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]

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

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

Even as late as 1800 Blake was capable of writing

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,

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

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

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

or

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

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:

which might have come direct from Pope, or

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.