We may interpret the struggle thus allegorically expressed by saying that a new age, increasingly scientific and rational in its outlook, felt it was high time to analyze critically and accurately the traditional canons and ideals of form and matter that classical learning, since the Renaissance, had been able to impose upon literature. This is not to say that seventeenth century writers and critics suddenly decided that all the accepted standards were radically wrong, and should be thrown overboard; but some of them at least showed and expressed themselves dissatisfied, and, alongside of the unconscious and, as it were, instinctive changes that reflected the spirit of the age, there were deliberate efforts to re-fashion both the matter and the manner of literary expression, to give creative literature new laws and new ideals.[2]
The movement towards purity and simplicity of expression received its first definite statement in Thomas Sprat’s “History of the Royal Society, 1667.” One section of the History contains an account of the French Academy, and Sprat’s efforts were directed towards the formation of a similar body in England as an arbiter in matters of language and style. The ideal was to be the expression of “so many things almost in an equal number of words.”[3] A Committee of the Royal Society, which included Dryden, Evelyn, and Sprat amongst its members, had already met in 1664, to discuss ways and means of “improving the English tongue,” and it was the discussions of this committee which had doubtless led up to Evelyn’s letter to Sir Peter Wyche, its chairman, in June 1665.[4] Evelyn there gives in detail his ideas of what an English academy, acting as arbiter in matters of vocabulary and style, might do towards purifying the language. Twenty-three years later Joseph Glanvill defined the new ideal briefly in a passage of his “Essay Concerning Preaching”: “Plainness is a character of great latitude and stands in opposition, First to hard words: Secondly, to deep and mysterious notions: Thirdly, to affected Rhetorications: and Fourthly, to Phantastical Phrases.”[5] In short, the ideal to be aimed at was the precise and definite language of experimental science, but the trend of the times tended to make it more and more that ideal of poetry also which was later to be summed up in Dryden’s definition of “wit” as a “propriety of thoughts and words.”[6]
It is of some little interest perhaps to note that it is not until the end of the seventeenth century that the word diction definitely takes on the sense which it now usually bears as a term of literary criticism. In the preface to “Sylvae, or The Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies” (1685), Dryden even seems to regard the term as not completely naturalized.[7] Moreover, the critics and poets of the eighteenth century were for the most part quite convinced that the special language of poetry had begun with Dryden. Johnson asserted this in his usual dogmatic fashion, and thus emphasized the doctrine, afterwards vigorously opposed by Wordsworth, that between the language of prose, and that proper to poetry, there is a sharp distinction. “There was therefore before the time of Dryden no poetical diction.... Those happy combinations of words which distinguished poetry from prose had been rarely attempted; we had few elegancies or flowers of speech.”[8] Gray moreover, while agreeing that English poetry had now a language of its own, declared in a letter to West that this special language was the creation of a long succession of English writers themselves, and especially of Shakespeare and Milton, to whom (he asserts) Pope and Dryden were greatly indebted.[9]
It is not very difficult to understand Dryden’s own attitude, as laid down in the various Prefaces. He is quite ready to subscribe to the accepted neo-classical views on the language of poetry, but characteristically reserves for himself the right to reject them, or to take up a new line, if he thinks his own work, or that of his contemporaries, is likely to benefit thereby. Thus in the preface to “Annus Mirabilis” (1666) he boldly claims the liberty to coin words on Latin models, and to make use of technical details.[10] In his apology for “Heroic Poetry and Poetic License” (1677) prefixed to “The State of Innocence and Fall of Man,” his operatic “tagging” of “Paradise Lost,” he seems to lay down distinctly the principle that poetry demands a medium of its own, distinct from that of prose,[11] whilst towards the end of his literary career he reiterates his readiness to enrich his poetic language from any and every source, for “poetry requires ornament,” and he is therefore willing to “trade both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our native language.”[12] But it is significant that at the same time he rejects the technical terms he had formerly advocated, apparently on the grounds that such terms would be unfamiliar to “men and ladies of the first quality.” Dryden has thus become more “classical,” in the sense that he has gone over or reverted to the school of “general” terms, which appeared to base its ideal of expression on the accepted language of cultured speakers and writers.[13]
Toward the establishment of this principle of the pseudo-classical creed the theory and practice of Pope naturally contributed; indeed, it has been claimed that it was in large measure the result of the profound effect of the “Essay on Criticism,” or at least of the current of thought which it represents, on the taste of the age.[14] In the Essay, Pope, after duly enumerating the various “idols” of taste in poetical thought and diction, clearly states his own doctrine; as the poets’ aim was the teaching of “True Wit” or “Nature,” the language used must be universal and general, and neologisms must be regarded as heresies. For Pope, as for Dryden, universal and general language meant such as would appeal to the cultured society for whom he wrote,[15] and in his practice he thus reflected the traditional attitude towards the question of language as a vehicle of literary expression. A common “poetics” drawn and formulated by the classical scholars mainly (and often incorrectly) from Aristotle had established itself throughout Western Europe, and it professed to prescribe the true relation which should exist between form and matter, between the creative mind and the work of art.[16]
The critical reaction against these traditional canons had, as we have noted, already begun, but Pope and his contemporaries are in the main supporters of the established order, in full agreement with its guiding principle that the imitation of “Nature” should be the chief aim and end of art. It is scarcely necessary to add that it was not “Nature” in the Wordsworthian sense that was thus to be “imitated”; sometimes, indeed, it is difficult to discover what was meant by the term. But for Pope and his followers we usually find it to mean man as he lives his life in this world, and the phrase to “imitate Nature” might thus have an ethical purpose, signifying the moral “improvement” of man.
But to appreciate the full significance of this “doctrine,” and its eighteenth century interpretation, it is necessary to glance at the Aristotelian canon in which it had its origin. For Aristotle poetry was an objective “imitation” with a definite plan or purpose, of human actions, not as they are, but as they ought to be. The ultimate aim, then, according to the Poetics, is ideal truth, stripped of the local and the accidental; Nature is to be improved upon with means drawn from Nature herself. This theory, as extracted and interpreted by the Italian and French critics of the Renaissance, was early twisted into a notion of poetry as an agreeable falsity, and by the end of the seventeenth century it had come to mean, especially with the French, the imitation of a selected and embellished Nature, not directly, but rather through the medium of those great writers of antiquity, such as Homer and Virgil, whose works provided the received and recognized models of idealized nature.[17]
As a corollary to this interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of ideal imitation, there appeared a tendency to ignore more and more the element of personal feeling in poetry,[18] and to concentrate attention on the formal elements of the art. This tendency, reinforced by the authority of the Horatian tag, ut pictura poesis (“as is painting, so is poetry”), led naturally, and in an ever-increasing degree, to the formal identification of poetry with painting. Critics became accustomed to discussing the elements in the art of writing that correspond to the other elements in pictorial art, such as light, colour, expression, etc. And as the poet was to be an imitator of accepted models, so also he was to be imitative and traditional in using poetical colouring, in which phrase were included, as Dryden wrote, “the words, the expressions, the tropes and figures, the versification, and all the other elegancies of sound.”[19] That this parallelism directly encourages the growth of a set “poetic diction” is obvious; the poet’s language was not to be a reflection of a genuine emotion felt in the mind for his words, phrases, and figures of speech, his operum colores,[20] he must not look to Nature but to models. In brief, a poetical gradus, compiled from accepted models, was to be the ideal source on which the poet was to draw for his medium of expression.
It is not necessary to dwell long on this pseudo-classical confusion of the two arts, as revealed in the critical writings of Western Europe down to the very outbreak of the Romantic revolt.[21] In English criticism, Dryden’s “Parallel” was only one of many. Of the eighteenth century English critics who developed a detailed parallelism between pictorial and plastic art on the one hand and poetry on the other, maintaining that their standards were interchangeable, the most important perhaps is Spence, whose “Polymetis” appeared in 1747, and who sums the general position of his fellow-critics on this point in the remark, “Scarce anything can be good in a poetical description which would appear absurd if represented in a statue or picture.”[22] The ultimate outcome of this confusion of poetry and painting found its expression in the last decade of the eighteenth century in the theory and practice of Erasmus Darwin, whose work, “The Botanic Garden,” consisted of a “second part,” “The Loves of the Plants,” published in 1789, two years before its inclusion with the “first part” the “Economy of Vegetation,” in one volume. Darwin’s theory of poetry is contained in the “Interludes” between the cantos of his poems, which take the form of dialogues between the “Poet” and a “Bookseller.” In the Interlude to Canto 1 of Part II (“The Loves of the Plants”) he maintains the thesis that poetry is a process of painting to the eye, and in the cantos themselves he proceeds with great zeal to show in practice how words and images should be laid on like pigments from the outside. The young Wordsworth himself, as his early poems show, was influenced by the theory and practice of Darwin, but Coleridge was not slow to detect the danger of the elaborate word-painting that might arise from the confusion of the two arts. “The poet,” he wrote,[23] “should paint to the Imagination and not to the Fancy.” For Coleridge Fancy was the “Drapery” of poetic genius, Imagination was its “Soul” or its “synthetic and magical power,”[24] and he thus emphasized what may be regarded as one of the chief distinctions between the pseudo-classical, and the romantic, interpretations of the language of poetry. In its groping after the “grand style,” as reflected in a deliberate avoidance of accidental and superficial “particularities,” and in its insistence on generalized or abstract forms, eighteenth century poetry, or at least the “neo-classical” portion of it, reflected its inability to achieve that intensity of imaginative conception which is the supreme need of all art.
The confusion between the two arts of poetry and painting which Coleridge thus condemned did not, it is needless to say, disappear with the eighteenth century. The Romanticists themselves finally borrowed that much-abused phrase “local colour” from the technical vocabulary of the painter, and in other respects the whole question became merged in the symbolism of the nineteenth century where literature is to be seen attempting to do the work of both music and painting.[25]