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:

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:

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.