As regards the language of poetry then—its vocabulary, the actual words in which it was to be given expression—the early eighteenth century had first this pseudo-classical doctrine of a treasury of select words, phrases, and other “ornaments,” a doctrine which was to receive splendid emphasis and exemplification in Pope’s translation of Homer. But alongside of this ideal of style there was another ideal which Pope again, as we have seen, had insisted upon in his “Essay on Criticism,” and which demanded that the language of poetry should in general conform to that of cultivated conversation and prose. These two ideals of poetical language can be seen persisting throughout the eighteenth century, though later criticism, in its haste to condemn the gradus ideal, has not often found time to do justice to the other.
But, apart from these general considerations, the question of poetic diction is rarely treated as a thing per se by the writers who, after Dryden or Pope, or alongside of them, took up the question. There are no attempts, in the manner of the Elizabethans,[26] to conduct a critical inquiry into the actual present resources of the vernacular, and its possibilities as a vehicle of expression. Though the attention is more than once directed to certain special problems, on the whole the discussions are of a general nature, and centre round such points as the language suitable for an Heroic Poem, or for the “imitation” of aspects of nature, or for Descriptive Poetry, questions which had been discussed from the sixteenth century onwards, and were not exhausted by the time of Dr. Johnson.[27]
Goldsmith’s remarks, reflecting as they do a sort of half-way attitude between the old order and the new, are interesting. Poetry has a language of its own; it is a species of painting with words, and hence he will not condemn Pope for “deviating in some instances from the simplicity of Homer,” whilst such phrases as the sighing reed, the warbling rivulet, the gushing spring, the whispering breeze are approvingly quoted.[28] It is thus somewhat surprising to find that in his “Life of Parnell” he had pilloried certain “misguided innovators” to whose efforts he attributed the gradual debasing of poetical language since the happy days when Dryden, Addison, and Pope had brought it to its highest pitch of refinement.[29] These writers had forgotten that poetry is “the language of life” and that the simplest expression was the best: brief statements which, if we knew what Goldsmith meant by “life,” would seem to adumbrate the theories which Wordsworth was to expound as the Romantic doctrine.
Dr. Johnson has many things to say on the subject of poetic language, including general remarks and particular judgments on special points, or on the work of the poets of whom he treated in his “Lives.” As might be expected, he clings tenaciously to the accepted standards of neo-classicism, and repeats the old commonplaces which had done duty for so long, pays the usual tribute to Waller and Denham, but ascribes the actual birth of poetical diction to the practice of Dryden. What Johnson meant by “poetical diction” is clearly indicated; it was a “system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to different arts,”[30] that is, the language of poetry must shun popular and technical words, since language is “the dress of thought” and “splendid ideas lose their magnificence if they are conveyed by low and vulgar words.”[31] From this standpoint, and reinforced by his classical preference for regular rhymes,[32] all his particular judgments of his predecessors and contemporaries were made; and when this is remembered it is easier to understand, for instance, his praise of Akenside[33] and his criticism of Collins.[34]
Gray, however, perhaps the most scrupulous and precise of all our poets with regard to the use of words in poetry,[35] has some pertinent things to say on the matter. There is his important letter to West, already referred to, with its dogmatic assertion that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry,” and that “our poetry has a language to itself,” an assertion which, with other remarks of Gray, helps to emphasize the distinction to be made between the two ideals of poetical diction to be seen persisting through the eighteenth century. It was generally agreed that there must be a special language for poetry, with all its artificial “heightening,” “licenses,” and variations from the language of prose, to serve the purpose of the traditional “Kinds,” especially the Epic and the Lyric. This is the view taken by Gray, but with a difference. He does not accept the conventional diction which Pope’s “Homer” had done so much to perpetuate, and hence he creates a poetic language of his own, a glittering array of words and phrases, blending material from varied sources, and including echoes and reminiscences of Milton and Dryden.
The second ideal of style was that of which, as we have seen, the canons had been definitely stated by Pope, and which had been splendidly exemplified in the satires, essays, and epistles. The aim was to reproduce “the colloquial idiom of living society,”[36] and the result was a plain, unaffected style, devoid of the ornaments of the poetic language proper, and, in its simplicity and directness, equally suitable for either poetry or prose. Gray could make use of this vehicle of expression, whenever, as in “The Long Story,” or the fragmentary “Alliance of Education and Government,” it was suitable and adequate for his purpose; but in the main his own practice stood distinct from both the eighteenth century ideals of poetical language. Hence, as it conformed to neither of the accepted standards, Goldsmith and Johnson agreed in condemning his diction, which was perhaps in itself sufficient proof that Gray had struck out a new language for himself.
Among the special problems connected with the diction of poetry to which the eighteenth century critics directed their attention, that of the use of archaic and obsolete words was prominent. It had been one of the methods by which the Elizabethans had hoped to enrich their language, but contemporary critics had expressed their disapproval, and it was left to Jonson, in this as in other similar matters, to express the reasonable view that “the eldest of the present and the newest of the past language is best.”[37] Dryden, when about to turn the “Canterbury Tales” “into our language as it is now refined,”[38] was to express a similar common-sense view. “When an ancient word,” he said, with his Horace no doubt in his mind, “for its sound and significancy deserves to be revived, I have that reasonable veneration for antiquity to restore it. All beyond this is superstition.”
A few years later the long series of Spenserian imitations had begun, so that the question of the poetic use of archaic and obsolete words naturally came into prominence. Pope, as might be expected, is to be found among the opposition, and in the “Dunciad” he takes the opportunity of showing his contempt for this kind of writing by a satiric gird, couched in supposedly archaic language:
But who is he in closet close y-pent
Of sober face with learned dust besprent?