And this leads us to a consideration of the poetic diction of the eighteenth century from a more general standpoint. For no discussion of poetical language can be complete unless an attempt is made to consider the question in its entirety with a view to the question of what really constitutes poetic diction, what it is that gives to words and phrases, used by certain poets in certain contexts, a magic force and meaning. The history of poetic diction from the very beginning of English literature down to present times has yet to be written, and it would be a formidable task. Perhaps a syndicate of acknowledged poets would be the only fit tribunal to pass judgment on so vital an aspect of the craft, but even then we suspect there would be a good deal of dissension, and probably more than one minority report. But the general aspects of the question have formed a fruitful field of discussion since Wordsworth launched his theories[259] and thus began a controversy as to the exact nature of poetic language, the echoes of which, it would seem, have not yet died away. For the Prefaces were, it may be truly said, the first great and definite declaration of principle concerning a question which has been well described as “the central one in the philosophy of literature, What is, or rather what is not, poetic diction?”[260]
Judged from this wider standpoint, the diction of the “classical” poetry of the eighteenth century, and even of a large portion of the verse that announces the ultimate Romantic triumph, seems to have marked limitations. The widespread poverty and sterility of this diction was not, of course, merely the result of an inability to draw inspiration from Nature, or of a failure to realize the imaginative possibilities of words and phrases: it was, it would almost seem, the inevitable outcome and reflex of an age that, despite great and varied achievements, now appears to us narrow and restricted in many vital aspects. If poetry is a criticism of life, in the sense in which Matthew Arnold doubtless meant his dictum to be taken, the age of Pope and his successors is not “poetic”; in many respects it is a petty and tawdry age—the age of the coffee-house and the new press, of the club and the coterie. There are great thinkers like Hume, great historians like Gibbon, great teachers and reformers like John Wesley; but these names and a few others seem only to throw into stronger light the fact that it was on its average level an age of talk rather than of thought, of “fickle fancy” rather than of imaginative flights, of society as a unit highly organized for the pursuit of its own pastimes, pleasures, and preoccupations, in which poetry, and literature generally, played a social part. Poetry seems to skim gracefully over the surface of life, lightly touching many things in its flight, but never soaring; philosophy and science and satire all come within its purview, but when the eternally recurring themes of poetry[261]—love and nature and the like—are handled, there is rarely or never poignancy or depth.
The great elemental facts and thoughts and feelings of life seldom confront us in the literature of the century as we make our way down the decades; even in the forerunners of the Romantic revolt we are never really stirred. “The Seasons,” and “The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” touch responsive chords, but are far from moving us to thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls. Not until Blake and Burns is the veneer of convention and artificiality, in both matter and manner, definitely cast aside, and there is to be caught in English verse again, not only the authentic singing note, but, what is more, the recognition and exemplification of the great truth that the finest poetry most often has its “roots deep in the common stuff,” and it is not to be looked for in an age and environment when, with rationality apparently triumphant, men seemed careless of the eternal verities, of the thoughts and feelings that lie too deep for tears, or sadly recognized their impotence, or their frustrated desires, to image them forth in poetry.
“What is it,” asks Gilbert Murray,[262] “that gives words their character and makes a style high or low? Obviously, their associations: the company they habitually keep in the minds of those who use them. A word which belongs to the language of bars and billiard-saloons will become permeated by the normal standard of mind prevalent in such places; a word which suggests Milton or Carlyle will have the flavour of those men’s minds about it. I therefore cannot resist the conclusion that if the language of Greek poetry has, to those who know it intimately, this special quality of keen austere beauty, it is because the minds of the poets who used that language were habitually toned to a higher level both of intensity and of nobility than ours. It is a finer language because it expresses the mind of finer men. By ‘finer men’ I do not necessarily mean men who behaved better, either by our standards or by their own: I mean the men to whom the fine things of the world, sunrise and sea and stars, and the love of man for man, and strife and the facing of evil for the sake of good, and even common things like meat and drink, and evil things like hate and terror had, as it were, a keener edge than they have for us, and roused a swifter and nobler reaction.” This passage has been quoted in full because it may be said to have a direct and definite bearing on the question of the average level of poetic language during the greater part of the eighteenth century: there were few or no trouvailles, no great discoveries, no sudden releasings of the magic power often lurking unsuspectedly in the most ordinary words, because the poets and versifiers for the most part had all gone wrong in their conception of the medium they essayed to mould. “The substance of poetry,” writes Professor Lowes,[263] “is also the very stuff of words. And in its larger sense as well the language of poetry is made up inevitably of symbols—of symbols for things in terms of other things, for things in terms of feelings, for feelings in terms of things. It is the language not of objects, but of the complex relations of objects. And the agency that moulds it is the ceaselessly active power that is special to poetry only in degree—imagination—that fuses the familiar and the strange, the thing I feel and the thing I see, the world within and the world without, into a tertium quid, that interprets both.” The eighteenth century was not perhaps so emphatically and entirely the “age of prose and reason” as is sometimes thought, but it could scarcely be called the “age of imagination,” and poetry, in its highest sense (“high poetry,” as Maeterlinck would call it), being of imagination all compact, found no abiding place there.
Most words, we may say, potentially possess at least two or more significations, their connotative scope varying according to the knowledge or culture of the speaker or reader. First of all, there is the logical, their plain workaday use, we might call it; and next, and above and beyond all this, they have, so to speak, an exciting force, a power of stimulating and reviving in the mind and memory all the associations that cluster around them. Nearly all words carry with them, in vastly varying degrees, of course, this power of evocation, so that even commonplace terms, words, and phrases hackneyed and worn thin by unceasing usage, may suddenly be invested with a strange and beautiful suggestiveness when they are pressed into the service of the highest poetic imagination. And in the same way the æsthetic appeal of words of great potential value is reinforced and strengthened, when in virtue of their context, or even merely of the word or words to which they are attached, they are afforded a unique opportunity of flashing forth and bringing into play all the mysterious powers and associations gathered to themselves during a long employment in prose and verse, or on the lips of the people:
All the charm of all the muses
often flowering in a lonely word.
Poetry of the highest value and appeal may be, and often is, as we know from concrete examples that flash into the mind, written in commonplace, everyday terms, and we ask ourselves how it is done.[264] There are the mysterious words of the dying Hamlet:
The rest is silence,
or the line quoted by Matthew Arnold[265] as an instance when Wordsworth’s practice is to be found illustrating his theories: