These phenomena of external nature, which in the old and great poets come forward simply as analogies and similitudes of what is truly great—namely, human nature, and as expressions of curious and wonderful relations, are in Wordsworth themselves the truly great, all-important, and pre-eminently wonderful things of the universe. Blue sky and white clouds, larks and linnets, daisies and celandines—these it appears are ‘the proper subject of mankind’; not, as we used to think, the wrath of Achilles, the guilt and remorse of Macbeth, the love and despair of Othello.
This tendency to exaggerate the importance of flowers and fields, lakes, waterfalls, and scenery, I remember myself, when a boy of eighteen, to have heard, not without a shock of mild surprise, the venerable poet correct. People come to the lakes, he said, and are charmed with a particular spot, and build a house, and find themselves discontented, forgetting that these things are only the sauce and garnish of life. Nevertheless, we fear that the exclusive student of Wordsworth may go away with the strange persuasion that it is his business to walk about this world of life and action, and, avoiding life and action, have his gentle thoughts excited by flowers and running waters and shadows on mountain sides.
This we conceive is a grievous inherent error in Wordsworth. The poet of Nature he may perhaps be; but this sort of writing does justice to the proper worth and dignity neither of man nor of Nature.
ON THE FORMATION OF CLASSICAL ENGLISH:
AN EXTRACT FROM A LECTURE ON DRYDEN.
Dryden, a true littérateur, simply reflects his epoch; the revolution he was intent upon, and which we are especially bound to consider, was that of English verse composition. While Newton was balancing the earth, and Locke weighing the intellect, Dryden was measuring syllables. While Penn and Locke were venturing experiments in government, he was making them in prosody. Political movements and agitations—the plot and the new plot—dissolutions and elections—falls of ministries and impeachments and deaths were to him chiefly of interest because he must mould the subject of his verse accordingly. To please the King as laureate he is in duty bound; and to serve his cause with rhyme to the purpose. Also prose.
Yet what side should a littérateur of real excellence take if not that of the King and the court? who certainly had the best taste, were the most judicious critics as well as the most likely paymasters. Settle and Shadwell might suit the Aldermen and the Exclusionists, who knew no better. And nothing, I imagine, more completely suited Dryden, more exactly met his feelings, and gave freer scope to his talents, than the revolution in literature which the new King and court sought to naturalise in England. To guide the process of that change and to elevate a matter of mere passing court fashion into a permanent reformation of English literature; to dignify a mere slipslop aversion of pedantry by converting it into an appreciation of elegance and propriety of writing—this was his vocation. He devoted himself to it for forty years with infinite zeal and perseverance, laborious study, and patient carefulness. And certainly with some considerable success.
During the whole of the next century I suppose it was considered that our language first was written, so to speak, by him. For models of composition no one was recommended anterior to him. In English poetry he is for them the earliest name. Into Johnson’s collection Cowley and Butler, and one or two others coëval with Dryden, are admitted, but not Spenser. So too in prose it is only in our time that people have begun to talk of Jeremy Taylor and Milton as legitimate standards of English prose composition. Dryden was supposed to have commenced in the two kinds of writing what Pope and Addison made perfect. For style Shakespeare was dangerous and Hooker pernicious reading; Ben Jonson’s wit was ponderous and the wisdom of Bacon pedantic; the mirth of Fletcher was rude and vulgar, the elegance of Sidney formal and factitious.
Maxims of this kind prevailed from the days of Dryden to those of Byron and Scott. There are circles where they are still current, and there are possibilities of their again finding a more general acceptation. I incline to believe that there is a great deal of truth in them. Our language before the Restoration certainly was for the most part bookish, academical, and stiff. You perceive that our writers have first learnt to compose in Latin; and you feel as if they were now doing so in English. Their composition is not a harmonious development of spoken words, but a copy of written words. We are set to study ornate and learned periods; but we are not charmed by finding our ordinary everyday speech rounded into grace and smoothed into polish, chastened to simplicity and brevity without losing its expressiveness, and raised into dignity and force without ceasing to be familiar; saying once for all what we in our rambling talk try over and over in vain to say; and saying it simply and fully, exactly and perfectly.
This scholastic and constrained manner of men who had read more than they talked, and had (of necessity) read more Latin than English; of men who passed from the study to the pulpit, and from the pulpit back to the study—this elevated and elaborated diction of learned and religious men was doomed at the Restoration. Its learning was pedantry, and its elevation pretence. It was no way suited to the wants of the court, nor the wishes of the people. It was not likely that the courtiers would impede the free motions of their limbs with the folds of the cumbrous theological vesture; and the nation in general was rather weary of being preached to. The royalist party, crowding back from French banishment, brought their French tastes and distastes. James I. loved Latin and even Greek, but Charles II. liked French better even than English. In one of Dryden’s plays is a famous scene, in which he ridicules the fashionable jargon of the day, which seems to have been a sort of slipshod English, continually helped out with the newest French phrases.
Dryden then has the merit of converting this corruption and dissolution of our old language into a new birth and renovation. And not only must we thank him for making the best of the inevitable circumstances and tendencies of the time, but also praise him absolutely for definitely improving our language. It is true that he sacrificed a great deal of the old beauty of English writing, but that sacrifice was inevitable; he retained all that it was practicable to save, and he added at the same time all the new excellence of which the time was capable.