as the giant flood obliquely strides
    And his banks open, and his lawns extend,
    Stops short the pleased traveller to view,
    Presiding o’er the scene, some rustic tower
    Founded by Norman or by Saxon hands:
    O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook
    The rocky pavement and the mossy falls
    Of solitary Wensbeck’s limpid stream,
    How gladly I recall your well-known seats
    Beloved of old, and that delightful time
    When all alone, for many a summer’s day,
    I wandered through your calm recesses, led
    In silence by some powerful hand unseen.

It is from Mark Akenside’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” (Bk IV, ll. 31
foll.). And so, too, is this:

            the meadow’s fragrant hedge,
    In spring time when the woodlands first are green

                                                         (Book II, 175-6)

which takes us far away from the formal conventional landscapes of the
Augustans.

These two are among the more famous of their time, but a close search
amongst the minor poetry of the mid-eighteenth century will bring to
light many a surprising instance of poetry written with an eye on the
object, as in John Cunningham’s (1729-1773) “Day,”[255] where the sights
and sounds of the countryside are simply and freshly brought before us:

    Swiftly from the mountain’s brow,
        Shadows, nurs’d by night, retire:
    And the peeping sun-beam, now,
        Paints with gold the village spire.

    Philomel forsakes the thorn,
        Plaintive where she prates at night;
    And the Lark, to meet the morn,
        Soars beyond the shepherd’s sight.

    From the low-roof’d cottage ridge,
        See the chatt’ring Swallow spring;
    Darting through the one-arch’d bridge,
        Quick she dips her dappled wing.

But the great bulk of neo-classical verse is unaffected by the regained
and quickened outlook on the external world. It is in the forerunners of
the Romantic revolt that this latter development is to be most plainly
noted: when, as the result of many and varied causes English poets
were inspired to use their eyes again, they were able, slowly and in a
somewhat shallow manner at first, afterwards quickly and profoundly,
to “sense” the beauty of the external world, its mysterious emanations
of power and beauty. This quickening and final triumph of the artistic
sense naturally revealed itself in expression; the conventional words
and epithets were really doomed from the time of “Grongar Hill” and
“The Seasons,” and a new language was gradually forged to express the
fresh, vivid perceptions peculiar to each poet, according as his senses
interpreted for him the face of the world.

A second variety of eighteenth century diction, or, more strictly
speaking, another conventional embellishment of the poetry of the period,
is found in that widespread use of personified abstraction which is
undoubtedly one of the greatest, perhaps _the_ greatest, of its faults.
Not only the mere versifiers, but also many of its greatest poets, make
abundant use of cut and dried personifications, whose sole claim to
vitality rests most often on the presence of a capital letter. It is a
favourite indulgence of the writers, not only of the old order, but
also of those who, like Collins and Gray, announce the advent of the
new, and not even the presence of genius could prevent its becoming a
poetical abuse of the worst kind. Whether it be regarded as a survival
of a symbolic system from which the life had long since departed, or
as a conventional device arising from the theory of poetical ornament
handed down by the neo-classicists, its main effect was to turn a large
proportion of eighteenth century poetry into mere rhetorical verse. It is
this variety of poetical language that might with justice be labelled as
the eighteenth century style in the derogatory sense of the term. In its
cumulative effect on the poetry of the period it is perhaps more vicious
than the stock diction which is the usual target of criticism.

Two other varieties of eighteenth century diction represent an endeavour
to replace, or rather reinforce the stereotyped words, phrases, and
similes by new forms. The first of these is the widespread use of
latinized words and constructions, chiefly in the blank verse poems
written in imitation of Milton, but not only there. The second is the use
of archaic and pseudo-archaic words by the writers whose ambition it was
to catch something of the music and melody of the Spenserian stanza. Both
these movements thus reflected the desire for a change, and though the
tendencies, which they reflect, are in a certain sense conventional and
imitative in that they simply seek to replace the accepted diction by new
forms derived respectively from Milton and Spenser, one of them at least
had in the sequel a real and revivifying influence on the language of
poetry.

The pedantic and cumbrous terms, which swarm in the majority of the
Miltonic imitations, were artificial creations, rarely imbued with any
trace of poetic power. Where they do not actually arise from deliberate
attempts to imitate the high Miltonic manner, they probably owe their
appearance to more or less conscious efforts to make the new blank verse
as attractive as possible to a generation of readers accustomed to the
polished smoothness of the couplet. Though such terms linger on until
the time of Cowper, and even invade the works of Wordsworth himself,
romanticism utterly rejected them, not only because of a prejudice in
favour of “Saxon simplicity,” but also because such artificial formations
lacked almost completely that mysterious power of suggestion and
association in which lies the poetical appeal of words. Wordsworth, it is
true, could win from them real poetic effects, and so occasionally could
Thomson, but in the main they are even more dead and dreary than the old
abstract diction of the neo-classicals.

The tendency towards archaism was much more successful in this respect,
because it was based on a firmer foundation. In harking back to “the
poet’s poet,” the eighteenth century versifiers were at least on a right
track, and though it was hardly possible, even with the best of them,
that more than a faint simulacrum of the music and melody of the “Faerie
Queene” could be captured merely by drawing drafts on Spenser’s diction,
yet they at least helped to blaze a way for the great men who were to
come later. The old unknown writers of the ballads and Spenser and the
Elizabethans generally were to be looked upon as treasure trove to which
Keats and Scott and Beddoes and many another were constantly to turn in
their efforts to revivify the language of poetry, to restore to it what
it had lost of freshness and vigour and colour.

The varieties or embellishments of poetical diction, which have just
been characterized, represent the special language of eighteenth
century poetry, as distinct from that large portion of language which
is common alike to prose and poetry. For it is scarcely necessary
to remind ourselves that by far the largest portion of the poetry of
the eighteenth century (as indeed of any century) is written in the
latter sort of language, which depends for its effects mainly upon the
arrangement of the words, rather than for any unique power in the words
themselves. In this kind of poetical diction, it is not too much to say
that the eighteenth century is pre-eminent, though the effect of the
Wordsworthian criticism has led to a certain failure or indisposition to
recognize the fact. Just as Johnson and his contemporaries do not give
direct expression to any approval of the admirable language, of which
Pope and some of his predecessors had such perfect command, so modern
criticism has not always been willing to grant it even bare justice,
though Coleridge’s penetrating insight had enabled him, as we have seen,
to pay his tribute to “the almost faultless position and choice of words,
in Mr. Pope’s _original_ compositions, particularly in his Satires and
Moral Essays.” It was, we may imagine, the ordinary everyday language,
heightened by brilliance and point, in which Pope and his coterie carried
on their dallyings and bickerings at Twickenham and elsewhere, and it was
an ideal vehicle, lucid and precise for the argument and declamation it
had to sustain. But it was more than that, as will be readily recognized
if we care to recall some of the oft-quoted lines which amply prove
with what consummate skill Pope, despite the economy and condensation
imposed by the requirements of the closed couplet, could evoke from this
plain and unadorned diction effects of imagination and sometimes even of
passion. Such lines as

    He stooped to Truth and moralised his song,

or

    In lazy apathy let stoics boast
    Their virtue fixed: ’tis fixed as in a frost,

or

    In Folly’s cup still laughs the bubble joy,

and dozens similar, show the lucidity, energy, and imaginative
picturesqueness with which Pope could endow his diction when the occasion
required it.[256] Such language is the “real language of men”; nearly
every word would satisfy the Wordsworthian canon.

And the same thing is true to a large extent of the poets, who are
usually considered as having taken Pope for their model. Whenever there
is a real concentration of interest, whenever they are dealing with the
didactic and moral questions characteristic of the “age of prose and
reason,” whenever they are writing of man and of his doings, his thoughts
and moods as a social member of civilized society, their language is,
as a rule, adequate, vivid, fresh, because the aim then is to present a
general thought in the language best adapted to bring it forcibly before
the mind of the reader. Here, as has been justly said,[257] rhetoric
has passed under the influence and received the transforming force of
poetry. “The best rhetorical poetry of the eighteenth century is not the
best poetry, but it is poetry in its own way, exhibiting the glow, the
rush, the passion which strict prose cannot, and which poetry can, give.”
Judged on the basis of this kind of poetical diction, the distinctions
usually drawn between the neo-classical “kind” of language in the
eighteenth century and the romantic “kind” all tend to disappear; at the
head (though perhaps we should go back to the Dryden of the “Religio
Laici” and “The Hind and the Panther”) is the “Essay on Criticism”;
in the direct line of descent are Akenside’s “Epistle to Curio,” large
portions of “The Seasons,” “The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,”
“The Vanity of Human Wishes,” the “Deserted Village,” and at the end of
the century, the “Village” of Crabbe. And in another _genre_, but just
as good in its own way, is that light verse, as it may perhaps best be
called, successfully ushered in, at the very beginning of the century, by
John Pomfret’s “The Choice,” and brought to perfection by Matthew Prior
in his lines “To a Child of Quality,” and many another piece.

Nor must it be forgotten that there is a large amount of eighteenth
century minor poetry which, whilst reflecting in the main the literary
tendency of the age in its fondness for didactic verse, presented in
the guise of interminably long and dull epics and epistles, yet reveals
to us, if we care to make the pilgrimage through the arid stretches of
Anderson’s “British Poets,” or Dodsley’s “Collection of Poets by Several
Hands,” or Bell’s “Fugitive Poetry,” or similar collections, the simple,
unambitious works of poets more or less unknown when they wrote and
now for the most part forgotten, who, unconscious or ignorant of the
accepted rules and regulations of their time, wrote because they felt
they must, and thus had no care to fetter themselves with the bondage of
the “classical” diction.[258] Their range was limited, but they were able
to express their thoughts and fancies, their little idylls and landscapes
in plain English without any trimmings, akin in its unaffected diction
and simplicity of syntax to the language of the genuine old ballads,
which were so largely and, for the most part, ineffectively, if not
ludicrously, imitated throughout the eighteenth century.

The Augustan age, then, was not without honour, even in poetry, where,
looking back after Romanticism had won and consolidated its greatest
triumphs, it would seem everything had gone wrong, there was not a little
from which the rebels themselves might well have profited. Nowadays we
are accustomed, perhaps too often, to think of the Romantic forerunners,
the poet of “The Seasons,” and Gray, and Collins, and Goldsmith, and the
rest, as lonely isolated outposts in hostile territory. So they were to
a large extent, but they could not, of course, altogether escape the
form and pressure of their age; and what we now admire in them, and
for which we salute them as the heralds of the Romantic dawn, is that
which shows them struggling to set themselves free from the “classical”
toils, and striving to give expression to the new ideas and ideals that
were ultimately to surge and sing themselves to victory. It is scarcely
necessary to recall many a well-known passage, in which, within a decade
of the death of Pope, or even before the mid-century, these new ideas
and ideals had found expression in language which really sounded the
death-knell of the old diction. Fine sounds, Keats within a few decades
was to proclaim exultantly, were then to be heard “floating wild about
the earth,” but already as early as Collins and Gray, and even now and
then in “The Seasons,” words of infinite appeal and suggestiveness were
stealing back into English poetry.

And this leads us to a consideration of the poetic diction of the
eighteenth century from a more general standpoint. For no discussion of
poetical language can be complete unless an attempt is made to consider
the question in its entirety with a view to the question of what really
constitutes poetic diction, what it is that gives to words and phrases,
used by certain poets in certain contexts, a magic force and meaning. The
history of poetic diction from the very beginning of English literature
down to present times has yet to be written, and it would be a formidable
task. Perhaps a syndicate of acknowledged poets would be the only fit
tribunal to pass judgment on so vital an aspect of the craft, but even
then we suspect there would be a good deal of dissension, and probably
more than one minority report. But the general aspects of the question
have formed a fruitful field of discussion since Wordsworth launched his
theories[259] and thus began a controversy as to the exact nature of
poetic language, the echoes of which, it would seem, have not yet died
away. For the Prefaces were, it may be truly said, the first great and
definite declaration of principle concerning a question which has been
well described as “the central one in the philosophy of literature, What
is, or rather what is not, poetic diction?”[260]

Judged from this wider standpoint, the diction of the “classical” poetry
of the eighteenth century, and even of a large portion of the verse
that announces the ultimate Romantic triumph, seems to have marked
limitations. The widespread poverty and sterility of this diction was
not, of course, merely the result of an inability to draw inspiration
from Nature, or of a failure to realize the imaginative possibilities of
words and phrases: it was, it would almost seem, the inevitable outcome
and reflex of an age that, despite great and varied achievements, now
appears to us narrow and restricted in many vital aspects. If poetry
is a criticism of life, in the sense in which Matthew Arnold doubtless
meant his dictum to be taken, the age of Pope and his successors is not
“poetic”; in many respects it is a petty and tawdry age—the age of the
coffee-house and the new press, of the club and the coterie. There are
great thinkers like Hume, great historians like Gibbon, great teachers
and reformers like John Wesley; but these names and a few others seem
only to throw into stronger light the fact that it was on its average
level an age of talk rather than of thought, of “fickle fancy” rather
than of imaginative flights, of society as a unit highly organized for
the pursuit of its own pastimes, pleasures, and preoccupations, in which
poetry, and literature generally, played a social part. Poetry seems to
skim gracefully over the surface of life, lightly touching many things
in its flight, but never soaring; philosophy and science and satire all
come within its purview, but when the eternally recurring themes of
poetry[261]—love and nature and the like—are handled, there is rarely or
never poignancy or depth.

The great elemental facts and thoughts and feelings of life seldom
confront us in the literature of the century as we make our way down the
decades; even in the forerunners of the Romantic revolt we are never
really stirred. “The Seasons,” and “The Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard,” touch responsive chords, but are far from moving us to
thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls. Not until Blake and Burns is
the veneer of convention and artificiality, in both matter and manner,
definitely cast aside, and there is to be caught in English verse again,
not only the authentic singing note, but, what is more, the recognition
and exemplification of the great truth that the finest poetry most often
has its “roots deep in the common stuff,” and it is not to be looked for
in an age and environment when, with rationality apparently triumphant,
men seemed careless of the eternal verities, of the thoughts and feelings
that lie too deep for tears, or sadly recognized their impotence, or
their frustrated desires, to image them forth in poetry.

“What is it,” asks Gilbert Murray,[262] “that gives words their character
and makes a style high or low? Obviously, their associations: the
company they habitually keep in the minds of those who use them. A word
which belongs to the language of bars and billiard-saloons will become
permeated by the normal standard of mind prevalent in such places; a
word which suggests Milton or Carlyle will have the flavour of those
men’s minds about it. I therefore cannot resist the conclusion that if
the language of Greek poetry has, to those who know it intimately, this
special quality of keen austere beauty, it is because the minds of the
poets who used that language were habitually toned to a higher level both
of intensity and of nobility than ours. It is a finer language because
it expresses the mind of finer men. By ‘finer men’ I do not necessarily
mean men who behaved better, either by our standards or by their own:
I mean the men to whom the fine things of the world, sunrise and sea
and stars, and the love of man for man, and strife and the facing of
evil for the sake of good, and even common things like meat and drink,
and evil things like hate and terror had, as it were, a keener edge
than they have for us, and roused a swifter and nobler reaction.” This
passage has been quoted in full because it may be said to have a direct
and definite bearing on the question of the average level of poetic
language during the greater part of the eighteenth century: there were
few or no _trouvailles_, no great discoveries, no sudden releasings of
the magic power often lurking unsuspectedly in the most ordinary words,
because the poets and versifiers for the most part had all gone wrong
in their conception of the medium they essayed to mould. “The substance
of poetry,” writes Professor Lowes,[263] “is also the very stuff of
words. And in its larger sense as well the language of poetry is made up
inevitably of symbols—of symbols for things in terms of other things,
for things in terms of feelings, for feelings in terms of things. It is
the language not of objects, but of the complex relations of objects.
And the agency that moulds it is the ceaselessly active power that is
special to poetry only in degree—_imagination_—that fuses the familiar
and the strange, the thing I feel and the thing I see, the world within
and the world without, into a _tertium quid_, that interprets both.” The
eighteenth century was not perhaps so emphatically and entirely the “age
of prose and reason” as is sometimes thought, but it could scarcely be
called the “age of imagination,” and poetry, in its highest sense (“high
poetry,” as Maeterlinck would call it), being of imagination all compact,
found no abiding place there.

Most words, we may say, potentially possess at least two or more
significations, their connotative scope varying according to the
knowledge or culture of the speaker or reader. First of all, there is
the logical, their plain workaday use, we might call it; and next, and
above and beyond all this, they have, so to speak, an exciting force,
a power of stimulating and reviving in the mind and memory all the
associations that cluster around them. Nearly all words carry with them,
in vastly varying degrees, of course, this power of evocation, so that
even commonplace terms, words, and phrases hackneyed and worn thin by
unceasing usage, may suddenly be invested with a strange and beautiful
suggestiveness when they are pressed into the service of the highest
poetic imagination. And in the same way the æsthetic appeal of words of
great potential value is reinforced and strengthened, when in virtue of
their context, or even merely of the word or words to which they are
attached, they are afforded a unique opportunity of flashing forth and
bringing into play all the mysterious powers and associations gathered to
themselves during a long employment in prose and verse, or on the lips of
the people:

    All the charm of all the muses
        often flowering in a lonely word.

Poetry of the highest value and appeal may be, and often is, as we know
from concrete examples that flash into the mind, written in commonplace,
everyday terms, and we ask ourselves how it is done.[264] There are the
mysterious words of the dying Hamlet:

    The rest is silence,

or the line quoted by Matthew Arnold[265] as an instance when
Wordsworth’s practice is to be found illustrating his theories:

    And never lifted up a single stone,

or the wonderful lines which seem to bring with them a waking vision of
the beauty of the English countryside, radiant with the promise of Spring:

                          daffodils,
    That come before the swallow dares, and take
    The winds of March with beauty.

In these and many similar passages, which the reader will recall for
himself, it would seem that the mere juxtaposition of more or less plain
and ordinary words has led to such action and reaction between them as
to charge each with vastly increased powers of evocation and suggestion,
to which the mind of the reader, roused and stimulated, instinctively
responds.

Similarly, the satisfaction thus afforded to our æsthetic sense, or
our emotional appreciation, is often evoked by a happy conjunction of
epithet and noun placed together in a new relation, instantly recognized
as adding an unsuspected beauty to an otherwise colourless word. The
poets and versifiers of the eighteenth century were not particularly
noteworthy for their skill or inspiration in the matter of the choice of
epithet, but the genius of Blake, in this as in other respects of poetic
achievement, raised him “above the age” and led him to such felicities of
expression as in the last stanza of “The Piper”:

    And I made a _rural pen_
    And I stained the water clear,

where, as has been aptly remarked,[266] a commonplace epithet is
strangely and, apparently discordantly, joined to an equally commonplace
noun, and yet the discord, in virtue of the fact that it sets the mind
and memory working to recover or recall the faint ultimate associations
of the two terms, endows the phrase with infinite suggestiveness. In the
same way a subtle and magic effect is often produced by inversion of
epithet, when the adjective is placed after instead of before the noun,
and this again is a practice or device little favoured in the eighteenth
century; the supremacy of the stopped couplet and its mechanical
requirements were all against it.

But the eighteenth century had little of this magic power of evocation;
the secret had departed with the blind Milton, and it was not till the
Romantic ascendancy had firmly established itself, not until Keats and
Shelley and their great successors, that English poetry was once more
able so to handle and fashion and rearrange words as to win from them
their total and most intense associations. Yet contemporary criticism,
especially in France, had not failed altogether to appreciate this
potential magic of words. Diderot, for instance, speaks of the magic
power that Homer and other great poets have given to many of their
words; such words are, in his phrase, “hieroglyphic paintings,” that is,
paintings not to the eye, but to the imagination.[267] What we feel about
all the so-called classical verse of the eighteenth century, as well as
of a good deal of the earlier Romantic poetry, is that writers have not
been able to devise these subtle hieroglyphics; lack of real poetical
inspiration, or the pressure of the prosaic and unimaginative atmosphere
of their times, has led to a general poverty in the words or phrases that
evoke some object before the inner eye, or charm the ear by an unheard
melody, terms that, like the magic words of Keats, or the evanescent
imagery of Shelley, stir us both emotionally and æsthetically. The
verse of Pope and his followers is not without something of this power,
but here the effect is achieved by the skill and polish with which the
words are selected and grouped within the limits of the heroic couplet.
Crabbe had marked down, accurately enough, this lack of word-power in his
description of Dryden’s verse as “poetry in which the force of expression
and accuracy of description have neither needed nor obtained assistance
from the fancy of the writer,” and again, more briefly, as “poetry
without an atmosphere.”[268] One negative indication of this “nudity”
is the comparative poverty of eighteenth century poetry in new compound
epithets, those felicitous terms which have added to the language some of
its most poetical and pictorial phrases.

The Prefaces of Wordsworth and the kindred comments and remarks of
Coleridge were not, it is hardly necessary to say, in themselves powerful
enough to effect an instant and complete revolution in poetical theory
and practice. But it was all to the good that inspired craftsmen were at
last beginning to worry themselves about the nature and quality of the
material which they had to mould and fashion and combine into poetry;
still more important was it that they were soon to have the powerful aid
of fellow-workers like Shelley and Keats, whose practice was to reveal
the magic lurking in words and phrases, so arranged and combined as to
set them reverberating in the depths of our sensibility. And, on the
side of form at least, this is the distinctively Romantic achievement;
the æsthetic possibilities and potentialities of the whole of our
language, past and present, were entrancingly revealed and magnificently
exemplified; new and inexhaustible mines of poetical word-power were thus
opened up, and the narrow and conventional limits of the diction within
which the majority of the eighteenth century poets had “tallied” their
verses were transcended and swept away.



FOOTNOTES


[1] A brief summary, which is here utilized, is given by Spingarn,
“Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century,” I, Intro. xxxvi, foll.
(Oxford, 1908).

[2] _Vide_ Spingarn, _op. cit._, _Intro._ XXXVI-XLVIII; and also
Robertson, “Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the XVIIIth
Century” (Cambridge, 1924), an attempt “to show that the Movement which
led to the dethronement of Reason, in favour of the Imagination, chief
arbiter in poetic creation, and which culminated with Goethe and Schiller
in Germany and the Romantic Revival in England, is to be put to the
credit not of ourselves, but of Italy, who thus played again that pioneer
rôle which she had already played in the sixteenth century.”

[3] Spingarn, _op. cit._, II, p. 118.

[4] _Ibid._, II, p. 310.

[5] _Ibid._, II, p. 273.

[6] “Apology for Heroic Poetry”: “Essays of John Dryden,” ed. W. P. Ker
(1909), Vol. I, p. 190.

[7] “There appears in every part of his [Horace’s] diction, or (to
speak English) in all his expressions, a kind of noble and bold
purity.”—_Ibid._, p. 266.

[8] “Lives”: Dryden, ed. G. B. Hill (1905), Vol. I, p. 420; and cp.
Goldsmith, “Poetry Distinguished from other Writing” (Miscellaneous
Works), 1821, Vol. IV, p. 381 foll.

[9] “Letters” (To R. West), 1742, ed. Tovey (1900); Vol. II, pp. 97-8.

[10] Ker, _op. cit._, Vol. I, pp. 17-8.

[11] _Ibid._, pp. 188 foll.

[12] Ker, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 234.

[13] Edward Young, the author of “Night Thoughts,” was later to express
this tersely enough: “Words tarnished, by passing through the mouths of
the vulgar, are laid aside as inelegant and obsolete”—”Conjectures on
Original Composition,” 1759 (“English Critical Essays,” Oxford, 1922, p.
320).

[14] Pope’s Works, ed. Courthope and Elwin: “Life,” Vol. V, p. 69.

[15] That is to say, as Mr. John Drinkwater has recently put it, it
was “the common language, but raised above the common pitch, of the
coffee-houses and boudoirs.”—“Victorian Poetry,” 1923, pp. 30-32.

[16] _Vide_ Elton, “The Augustan Ages,” 1889, pp. 419 foll.

[17] Cp. “Essay on Criticism,” I, ll. 130-140.

[18] John Dennis, of course, at the beginning of the century, is to
be found pleading that “passion is the chief thing in poetry,” (“The
Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry,” 1701); but it is to be
feared that he is only, so to speak, ringing the changes on the Rules.

[19] “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting,” ed. Ker, _op. cit._, Vol. II,
p. 147.

[20] “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting,” Ker, _op cit._, Vol. II, p.
148. “_Operum Colores_ is the very word which Horace uses to signify
words and elegant expressions.” etc.

[21] Lessing’s “Laokoon,” which appeared in 1766, may in this, as in
other connexions, be regarded as the first great Romantic manifesto.
The limitations of poetry and the plastic arts were analysed, and the
fundamental conditions to which each art must adhere, if it is to
accomplish its utmost, were definitely and clearly laid down.

[22] “Polymetis” (1747), p. 311.

[23] “Biographia Literaria,” Chap. XXII.

[24] _Ibid._, Chap. IV.

[25] _Vide_ especially Babbitt, “The New Laocoon, An Essay on the
Confusion of the Arts” (1910), to which these paragraphs are indebted;
and for a valuable survey of the relations of English poetry with
painting and with music, see “English Poetry in Its Relation to Painting
and the other Arts,” by Laurence Binyon (London, 1919), especially pp.
15-19.

[26] _Vide_ “Elizabethan Critical Essays,” ed. Gregory Smith, Vol. I,
Intro. (Oxford, 1904).

[27] _Vide_, e.g., Addison, “Spectator” papers on “Paradise Lost” (No.
285, January 26, 1712).

[28] Essay, “Poetry Distinguished from other Writing” (Miscellaneous
Works, 1820, Vol. IV, pp. 408-14).

[29] _Ibid._, p. 22.

[30] “Lives,” Hill, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 420.

[31] “Lives”: Cowley; cp. “The Rambler,” No. 158.

[32] Cp. Boswell’s “Life” (1851 edition), Vol. I, p. 277: “He enlarged
very convincingly upon the excellence of rhyme over blank verse in
English poetry”; also _ibid._, Vol. II, p. 84.

[33] “Lives,” ed. Hill, _op. cit._, Vol. III, pp. 416 foll.

[34] _Ibid._, p. 341.

[35] This is of course exemplified in his own poetic practice, and it
has been held sufficient to explain the oft-debated scantiness of his
literary production. But for remarkable examples of his minuteness and
scrupulosity in the matter of poetic diction see the letter to West
referred to above; to Mason, January 13, 1758 (Tovey, _op. cit._, II, p.
12), and to Beattie, March 8, 1771 (_ibid._, II, p. 305).

[36] Cp. Courthope, “History of English Poetry,” Vol. V, pp. 218 foll.

[37] _Vide_ “Elizabethan Critical Essays,” _op. cit._, Intro., pp. LV-LX.

[38] Preface to the “Fables,” Ker, _op. cit._, Vol. II, pp. 266-67.

[39] _Vide_ Works, ed. Elwin and Courthope, Vol. II.

[40] _Vide_ “Translation of Homer,” ed. Buckley, Intro., p. 47; and cp.
“The Guardian,” No. 78, “A Receipt to make an Epic Poem.”

[41] Tovey, _op. cit._, March 8, 1771 (Vol. II, pp. 305 foll.); Beattie’s
comments are given by Tovey, _ibid._, footnotes.

[42] “Rambler,” No. 121, May 14, 1751.

[43] “Lines written in Imitation of Certain Poems Published in 1777”;
and cp. William Whitehead’s “Charge to the Poets” (1762), which may be
taken to reflect the various attitudes of the reading public towards the
“revivals.”—(“Poets of Great Britain,” 1794, Vol. XI, pp. 935-7.)

[44] Works (1820), _op. cit._, Vol. IV, p. 124.

[45] September 27, 1788 (“Letters,” 4 vols, 1806, Vol. II, p. 106).

[46] Letter to Lady Hesketh, March 22, 1790 (“Correspondence of
William Cowper—Arranged in Chronological Order by T. Wright,” 4 vols.,
1904).—Vol. III, pp. 446, foll.

[47] 1807 ed., Vol. I, pp. 21 and 24; cp. also Campbell, “The Philosophy
of Rhetoric” (London, 1776), Vol. I, pp. 410-411.

[48] “Spectator,” 285, January 26, 1712.

[49] “Homer”; ed. Buckley, Intro., 49.

[50] Spingarn, _op. cit._, II, pp. 1-51; for Hobbes “Answer,” and
Cowley’s “Preface to Poems,” see _ibid._, pp. 54-90.

[51] “Dedication of the Æneis,” Ker, _op. cit._, Vol. II, pp. 154, foll.;
cp. Addison, “Spectator,” 297, January 9, 1712.

[52] _Vide_, e.g., E. Barat, “Le Style poétique et la Révolution
Romantique” (Paris, 1904), pp. 5-35.

[53] “Lives of the Poets. Pope,” ed. Birbeck Hill, Vol. III, p. 251.

[54] _Ibid._, p. 244.

[55] January 17, 1782 (Wright, _op. cit._, Vol. II, pp. 429-30).

[56] Prose Works, ed. Grosart, Vol. II, pp. 101 foll.

[57] “Biographia Literaria,” ed. Shawcross (1907), p. 26, Note; cp. also
Southey, “Works of Cowper” (1884 edition), Vol. I, p. 313.

[58] “The Progress of Taste,” III, ll. 7-10.

[59] Wordsworth himself of course stigmatized the “hubbub of words”
which was often the only result of these eighteenth century attempts to
paraphrase passages from the Old and the New Testament “as they exist in
our common translation.”—_Vide_ Prefaces, etc., “Poetical Works,” ed.
Hutchinson (Oxford, 1916). p. 943.

[60] For a detailed description of the stock diction of English
“Classical” poetry, see especially Myra Reynolds, “Nature in English
Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth” (Chicago, 1912), to which the foregoing
remarks are indebted.

[61] “Essay on Criticism,” I, l. 350 foll.

[62] “Essay on Men and Manners” (Works, 1764), Vol. II.

[63] “History of English Prosody” (1908), Vol. II, p. 449.

[64] Bysshe, “Art of Poetry,” Third Edition (1708), Chap. I, par. 1
(quoted by Saintsbury, “Loci Critici,” 1903, p. 174).

[65] To the Rev. John Newton, December 10, 1785 (Wright, _op. cit._, Vol.
II, pp. 404-406).

[66] _Vide_ Pope’s Works, ed. Courthope and Elwin (1889), Vol. V., p. 166.

[67] Philips has large supplies of the poetical stock-in-trade. He speaks
of “honeysuckles of a _purple_ dye,” and anticipates Gray in his couplet,

    Like woodland Flowers which paint the desert glades
    And waste their sweets in unfrequented shades.

                                                   (“The Fable of Thule”)

(_Vide_ “Poets of Great Britain,” 1794, Vol. IX, 384-407.)

[68] But, as de Selincourt points out in “Poems of John Keats” (1905,
Appendix C, p. 580), it is only the excessive and unnatural use of these
adjectives that calls for censure.

[69] Especially in the case of compound epithets. Cf. Earle, “Philology
of the English Tongue,” p. 601, for examples from the works of the poets
from Shakespeare to Tennyson. For Shakespeare’s use of this form, see
Schmidt, “Shakespeare Lexicon,” Vol. II, pp. 147 foll. (2nd Ed., London
and Berlin, 1886).

[70] But compare “Milton,” by Walter Raleigh (p. 249), where it is justly
pointed out that not a few of these circuitous phrases are justified by
“considerations of dramatic propriety.”

[71] Cf. Raleigh, “Milton,” _op. cit._, pp. 252-3.

[72] “Spring,” ll. 478 foll.

[73] In “Summer,” Thomson had first used _feathery race_ which was later
amended into _tuneful race_—apparently the best improvement he could
think of!

[74] For a detailed study of Thomson’s diction, see especially Leon
Morel, “James Thomson. Sa Vie et Ses Œuvres” (Paris, 1895), Chap. IV, pp.
412 foll.

[75] To Mason, January 13, 1758 (“Letters of Gray,” ed. Tovey, Vol. II,
pp. 13-14).

[76] _Vide_ “The Poems of Chatterton, with an Essay on the Rowley Poems,”
by W. W. Skeat (1871).

[77] Canto III, 652 foll.

[78] “A Paladin of Philanthropy” (1899), p. 59 (quoted by Courthope,
“History English Poetry,” V, 216).

[79] But cf. Courthope, “History English Poetry” (1910), Vol. V, p. 218.

[80] Arthur Symons, “William Blake” (1907), p. 39.

[81] To Mrs. Butts: “Poetical Works,” ed. Sampson (Oxford, 1914), p. 187.

[82] “Biographia Literaria,” ed. Shawcross, p. 16. (Oxford, 1907.)

[83] Cf. “Letters,” to Samuel Rose, December 13, 1787: “Correspondence”
arranged by W. Wright (1904), Vol. III, p. 190. To C. Rowley, February
21, 1788, _ibid._, pp. 231 foll.

[84] E.g. Charles Wesley’s “Wrestling Jacob,” or Watts’s “When I Survey
the Wondrous Cross.”

[85] _Vide_ Courthope, _op. cit._, Book V, Ch. XI; and cp. the confident
and just claims put forward by John Wesley himself on behalf of the
language of the hymns, in his “Preface to the Collection of Hymns for the
Use of the People called Methodists,” 1780.

[86] Cf. Coleridge “Biographia Literaria,” ed. Shawcross, _op. cit._, p.
11.

[87] _Vide_ especially the dialogue with a Bookseller on the language of
poetry.

[88] In both the first and the final forms “Poetical Works,” ed.
Hutchinson (Oxford, 1916) Appendix, pp. 592 foll.

[89] For a detailed account see E. Legouis, “La Jeunesse de Wordsworth”
(English translation, 1897; Revised edition, 1921).

[90] _Vide_ “Elizabethan Critical Essays,” ed. Smith, Vol. I, Intro., pp.
lv foll.

[91] Both the Fletchers also used many other latinized forms found before
their time, and which in some cases they probably took direct from
Spenser.

[92] E.g. by Courthope, “History of English Poetry” (1910), Vol. III, p.
339, where a list is given (“only a few of the examples”) of Milton’s
“coinages” and “creations.” Of this list only some half dozen (according
to the N.E.D.) owe their first literary appearance to Milton.

[93] E.g. _debel_, _disglorified_, _conglobe_, _illaudable_, etc., date
from the sixteenth century; _Battailous_ goes back to Wycliff (N.E.D.).

[94] Cf.“Milton,” by Walter Raleigh (1915), pp. 247 foll.

[95] _Vide_ Masson, “Milton’s Poetical Works,” Vol. III, pp. 77-78
(1890-).

[96] Similarly the “Virgil” translation has, e.g., _in a round error_ for
“wandering round and round,” etc.

[97] That it could easily become absurd was not unperceived in the
eighteenth century. Vide Leonard Welsted: “Epistle to Mr. Pope,” May,
1730 (“Works in Verse and Prose,” London, 1787, p. 141).

[98] _Vide_ “Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea,” ed. Myra Reynolds,
pp. 210-213 (Chicago, 1903).

[99] _Vide_ “Complete Poetical Works,” edited J. L. Robertson (Oxford,
1908), which includes a variorum edition of “The Seasons.”

[100] “Poetical Epistle to Mr. Thomson on the First Edition of his
‘Seasons’” (P.G.B., Vol. VIII, p. 504).

[101] “Letter to Mallett,” August 11, 1726.

[102] Cp. Morel, _op. cit._, pp. 419-424.

[103] E.g. ll. 766 foll., 828 foll., 881 foll.

[104] Cp. also ll. 126 foll.; 711 foll.

[105] Cp. also the respective versions of “Autumn,” ll. 748 and 962.

[106] Cp. also “Summer,” ll. 353, 376, 648; “Autumn,” ll. 349, 894-895.

[107] Cp. “Milton,” Raleigh, _op. cit._, pp. 252-3.

[108] One of the most noteworthy is the constant employment of adjectives
as adverbs in opposition (e.g., “the grand etherial bow, Shoots up
_immense_”) a device used both by Milton and Pope, but by neither with
anything like the freedom seen in “The Seasons.”

[109] Cf. Chapter VI, _infra._

[110] In the “Essay Supplementary to the Preface,” Hutchinson, _op.
cit._, p. 949.

[111] That Young’s readers and even his editors were occasionally puzzled
is seen by the history of the term “concertion.” This was the spelling
of the first and most of the subsequent editions, including that of
1787, where the Glossary explains it as meaning “contrivance.” But some
editions (e.g. 1751) have “consertion,” and some, according to Richardson
(“New Dictionary,” 1836), have “conception.”

[112] Armstrong’s “gelid cistern” for “cold bath” has perhaps gained the
honour of an unidentified quotation.

[113] _Vacant_ in the oft-quoted line from “The Deserted Village” (“The
loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind”), where the word is used in its
Latin sense of “free from care.”

[114] As in the case of Milton, Cowper’s latinized words appear to have
been floating about for a considerable period, though in most cases their
first poetic use is apparently due to him.

[115] Cp. also III, 229, 414; IV, 494.

[116] Apparently after he had done some pruning amongst them (_vide_
“Letter” to Joseph Hill, March 29, 1793, Wright, _op. cit._, Vol. IV,
p. 390), and compare his footnote to the “Iliad,” VII, 359, where he
apologizes for his coinage _purpureal_.

[117] For an account of the parallelism between certain of the eighteenth
century stock epithets and various words and phrases from the Latin
poets, especially Virgil (e.g. “hollow” and “_cavus_”: “liquid fountain”
and _liquidi fontes_), see Myra Reynolds, “Nature in English Poetry from
Pope to Wordsworth” (Chicago, 1909), pp. 46-49.

[118] Cf. Some apt remarks by Raleigh, “Milton,” _op. cit._, pp. 247 and
255.

[119] Cp. Saintsbury, “History of Literary Criticism” (1900-1904), Vol.
II, p. 479, note 1.

[120] Cp. Elton, “Survey of English Literature,” 1830-1880 (1920), Vol.
II, p. 17, remarks on Rossetti’s diction.

[121] Cp. also Morel, _op. cit._, pp. 423-424.

[122] _Vide_ Lounsbury, “Studies in Chaucer” (1892), Vol. III.

[123] “Scrannel” is either Milton’s coinage or a borrowing from some
dialect (N.E.D.).

[124] This of course is used by many later writers, and was perhaps not
regarded in Dryden’s time as an archaism.

[125] “New English Dictionary.”

[126] “Works,” ed. Courthope and Elwin, Vol. X, p. 120.

[127] The prevailing ignorance of earlier English is illustrated in that
stanza by Pope’s explanation of the expression “mister wight,” which he
had taken from Spenser, as “uncouth mortal.”

[128] “The Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser, in 6 Vols. with a glossary
explaining the old and obscure words. Published by Mr. Hughes, London.”

[129] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 115-140.

[130] As in Prior’s “Susanna and the Two Elders” and “Erle Robert’s Mice”
(1712).

[131] “Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser,” 1754.

[132] “An Answer to the Sompner’s Prologue in Chaucer,” printed anon, in
“Lintott’s Miscellany,” entitled “Poems on Several Occasions” (1717), p.
147.

[133] “A Tale Devised in the Plesaunt manere of Gentil Maister Jeoffrey
Chaucer” (“Poets of Great Britain,” 1794, Vol. VII, p. 674).

[134] “Poems on Several Occasions,” by the Rev. Thomas Warton, 1748, p.
30.

[135] “Poems on Several Occasions,” London, 1711, pp. 203-223.

[136] _Vide_ List given by Phelps, “The Beginnings of the English
Romantic Movement” (1899), Appendix I, p. 175; and cf. an exhaustive
list, including complete glossaries, given in “Das Altertümliche im
Wortschatz der Spenser-Nachahmungen des 18 Jahrhunderts,” by Karl Reining
(Strassburg, 1912).

[137] E.g. Robert Lloyd, 1733-1764, in his “Progress of Envy” (Anderson,
Vol. V), defines _wimpled_ as “hung down”; “The Squire of Dames,” by
Moses Mendez (1700-1738) has many old words (“benty,” etc.), which are
often open to the suspicion of being manufactured archaisms.

[138] _Vide_ his letter to Graves, June, 1742.—“Works,” Vol. III, p. 63
(1769).

[139] “Poems on Several Occasions,” by William Thompson, M.A., etc.,
Oxford, 1757, pp. 1-13.

[140] _Ibid._, pp. 58-68.

[141] “The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper,” by Dr.
Samuel Johnson, 21 Vols. (London, 1810), Vol. XV, p. 32.

[142] Thompson has taken this wrong meaning direct with the word itself
from Spenser, “Shepherds Kalendar,” April, l. 26, where _glen_ is glossed
by E.K. as “a country hamlet or borough.”

[143] Cp. Joseph Warton’s “Essay on Pope,” Vol. I, p. 366 (4th edition,
1782). Wordsworth, too, as we know, called it a “fine poem” and praised
it for its harmonious verse and pure diction, but we may imagine that
he was praising it for its own sake without regard to its merits as a
Spenserian imitation (_vide_ Hutchinson, _op. cit._, p. 949).

[144] There are at least forty stanzas in the First Canto, without a
single archaic form, and an equal proportion in Canto Two: Cf. Morel,
_op. cit._, pp. 629-630.

[145] “The letter _y_,” he naïvely says in his “Glossary,” “is frequently
placed at the beginning of a word by Spenser, to lengthen it a syllable,
and _en_ at the end of a word, for the same reason.”

[146] Thompson seems to have been the first to use the word _bicker_ as
applied to running water, an application which was later to receive the
sanction of Scott and Tennyson (N.E.D.).

[147] Among the last examples was Beattie’s “Minstrel” (1771-74), which
occasioned some of Gray’s dicta on the use of archaic and obsolete words.

[148] Spenserian “forgeries” had also made their appearance as early as
in 1713, when Samuel Croxall had attempted to pass off two Cantos as the
original work of “England’s Arch-Poet, Spenser” (2nd edition, London,
1714). In 1747, John Upton made a similar attempt, though probably in
neither case were the discoveries intended to be taken seriously.

[149] See Phelps, _op. cit._, Chap. VIII, and Grace R. Trenery, “Ballad
Collections of the Eighteenth Century,” “Modern Language Review,” July,
1915, pp. 283 foll.

[150] _Vide_ “Preface to A Collection of Old Ballads,” 3 vols. (1723-52),
and cf. Benjamin Wakefield’s “Warbling Muses” (1749), Preface.

[151] Yet thirty years later the collections of Joseph Ritson, the last
and best of the eighteenth century editors, failed to win acceptance.
His strictly accurate versions of the old songs and ballads were
contemptuously dismissed by the “Gentleman’s Magazine” (August, 1790) as
“the compilation of a peevish antiquary.”

[152] “Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript,” edited Furnivall and Hales, 4
vols. (1867-68).

[153] _Vide_ Henry A. Beers, “A History of English Romanticism in the
Eighteenth Century,” 1899, Chap. VIII, pp. 298-302.

[154] Hutchinson, _op. cit._, p. 950.

[155] “Chatterton—Poetical Works,” with an Essay on the Rowley Poems,
by W. W. Skeat, and a memoir by Bell (2 vols., 1871-1875); and _vide_
Tyrwhitt, “Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas
Rowley and others in the fifteenth century” (London, 1777).

[156] _Vide_ Oswald Doughty, “English Lyric in the Age of Reason” (1922),
p. 251.

[157] _Vide_ John Sampson, “The Poetical Works of William Blake” (Oxford,
1905), Preface, viii.

[158] Until the middle of the eighteenth century the form _glen_ occurs
in English writers only as an echo of Spenser (N.E.D.).

[159] _Vide_ “The Dialect of Robert Burns,” by Sir James Wilson
(Oxford Press, 1923), and for happy instances of beautiful words still
lingering on in the Scots dialects, _vide_ especially “The Roxburghshire
Word-Book,” by George Watson (Cambridge, 1923).

[160] Sweet, “New English Grammar” (1892), Part II, pp. 208-212, and
Skeat, “Principles of English Etymology” (1887), Part I, pp. 418-420.

[161] The first literary appearance of each compound has been checked
as far as possible by reference to the “New English Dictionary.” It is
hardly necessary to say that the fact of a compound being assigned, as
regards its first appearance, to any individual writer, is not in itself
evidence that he himself invented the new formation, or even introduced
it into literature. But in many cases, either from the nature of the
compound itself, or from some other internal or external evidence, the
assumption may be made.

[162] Cp. Sweet, _op. cit._, p. 449.

[163] In the “Beowulf” there are twenty-three compounds meaning “Ocean,”
twelve meaning “Ship,” and eighteen meaning “Sword” (_vide_ Emerson,
“Outline History of the English Language,” 1906, p. 121).

[164] Cp. Champney’s “History of English” (1893), p. 192 and Note; and
Lounsbury, “History of the English Language” (1909), p. 109.

[165] Cp. Sidney’s remarks in the “Defence of Poesie—Elizabethan Critical
Essays,” ed. Smith, Vol. I, p. 204.

[166] E.g. Spenser’s “_sea-shouldering_ whales” (an epithet that
especially pleased Keats), Nashe’s “_sky-bred_ chirpers,” Marlowe’s
“_gold-fingered_ Ind,” Shakespeare’s “_fancy-free_,” “_forest-born_,”
“_cloud-capt_,” etc.

[167] Dryden, “English Men of Letters” (1906), p. 76.

[168] Pope’s “Homer,” ed. Buckley, Preface, p. xli.

[169] _Ibid._, p. 47; and cp. Coleridge, “Biographia Literaria,” ed.
Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), Vol. I, p. 2, Footnote.

[170] Here it may be noted that many of Pope’s compounds in his “Homer”
have no warrant in the original; they are in most cases supplied by Pope
himself, to “pad out” his verses, or, more rarely, as paraphrases of
Greek words or phrases.

[171] Shawcross, _op. cit._, p. 2, Footnote.

[172] “Lives” ed. Hill, _op. cit._, Vol. III, p. 298.

[173] _Vide_ Leon Morel, _op. cit._, Ch. IV, pp. 412 foll., for a
detailed examination of Thomson’s compound formations.

[174] It would appear that this epithet had particularly caught the
fancy of Collins. He uses it also in the “Ode on the Manners,” this time
figuratively, when he writes of “_dim-discovered_ tracts of mind.”

[175] “Works,” _op. cit._, Vol. IV, p. 203. In point of fact, there is
little or no evidence in favour of it. Even the Spenserian imitations
that flourished exceedingly at this time have little interest in this
respect. Shenstone has very few instances of compounds, but the poems
of William Thompson furnish a few examples: “_honey-trickling_ streams”
(“Sickness,” Bk. I), “_Lily-mantled_ meads” (_ibid._), etc. Gilbert
West’s Spenserian poems have no instances of any special merit; but
a verse of his Pindar shows that he was not without a gift for happy
composition: “The _billow-beaten_ side of the _foam-besilvered_ main.”

[176] “Letters,” Vol. III, p. 97.

[177] Hill, _op. cit._, Vol. III, p. 437.

[178] _Ibid._, p. 434.

[179] _Vide_ Edmund Gosse, “Two Pioneers of Romanticism” (Warton
Lecture), 1915.

[180] It is a coincidence to find that the N.E.D. assigns the first use
of the compound _furze-clad_ to Wordsworth.

[181] Bell’s “Fugitive Poets” (London, 1789), Vol. VI.

[182] Anderson’s “British Poets,” Vol. XI.

[183] Bell, _op. cit._

[184] Anderson, _op. cit._

[185] “British Poets,” Vol. X.

[186] _Ibid._, Vol. XI, Pt. I.

[187] _Ibid._, Pt. II.

[188] “British Poets,” Vol. XI, Pt. II.

[189] _Vide_ Legouis, _op. cit._ (English translation, 1897), pp. 133
foll.

[190] Shawcross, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 2, Note.

[191] See, e.g., de Selincourt’s remarks on Keats’ compound epithets;
“Poems” (1904), Appendix C, p. 581.

[192] “Biog. Lit.,” _op. cit._, and cp. “Poetical Works,” ed. Dykes
Campbell, Appendix K, p. 540.

[193] “History of English Prosody” (1908), Vol. II, p. 449.

[194] “History of English Prosody,” _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 480; and cp.
_ibid._, p. 496.

[195] Prefaces, “Poetical Works,” ed. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1916), p. 936.

[196] _Vide_ Courthope, “History of English Poetry” (1910), Vol. I, Chap.
IX, for an account of mediaeval allegory and personification.

[197] E.g. “Palamon,” II, 480, 564, 565; Æneas XII, 505-506.

[198] “Black Melancholy” (ll. 163-168) and “Hope” (l. 278), the former of
which especially pleased Joseph Warton (“Essay on Pope”: Works, Vol. I,
p. 314).

[199] Elton, “The Augustan Ages” (1895), p. 209.

[200] Cf. “Suicide” (Canto II, 194-250).

[201] Cf. also Bk. I, ll. 10, 11; 548, etc.

[202] Especially in Book III of “The Duellist,” where the reader is
baffled and wearied by the unending array of bloodless abstractions.

[203] It may be noted incidentally that, according to the “New English
Dictionary,” the term _personification_ owes its first literary
appearance to the famous “Dictionary” of 1755, where it is thus defined,
and (appropriately enough) illustrated: “_Prosopopeia_, the change of
things to persons, as ‘Confusion heard his voice.’”

[204] Phelps, _op. cit._, pp. 37-38.

[205] “Letter” to Mallet, August 11, 1726: “I thank you heartily for your
hint about personizing of Inspiration: it strikes me.”

[206] Cf. also “Winter,” 794 and “Autumn,” 143.

[207] For some happy instances of its use in English poetry, as well
as for a detailed account of Thomson’s use of personification, see
especially Morel, _op. cit._, pp. 444-455.

[208] Poets of Great Britain (1793), Vol. IX, p. 414.

[209] “British Poets,” Vol. XXII (1822), p. 117.

[210] “A Collection of Poems by several hands,” 3 vols., 1748; 2nd
edition, with Vol. IV, 1749; Vol. V and VI, 1758; Pearch’s continuations,
Vol. VII and VIII, 1768, and Vol. IX and X, 1770.

[211] “Dodsley” (1770 ed.), Vol. IV, p. 50.

[212] _Ibid._, VI, 148.

[213] “Dodsley-Pearch,” X, p. 5.

[214] _Vide_ also Bell’s “Fugitive Poetry” (1791). Vol. XI, where there
is a section devoted to “Poems in the manner of Milton.”

[215] “Dodsley-Pearch,” X, p. 269.

[216] At the same time there appeared a similar volume of the Odes of
William Collins, “Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects,”
the original intention having been to publish in one volume. Collins’s
collection had a lukewarm reception, so that the author soon burned the
unsold copies. But see Articles in “The Times Literary Supplement,”
January 5th (p. 5) and January 12, 1922 (p. 28), by Mr. H. O. White,
on “William Collins and his Contemporary Critics,” from which it would
appear that the Odes were not received with such indifference as is
commonly believed.

[217] Cf. “Pope’s Works,” ed. Courthope and Elwin, Vol. V, p. 365.

[218] _Vide_ also “The Triumph of Isis” (1749), and “The Monody written
near Stratford-on-Avon.” (“Poets of Great Britain,” 1794, Vol. XI, pp.
1061-4.)

[219] Cf. Gosse, “A History of Eighteenth Century Literature” (1889), p.
233.

[220] Cf. Courthope, “Hist. Engl. Poetry,” Vol. V, pp. 397-8.

[221] “Lives,” ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, Vol. III, p. 341.

[222] “On Lyric Poetry—Poetical Works,” ed. Mitford (Aldine, ed. 1896),
Vol. II, p. 147.

[223] In the Aldine edition, ed. Thomas (1901) these personified
abstractions are not invested with a capital letter.

[224] “Biographia Literaria” (ed. Shawcross, 1907), p. 12; cf. also
“Table Talk” (October 23, 1833), ed. H. N. Coleridge (1858), p. 340.
“Gray’s personifications,” he said, “were mere printer’s devil’s
personifications,” etc.

[225] Two of Gray’s mechanical figures were marked down for special
censure by Dr. Johnson (“Lives,” Gray, ed. Birbeck Hill, Vol. III, p.
440), whose criticism was endorsed by Walpole (“Letters,” Vol. III, p.
98), who likened “Fell Thirst and Famine” to the devils in “The Tempest”
who whisk away the banquets from the shipwrecked Dukes.

[226] “Letters” (December 19, 1786), Tovey, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 322.

[227] In this connexion mention may be made of “William Blake’s Designs
for Gray’s Poems,” recently published for the first time with a valuable
introduction by H. J. C. Grierson (Oxford, 1922). “Blake’s imagination,”
says Professor Grierson, “communicates an intenser life to Gray’s
half-conventional personifications” (Intro., p. 17).

[228] Canto I: LXXIV-LXXV.

[229] Cp. also the detailed personification of “Thrift,” given by Mickle
in his “Syr Martyn” (1787).—“Poets of Great Britain” (1794), Vol. XI, p.
645.

[230] Cf. “Paradise Lost,” VI, 3; and Pope’s “Iliad,” V, 297.

[231] “Works” ed. Ellis and Yeats, Vol. I, Pref., x.

[232] July 6, 1803, “Letters,” ed. A. G. B. Russell (1906), p. 121.

[233] In the parallel verses of “The Songs of Experience” the human
attributes are attributed respectively to _Cruelty_, _Jealousy_,
_Terror_, and _Secrecy_.

[234] “Poetical Works,” ed. John Sampson (Oxford), 1914, p. 187.

[235] _Vide_, e.g., ll. 18-26.

[236] See also, e.g., “Midnight,” l. 272 foll, and l. 410 foll.

[237] A similar type of abstraction is found here and there in the
stanzas of the “Song to David” (1763), e.g.:

    ’Twas then his thoughts self-conquest pruned
    And heavenly melancholy tuned
        To bless and bear the rest.

But on the whole Smart’s famous poem is singularly free from the bane,
though the “Hymn to the Supreme Being” (_vide_ “A Song to David,” edited
Tutin (1904), Appendix, p. 32), has not escaped the contagion. But better
instances are to be found in the Odes (“Works,” 1761-1762), e.g., “Strong
Labour ... with his pipe in his mouth,” “Health from his Cottage of
thatch,” etc. _Vide_ also article on “Christopher Smart,” “Times Literary
Supplement,” April 6, 1922, p. 224.

[238] Cf. “Poems of William Cowper,” ed. J. C. Bailey (1905), Intro., p.
xl.

[239] There are faint personifications of the other seasons in Book
III, ll. 427 foll., but none perhaps as effective as William Mickle had
already given in his ode, “Vicissitude,” where he depicts Winter staying:

          his creeping steps to pause
    And wishful turns his icy eyes
    On April meads.

[240] _Streaky_, for instance, is due to Thomson who, in the first draft
of “Summer” (ll. 47-48) had written:

    Mildly elucent in the streaky east,

later changed to

    At first faint-gleaming in the dappled east.

[241] “Letters,” edited E. Coleridge, 1895, p. 215.

[242] “Biographia Literaria,” Chap. I.

[243] The ridicule was crystallized in Canning’s famous parody, “The
Loves of the Triangles,” which appeared in “The Anti-Jacobin,” Nos. 23,
24 and 26, April to May, 1798. (_Vide_ “The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin,”
edited C. Edmonds, 1854, 3rd edition, 1890.)

[244] “The Botanic Garden” (4th edition, 1799), Interlude I, Vol. II, p.
64. Cp. also _ibid._, Interlude III, p. 182 foll.

[245] For details see Legouis, _op. cit._

[246] Both the original and the final versions of the “Evening Walk” and
the “Descriptive Sketches” are given by Hutchinson, _op. cit._, Appendix,
pp. 592, 601.

[247] But the artistic possibilities of Personification were not
unrecognized by writers and critics in the eighteenth century. _Vide_
Blair’s lecture on “Personification” (“Lectures on Rhetoric”) 9th
edition, 1803; Lec. XVI, p. 375.

[248] “The Stones of Venice” (1851), Vol. II, Chap. VIII, pp. 312
foll.—The Ducal Palace, “Personification is, in some sort, the reverse
of symbolism, and is far less noble. Symbolism is the setting forth of
a great truth by an imperfect and inferior sign ... and it is almost
always employed by men in their most serious moods of faith, rarely in
recreation.... But Personification is the bestowing of a human or living
form upon an abstract idea; it is in most cases, a mere recreation of
the fancy, and is apt to disturb the belief in the reality of the thing
personified.”

[249] For an illuminating analysis, see Elton, “A Survey of English
Literature,” 1780-1830 (1912), pp. 1-29.

[250] “Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise,” Vol. IV, pp. 175-178.

[251] Cf. Coleridge’s remarks in “Biographia Literaria,” ed. Shawcross,
Chap. I (Oxford, 1907).

[252] Elton, “The Augustan Ages” (1895), p. 211.

[253] “Sleep and Poetry,” ll. 188-201.

[254] Hutchinson, _op. cit._, p. 948.

[255] “Poets of Great Britain” (1794), Vol. X, p. 709.

[256] Cf. “Works” (1889), ed. Courthope and Elwin, Vol. V., p. 360-364.

[257] George Saintsbury, “Eighteenth Century Poetry” (“The London
Mercury,” December, 1919, pp. 155-163); an article in which a great
authority once again tilts an effective lance on behalf of the despised
Augustans.

[258] The best of them have been garnered by Mr. Iola A. Williams into
a little volume, “By-ways Round Helicon” (London, 1922), where the
interested reader may browse with much pleasure and profit, and where he
will no doubt find not a little to surprise and delight him. For a still
more complete anthology, _vide_ “The Shorter Poems of the Eighteenth
Century” (1923) by the same editor. But for the devil’s advocacy see
Doughty, “English Lyric in the Age of Reason” (London, 1922)

[259] The fountain head of all such studies is, of course, the
“Biographia Literaria,” for which see especially Shawcross’s edition,
1907, Vol. II, pp. 287-297. Of recent general treatises, Lascelles
Abercrombie, “Poetry and Contemporary Speech” (1914); Vernon Lee,
“The Handling of Words” (1923); Ogden and Richards, “The Meaning of
Meaning”(1923), may be mentioned.

[260] Elton, “Survey of English Literature” (1780-1830), Vol. II, pp. 88
foll.

[261] Cf. Elton, “The Augustan Ages” (1899), p. 209.

[262] “The Legacy of Greece” (Oxford, 1921), p. 11.

[263] “Convention and Revolt in Poetry” (London, 1921), p. 13.

[264] Just as this book was about to go to press, there appeared “The
Theory of Poetry,” by Professor Lascelles Abercrombie, in which a poet
and critic of great distinction has embodied his thoughts on his own art.
Chaps. III and IV especially should be consulted for a most valuable
account and analysis of how the poetical “magic” of words is achieved.

[265] “Essays in Criticism,” Second Series (1888): “Wordsworth” (1913
ed.), p. 157.

[266] O. Barfield, “Form in Poetry” (“New Statesman” August 7, 1920, pp.
501-2).

[267] “Œuvres” (ed. Assézat), I, p. 377 (quoted by Babbitt), _op. cit._,
p. 121.

[268] Preface to “The Tales” (Poems), ed. A. W. Ward, (Cambridge, 1906),
Vol. II, p. 10.



INDEX


  Abercrombie, Lascelles, 197 n., 201 n.

  Addison, Joseph, 21

  “Ælla” (T. Chatterton’s), 163

  Akenside, Mark, 16, 27, 69-70, 138-9, 189, 195
    Dr. Johnson’s criticism, 16
    “Epistle to Curio,” 195
    Latinism, 69-70
    Personification, 138-9
    “Pleasures of the Imagination,” 69

  “Alma” (M. Prior’s), 75

  “Amyntor and Theodora,” 142

  “Anti-Jacobin, The,” 173 n.

  “Approach of Summer, The,” 179

  “Archaism,” 17-21, 80-101

  Aristotle, 10-12, 185

  Armstrong, John, 69-70, 110

  Arnold, Matthew, 2, 41, 181, 198, 201

  “Art of Preserving Health,” 69, 110


  Babbitt, I., 13 n., 203 n.

  Bailey, J. C., 169 n.

  Ballads, 95-7, 196

  Barfield, Owen, 202 n.

  “Bastard, The,” 111

  Beattie, James, 19, 93 n., 125

  Beers, H. A., 97 n.

  “Beowulf, The,” 104 n.

  Binyon, Laurence, 13 n.

  “Biographia Literaria,” 13 n., 24 n., 48 n., 51 n., 127 n., 156 n.,
        173 n., 185 n.

  “Birth of Flattery, The” (G. Crabbe’s), 168

  Blair, Robert, 110, 176 n.

  Blake, William, 28, 46-7, 77, 99, 124, 129, 136-59, 163-7, 179-80,
        181, 187 n., 198, 202
    Allegory and Vision, remarks on, 165
    Artist, as, 136, 159 n.
    Compounds, 124, 129
    Felicity of diction, 46-7, 202
    “Imitation of Spenser,” 47, 165
    “Letters,” 47 n., 164 n., 187 n.
    “Muses, To the,” 47
    Mysticism, 164
    Personifications, 163-7, 179-80
    “Piper, The,” 202
    “Songs of Experience,” 46, 165 n., 166
    “Songs of Innocence,” 46, 165
    Stock diction, 46-7

  Blount, T., 93

  Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” 16 n.

  “Botanic Garden” (E. Darwin’s), 12, 51-2, 126, 173-5

  Bowles, William Lisle, 48

  Boyce, S., 162

  Bruce, Michael, 122

  Burns, Robert, 28, 100, 198

  Bysshe, Edward, 30

  “By-ways Round Helicon”, 195 n.


  Campbell, Dykes, 128 n.

  Canning, George, 139, 173 n.

  Capell, Edward, 95-6

  “Castaway, The,” 49, 170

  “Castle of Indolence,” 90-2, 161

  Chapman, George, 105

  “Charge to the Poets” (W. Whitehead’s), 20 n.

  “Chase, The” (W. Somerville’s), 68, 110, 142

  Chatterton, Thomas, 19, 42-3, 97-8, 123-4, 162-3
    Compounds, 123-4
    Personifications, 162-3
    “Rowley Poems,” 97-8
    Stock diction, 42-3

  Chaucer, Geoffrey, 26, 84-6, 133

  Chaucerian imitations, 84-6

  Chesterfield, Lord, 20

  “Child of Quality, Lines to” (M. Prior’s), 195

  “Choice, The” (J. Pomfret’s), 195

  Churchill, John, 139-40, 169-70

  Classical literature (connexion with romantic), 181-2

  Coleridge, H. N., 156 n.

  Coleridge, S. T., 1, 13, 24, 31, 32, 51, 100, 127-8, 156, 173, 182,
        193, 204
    Archaisms, 100
    Compounds, 127-8
    Darwin, E., remarks, on, 13, 173
    Gray’s personifications, on, 156
    Imagination, on, 13
    “Letters,” 173 n.
    Pope’s style, on, 24, 32, 193

  Collins, William, 16, 40-1, 71, 98, 116-7, 129, 149, 150-5, 166, 167,
        191, 196
    Archaisms, 98
    Compounds, 116-7, 129
    Dr. Johnson’s criticisms of, 16, 40, 151
    “Odes,” 149 n., 150-5
    Personifications, 150-5, 166, 167, 178, 179, 191
    Romantic forerunner, a, 196
    Stock diction, 40-1

  Compound epithets, 4, 102-31, 204

  “Convention and Revolt in Poetry,” 200 n.

  Courthope, W. J., 9 n., 17 n., 45 n., 50 n., 57 n., 133 n., 149 n.,
        194 n.

  Coventry, F., 147

  Cowper, William, 20, 24, 31, 48-50, 73-4, 76, 126, 168-73
    Archaism, on, 20
    Compounds, 126
    Familiar style, on the, 24
    “Homer” translation, 48, 74, 126
    Latinism, 73-5
    “Letters,” 20 n., 48 n., 74 n.
    “Olney Hymns,” 49, 169
    Personifications, 169-73, 179
    Stock diction, 48-9
    “Table Talk,” 49
    “Task, The,” 49, 73-4, 170-1

  Crabbe, George, 50-1, 124-5, 167-8, 179, 195, 204
    Compounds, 124-5
    Dryden’s style, on, 204
    Personifications, 167-8, 179
    Stock diction, 50-1

  Croxall, Samuel, 93 n.

  Cunningham, John, 27, 189


  Darwin, Erasmus, 12, 37, 51-2, 53, 120, 173-5

  Davenant, Sir William, 21

  Denham, Sir John, 15

  Dennis, John, 11 n.

  De Quincey, Thomas, 52

  “Descriptive Sketches,” 52, 175, 176 n.

  “Deserted Village, The,” 45-6, 111-2, 195

  Diderot, Denis, 203

  Dodsley, Robert, 147, 195

  Doughty, Oswald, 98 n., 195 n.

  Drayton, Michael, 107

  Drinkwater, John, 9 n.

  Dryden, John, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 18, 21, 22, 26-7, 28, 30, 31,
        32, 33, 36, 58-9, 81-2, 83, 105-6, 109, 134, 181, 194, 204
    “Annus Mirabilis,” 8
    Archaisms, 18, 81-2
    Chaucer “translations,” 26-7
    Compounds, 105-6
    “Essays” and “Prefaces,” 7-11
    “Hind and Panther,” 195
    Language of poetry, on, 8-9
    Latinism, 58-9
    Periphrasis, use of, 28, 33
    Personifications, 134
    “Religio Laici,” 194
    Royal Society, 7
    Satire, 106, 140
    Technical terms, on, 21

  “Duellist, The” (Charles Churchill’s), 140 n.

  Dyer, John, 39, 70, 109, 142, 188-9


  Earle, J., 35 n.

  “Economy of Vegetation,” 12, 126, 173-4

  Edmonds, C., 173 n.

  “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 42, 72, 157, 159, 195, 198

  “Eloisa to Abelard,” 134

  Elton, Oliver, 10 n., 135 n., 182 n., 186 n., 197 n.

  Emerson, O., 104 n.

  “English Lyric in the Age of Reason,” 195

  “Enthusiast, The,” 71, 121, 149

  “Epistle to Curio” (M. Akenside’s), 195 n.

  Epithalamium (W. Thompson’s), 160

  “Essay on Criticism,” 9-10, 29 n., 195

  “Eton College, Ode on a Distant View of,” 156

  Evelyn, John, 7

  “Evening, Ode to,” 41, 116, 155

  “Evening Walk, The,” 52, 127, 175-6

  “Excursion, The” (David Mallet’s), 142


  “Faerie Queene,” 87, 94, 99, 133, 159-60, 192

  Falconer, William, 22, 43-4

  “Fleece, The,” (J. Dyer’s), 39, 70

  Fletcher, Giles, 57

  Fletcher, Phineas, 57

  “Fugitive Poets” (Bell’s), 122, 147 n., 195

  Furetière, Antoine, 5


  Gay, John, 33, 109

  Gibbon, Edward, 198

  Glanvill, Joseph, 7

  Goldsmith, Oliver, 14-15, 20, 44-6, 72, 111-2, 140-1, 195
    Archaism, on, 20
    Compounds, in, 117-8
    Diction of poetry, on, 15
    Latinism, 72-3
    Personifications, 141-2, 179
    Stock diction, 44-6

  Graeme, James, 122

  Grainger, James, 70, 110, 142

  “Grave,” the (Robert Blair’s), 110

  Gray, Thomas, 8, 16-17, 18-19, 21-2, 31, 41-2, 67, 71-2, 93 n., 98-9,
        117-20, 146, 155-9, 177, 196
    Archaisms, on, 18-19, 98-9
    Coinages, on, 21
    Compounds, 117-20
    Diction of poetry, on, 8, 16-17
    “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 42, 72, 157, 159, 195, 198
    Latinism, 71-2
    Letters, 8 n., 16 n.
    Personifications, 155-9, 177, 191
    Plain colloquial style, 17, 195
    Romantic forerunner, A, 150, 196
    Stock diction, 41-2
    Technical terms, on, 22

  Grierson, H. J. C., 159 n.

  “Grongar Hill,” 39, 109, 184, 188, 190


  Hamilton, William (of Bangor), 146

  Hill, G. B., 8 n., 15 n., 16 n., 23 n., 112 n., 151 n.

  “Hind and Panther, The,” 195

  “Horror, Ode to,” 148

  Hughes, John, 83

  Hume, David, 198

  Hutchinson, T., 52 n., 68 n., 97 n., 132 n., 176 n.

  “Hymn to May” (W. Thompson’s), 160


  “Il Bellicoso,” 147

  “Il Pacifico,” 147

  “Il Penseroso,” 71, 176

  “Inebriety,” 167


  Jago, R., 122

  Johnson, Dr., 15-16, 17, 19-20, 23, 31, 40-2, 44, 72-3, 111, 119,
        140-1, 151, 159, 177, 179
    Archaism, 19-20
    Collins, on, 150, 151
    Compounds, 111, 119-20
    Diction, on, 15-16
    “Dictionary,” 140 n.
    Dryden, on, 8
    Gray’s personifications, on, 156 n.
    Latinism, 73
    Personifications, 140-1, 177, 179
    Pope’s style, on, 23, 31, 193
    Satire, 139
    Stock diction, 45

  Jonson, Ben, 17-18


  Keats, John, 126, 128, 129, 144, 187, 188, 192, 196, 203, 204

  Ker, W. P., 7 n., 8 n., 9 n., 11 n., 18 n., 21 n.

  Kersey, John, 97


  “L’Allegro,” 162, 176

  Langhorne, J., 122

  Langland, William, 133

  Latinism, 56-79, 191-2

  Lee, Vernon, 197 n.

  “Legacy of Greece, The,” 199

  Legouis, E., 53 n., 127 n., 175 n.

  Lessing’s “Laokoon,” 12 n.

  Lloyd, Robert, 88 n.

  “London” (Dr. Johnson’s), 111, 140-1

  “Loves of the Plants” (E. Darwin’s), 12, 173

  “Loves of the Triangles” (G. Canning’s), 173 n.

  Lowes, Professor J. L., 200

  “Lyrical Ballads,” 1, 2, 175

  Lyttleton, G., 119


  Maeterlinck, M., 200

  Mallet, D., 110, 144 n., 142

  Marlowe, Christopher, 105 n.

  Marriott, Dr., 147

  Mason, William, 86, 146-7

  Masson, David, 58 n.

  Mendez, Moses, 88, 122

  Mickle, William, 93, 125, 162 n., 171 n.

  Milton, John, 8, 33-6, 41, 57-8, 60, 61, 62, 66, 70, 71, 72, 76, 77,
        81, 94, 107, 133, 136, 142, 146-7, 148, 149, 150, 176-7, 191-2
    Archaism, 81, 94
    Compound epithets, 105
    Diction, 34-6, 57-8
    Imitated in eighteenth century, 60-70, 76-7, 146-50, 191-2
    Latinism, 57-8, 177
    Personification, 133, 137, 142, 146-7, 176-7

  “Monody written near Stratford-on-Avon,” 149 n.

  Morel, Leon, 39 n., 63 n., 78 n., 91 n., 114 n., 145 n.

  Murray, Gilbert, 199


  Nashe, Thomas, 105 n.

  Neo-classicism, 9-13, 53-4

  “Night Thoughts” (E. Young’s), 28, 68-9, 136-8

  “Nocturnal Reverie” (Countess of Winchilsea’s), 187


  Old English Compounds, 104

  “Ossian” poems, 19, 166


  “Paradise Lost,” 34-6, 57-8, 76, 133, 136, 184

  Parnell, Thomas, 135-6

  “Passions, Ode to the,” 153

  “Penshurst” (F. Coventry’s), 147

  Percy, Bishop, 96-7

  Personification and abstraction, 133-80, 190-1

  Phelps, W. L., 142 n.

  Philips, John, 37, 60-1, 86, 109, 142

  “Pity, Ode to” (W. Collins’), 153

  “Pleasures of the Imagination” (M. Akenside’s), 69, 138-9, 189

  “Pleasures of Melancholy, The” (T. Warton’s), 71, 121

  “Poetical Character, Ode on the” (W. Collins’s), 152

  “Poetical Sketches” (W. Blake’s), 99, 167, 181

  Pomfret, John, 195

  Pope, Alexander, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21-2, 23-4,
        25, 29, 31-4, 36-7, 40, 42, 45, 46, 48, 50, 54, 59-60, 67, 73,
        81, 82-3, 85, 106-9, 111, 115, 130, 134, 135, 136, 139, 140,
        183, 184, 185, 189, 193-4, 204
    Archaism, 18, 82-3
    Compounds, 21, 106-9
    Diction, 33, 36-7
    “Dunciad,” 18, 134
    “Essay on Criticism,” 14, 29 n., 195
    Heroic couplet, 29-30, 31-2
    “Homer,” 2, 14, 17, 31-2, 40, 48, 184
    Language of poetry, 9-10
    Latinism, 59-60
    Personifications, 134
    Satire, 139, 140

  Potter, R., 122

  Prior, Matthew, 75, 87, 95, 195

  “Progress of Error” (W. Cowper’s), 170

  “Progress of Poetry” (Thomas Gray’s), 72

  “Prolusions” (E. Capell’s), 95-6


  Raleigh, Sir Walter, 35 n., 58 n., 66 n.

  “Rape of the Lock,” 134

  “Religio Laici,” 194

  “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry,” 19, 96-7

  Reynolds, Myra, 28 n., 61 n., 75 n.

  Ritson, Joseph, 96 n.

  Robertson, J. L., 6 n., 62

  Rogers, Samuel, 125-6

  Romanticism, connexion with classicism, 181-2

  Rowley poems, 42-4, 97-8, 162-3

  “Ruins of Rome” (J. Dyer’s), 109, 142

  Ruskin, John, 180

  Russell, A. J. B., 164 n.


  Saintsbury, George, 29-30, 76 n., 106, 130, 131, 194 n.

  Sampson, John, 47 n., 99 n., 165 n.

  Savage, Richard, 75, 111, 136

  Schmidt’s “Shakespeare Lexicon,” 35

  “Schoolmistress, The,” 88-9, 161

  Scott, John, 123

  Scott, Sir Walter, 100, 192

  “Seasons, The” (J. Thomson’s), 37-9, 62-8, 112-6, 142-6, 190, 196, 198

  Selincourt, B. de, 35 n., 128 n.

  Shakespeare, William, 35, 105 n., 129

  Shawcross, T. (_see_ “Biographia Literaria”).

  Shelley, P. B., 126, 178, 203, 204

  Shenstone, W., 26, 29, 75, 88-9, 118 n., 161

  “Shorter Poems of the Eighteenth Century,” 195 n.

  Sidney, Sir Philip, 105 n.

  Skeat, W. W., 43 n., 97, 98 n., 102 n.

  Smart, Christopher, 169 n.

  Smith, Gregory, 14 n., 18 n., 56 n.

  Somerville, William, 110, 142

  “Song to David,” 169 n.

  Spence, Joseph, 12

  Spenser, Edmund, 80-1, 105 n., 133, 159-60, 191, 192

  Spenserian imitations, 18, 84, 86-94, 160-2, 178, 191, 192

  Spingarn, J. E., 5 n., 6 n., 7 n.

  Sprat, Thomas, 6, 7

  Stock diction, The, 25-55, 183-7

  “Stones of Venice, The” (J. Ruskin’s), 180 n.

  “Storie of William Canynge,” 163

  “Sugar Cane, The,” 70, 110, 142

  Sweet, Henry, 102 n., 103 n.

  Swift, Jonathan, 139

  Symbolism, 13, 164, 179, 180

  Symons, Arthur, 47 n.

  “Syr Martin,” 93, 125, 162 n.


  “Table Talk” (S. T. Coleridge’s), 156 n.

  “Table Talk” (W. Cowper’s), 49, 170

  Taine, H., 183

  “Task, The” (W. Cowper’s), 49, 73-4, 170-1

  Theory of diction, 5-24

  Thomson, James, 37-9, 62-8, 76, 77, 78, 90-2, 94, 112-6, 131, 142-6,
        161, 167, 179, 186, 188
    “Castle of Indolence,” 90-2, 161
    Compounds, 112-6, 131
    Diction generally, 37, 67
    Latinism, 62-8, 78, 192
    Miltonic borrowings, 37, 66
    Nature poet, a, 37, 78, 186
    Personifications, 142-6, 161, 166, 178-9
    Romantic forerunner, a, 196
    “Seasons, The,” 37-9, 62-8, 112-6, 142-6, 190, 195, 196, 198
    Stock diction, 37-8

  Thompson, W., 61-2, 85, 89-90, 118 n.

  “Tintern Abbey, Lines written above,” 131

  “Traveller, The” (O. Goldsmith’s), 45, 72, 112, 141

  Trenery, Grace R., 95 n.

  “Triumph of Isis,” 149 n.

  Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 86, 98 n.


  Upton, John, 93 n.


  “Vacation, The,” 147

  “Vale Abbey, Lines written at” (T. Warton’s), 149

  “Valetudinarian, The,” 147

  “Vanity of Human Wishes,” 73, 111, 140-1, 195

  “Village, The” (G. Crabbe’s), 167, 168, 195

  “Vision of Patience” (S. Boyce’s), 162

  “Vision of Solomon” (W. Whitehead’s), 162


  Wakefield, Benjamin, 95 n.

  Waller, Edmund, 15

  Walpole, Horace, 119, 156 n.

  “Wanderer, The” (R. Savage’s), 111, 136

  Ward, A. W., 204 n.

  Warton, Joseph, 21, 70-1, 121, 134, 148-9

  Warton, Thomas, 71, 83, 84, 85, 86, 120-1, 149

  Watson, George, 100 n.

  Watts, Isaac, 49

  Welsted, Leonard, 59 n.

  Wesley, John, 49, 50, 198

  Wesley, Charles, 49

  West, Gilbert, 118 n.

  White, Gilbert (of Selborne), 28

  White, H. O., 148 n.

  Whitehead, W., 20 n., 122, 162

  Williams, I. O., 195 n.

  Wilson, Sir James, 100 n.

  Winchilsea, Anne, Countess of, 61, 109, 187-8

  “Windsor Forest,” 134

  Wordsworth, William, 1, 3, 13, 15, 24, 25, 27 n., 28, 31, 32, 33, 35,
        36, 48, 51-3, 67, 68, 77, 79, 97, 115, 132, 175, 182, 185, 187,
        189, 192, 193, 197, 201, 204
    Archaism, 100
    Compounds, 127
    Darwin’s (Erasmus) influence, 52-4, 175
    Latinism, 79, 192
    Percy’s “Reliques,” on, 97
    Personifications, 133, 175-6, 178, 180
    Pope’s style, on, 24
    “Prefaces,” 1, 53, 132, 182, 197, 204
    “Prelude, The,” 184-5

  Wyche, Sir Peter, 7


  “Yardley Oak” (W. Cowper’s), 131, 172

  Yeats, W. B., 164 n.

  Young, Edward, 9 n., 28, 68-9, 136-8, 151




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