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

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:

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

or even his tree catalogue,

or

or

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.

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

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:

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

or

or

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:

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:

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

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:

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”:

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.