And pykes, the tyrants of the wat’ry plains.
Let any person of any ear substitute liquid for wat’ry and he will find the disadvantage.”[62] Saintsbury has pointed out[63] that the “drastic but dangerous device of securing the undulating penetration of the line by the use of the gradus epithet was one of the chief causes of the intensely artificial character of the versification and its attendant diction.... There are passages in the ‘Dispensary’ and ‘The Rape of the Lock,’ where you can convert the decasyllable into the octosyllable for several lines together without detriment to sense or poetry by simply taking out these specious superfluities.”
In the year of Dryden’s death (or perhaps in the following year) there had appeared the “Art of Poetry” by Edward Bysshe, whose metrical laws were generally accepted, as authoritative, during the eighteenth century. During the forty years of Dryden’s literary career the supremacy of the stopped regular decasyllabic couplet had gradually established itself as the perfect form of verse. But Bysshe was the first prosodist to formulate the “rules” of the couplet, and in doing so he succeeded, probably because his views reflected the general prosodic tendencies of the time, in “codifying and mummifying” a system which soon became erected into a creed. “The foregoing rules (of accent on the even places and pause mainly at the 4th, 5th, or 6th syllable) ought indispensably to be followed in all our verses of 10 syllables: and the observation of them will produce Harmony, the neglect of them harshness and discord.”[64] Into this rigid mechanical mould contemporary and succeeding versifiers felt themselves constrained to place their couplets. But to pad out their lines they were nearly always beset with a temptation to use the trochaic epithets, of which numerous examples have been given above. As a natural result such epithets soon became part and parcel of the poetic stock of language, and hence most of them were freely used by poets, not because of any intrinsic poetic value, but because they were necessary to comply with the absurd mechanics of their vehicle of expression.
Since the “Lives of the Poets” it has been customary to regard this “poetic diction” as the peculiar invention of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and especially of Dryden and Pope, a belief largely due to Johnson’s eulogies of these poets. As an ardent admirer of the school of Dryden and Pope, it was only natural that Johnson should express an exalted opinion of their influence on the poetic practice of his contemporaries. But others—Gray amongst them—did not view their innovations with much complacency, and towards the end of the century Cowper was already foreshadowing the attack to be made by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the next generation. To Pope’s influence, he says in effect, after paying his predecessor a more or less formal compliment, was due the stereotyped form both of the couplet and of much of the language in which it was clothed. Pope had made
poetry a mere mechanic art
And every warbler had his tune by heart;
and in one of his letters he stigmatizes and pillories the inflated and stilted phraseology of Pope, and especially his translation of Homer.[65] Finally, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed in ascribing the “poetical diction,” against which their manifestoes were directed, to that source.
It is to be admitted that Pope’s translation is to some extent open to the charge brought against it of corrupting the language with a meretricious standard of poetic diction. In his Preface he expresses his misgivings as to the language fit and proper for an English rendering of Homer, and indeed it is usually recognized that his diction was, to a certain extent, imposed upon him both by the nature of his original, as well as by the lack of elasticity in his closed couplet. To the latter cause was doubtless due, not only the use of stock epithets to fill out the line, but also the inevitable repetition of certain words, due to the requirements of rhyme, even at the expense of straining or distorting their ordinary meaning. Thus train, for instance, on account of its convenience as a rhyming word, is often used to signify “a host,” or “body,” and similarly plain, main, for the ocean. In this connexion it has also been aptly pointed out that some of the defects resulted from the fact that Pope had founded his own epic style on that of the Latin poets, whose manner is most opposed to Homer’s. Thus he often sought to deck out or expand simple thoughts or commonplace situations by using what he no doubt considered really “poetical language,” and thus, for instance, where Homer simply says, “And the people perished,” Pope has to say, “And heaped the camp with mountains of the dead.” The repeated use of periphrases: feathered fates, for “arrows”; fleecy breed for “sheep”; the wandering nation of a summer’s day for “insects”; the beauteous kind for “women”; the shining mischief for “a fascinating woman”; rural care for “the occupations of the shepherd”; the social shades for “the ghosts of two brothers,” may be traced to the same influence.[66]
But apart from these defects the criticisms of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and their ascribing of the “poetical diction,” which they wished to abolish, to the influence of Pope’s “Homer,” are to a large extent unjust. Many of the characteristics of this “spurious poetic language” were well established long before Pope produced his translation. It is probable that they are present to a much larger extent, for instance, in Dryden; painted, rural, finny, briny, shady, vocal, mossy, fleecy, come everywhere in his translations, and not only there. Some of his adjectives in y are more audacious than those of Pope: spongy clouds, chinky hives, snary webs, roomy sea, etc. Most of the periphrases used by Pope and many more are already to be found in Dryden: “summer” is the sylvan reign; “bees,” the frugal or industrious kind; “arrows,” the feathered wood or feathered fates; “sheep,” the woolly breed; “frogs,” the loquacious race! From all Pope’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries similar examples may be quoted, like Gay’s
When floating clouds their spongy fleeces drain