[89] A Discourse of Epick Poetry "If the public approve." "On ne peut pas admettre dans le developpement des langues aucune révolution artificielle et sciemment executée; il n'y a pour elles ni conciles, ni assemblées délibérantes; on ne les réforme pas comme une constitution vicieuse."—Renan, De l'Origine du Langage, p 95.
[90] This is an old complaint. Puttenham sighs over such innovation in Elizabeth's time, and Carew in James's. A language grows, and is not made. Almost all the new-fangled words with which Jonson taxes Marston in his "Poetaster" are now current.
[91] Like most idiomatic, as distinguished from correct writers, he knew very little about the language historically or critically. His prose and poetry swarm with locutions that would have made Lindley Murray's hair stand on end. How little he knew is plain from his criticising in Ben Jonson the use of ones in the plural, of "Though Heaven should speak with all his wrath," and be "as false English for are, though the rhyme hides it." Yet all are good English, and I have found them all in Dryden's own writing! Of his sins against idiom I have a longer list than I have room for. And yet he is one of our highest authorities for real English.
[92] To see what he rescued us from in pedantry on the one hand, and vulgarism on the other, read Feltham and Tom Brown—if you can.
[93] "Cette ode mise en musique par Purcell (si je ne me trompe), passe en Angleterre pour le chef-d'oeuvre de la poésie la plus sublime et la plus variée; et je vous avoue que, comme je sais mieux l'anglais que le grec, j'aime cent fois mieux cette ode que tout Pindare."—Voltaire to M. De Chabanon, 9 mars, 1772.
Dryden would have agreed with Voltaire. When Chief-Justice Marlay, then a young Templar, "congratulated him on having produced the finest and noblest Ode that had ever been written in any language, You are right, young gentleman' (replied Dryden), 'a nobler Ode never was produced, nor ever will.'"—Malone.
[94] This was true of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and still more of Southey who in some respects was not unlike Dryden.
[95] Pope's notion of gentility was perhaps expressed in a letter from Lord Cobham to him: "I congratulate you upon the fine weather. 'T is a strange thing that people of condition and men of parts must enjoy it in common with the rest of the world." (Ruffhead's Pope, p 276, note.) His Lordship's naive distinction between people of condition and men of parts is as good as Pope's between genteel and poetical men. I fancy the poet grinning savagely as he read it.
[96] "Nothing is truly sublime," he himself said, "that is not just and proper."
[97] Dennis in a letter to Tonson, 1715.