Proptereà noctes hiberno tempore longæ
Cessant, dum veniat RADIATUM INSIGNE DIEI.
Lucr. l. v. 698.
Here, you see, the poet’s allusion to a classic idea has led us to the discovery of the very passage from which it was taken. And this use a learned reader will often make of the species of Imitation, here considered.
V. Great writers, you find, sometimes forget the character of the Age, they live in; the principles, and notions that belong to it. “Sometimes they forget themselves, that is, their own situation and character.” Another sign of the influence of Imitation.
1. When we see such men, as Strada and Mariana, writers of fine talents indeed, but of recluse lives and narrow observation, chusing to talk like men of the world, and abounding in the most refined conclusions of the cabinet, we are sure that this character, which we find so natural in a Cardinal de Retz, is but assumed by these Jesuits. And we are not surprized to discover, on examination, that their best reflexions are copied from Tacitus.
On the other hand, when a man of the world took it into his head, the other day, in a moping fit, to talk Sentences, every body concluded that this was not the language of the writer or his situation, but that he had been poaching in some pedant; perhaps in the Stoical Fop, he affected so much contempt of, Seneca.
2. Sometimes we catch a great writer deviating from his natural manner, and taking pains, as it were, to appear the very reverse of his proper character. Would you wish a stronger proof of his being seduced, at least for the time, by the charms of imitation?
Nothing is better known than the easy, elegant, agreeable vein of Voiture. Yet you have read his famous Letter to Balzac, and have been surprized, no doubt, at the forced, quaint, and puffy manner, in which it is written. The secret is, Voiture is aping Balzac from one end of this letter to the other. Whether to pay his court to him, or to laugh at him, or that perhaps, in the instant of writing, he really fancied an excellence in the style of that great man, is not easy to determine. An eminent French critic, I remember, is inclined to take it for a piece of mockery. At all events, we must needs esteem it an imitation.
3. This remark on the turn of a writer’s genius may be further applied to that of his temper or disposition.
The natural misanthropy of Swift may account for his thinking and speaking very often in the spirit of Rochefoucault, without any thought of taking from his Maxims, though he was an admirer of them. But if at any time we observe so humane and benevolent a man as Mr. Pope giving into this language, we say of course, “This is not his own, but an assumed manner.”
Or what say you to an instance that exemplifies both these observations together? The natural unaffected turn of Mr. Cowley’s manner, and the tender sensibility of his mind, are equally seen and loved in his prose-works, and in such of his poems as were written after a good model, or came from the heart. A clear sparkling fancy, softened with a shade of melancholy, made him, perhaps, of all our poets the most capable of excelling in the elegiac way, or of touching us in any way where a vein of easy language and moral sentiment is required. Who but laments then to see this fine genius perverted by the prevailing pedantry of his age, and carried away, against the bias of his nature, to an emulation of the rapturous, high-spirited Pindar?