Goldsmith too had his misgivings. “I dislike the imitations of our old English poets in general,” he wrote with reference to “The Schoolmistress,” “yet, on this minute subject, the antiquity of the style produces a very ludicrous solemnity.”[44]
On this matter of poetic archaism, the point of view of the average cultured reader, as distinct from the writer, is probably accurately represented in one of Chesterfield’s letters. Writing to his son,[45] he was particularly urgent that those words only should be employed which were found in the writers of the Augustan age, or of the age immediately preceding. To enforce his point he carefully explained to the boy the distinction between the pedant and the gentleman who is at the same time a scholar; the former affected rare words found only in the pages of obscure or antiquated authors rather than those used by the great classical writers.
This was the attitude adopted in the main by William Cowper, who, after an early enthusiasm for the “quaintness” of old words, when first engaged on his translation of Homer, later repented and congratulated himself on having, in his last revisal, pruned away every “single expression of the obsolete kind.”[46] But against these opinions we have to set the frankly romantic attitude of Thomas Warton, who, in his “Observations on the Faerie Queen” (1754), boldly asserts that “if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported,” whilst he is quite confident that Spenser’s language is not so difficult and obsolete as it is generally supposed to be.[47]
Here and there we also come across references to other devices by which the poet is entitled to add to his word-power. Thus Addison grants the right of indulging in coinages, since this is a practice sanctioned by example, especially by that of Homer and Milton.[48] Pope considered that only such of Homer’s compound epithets as could be “done literally into English without destroying the purity of our language” or those with good literary sanctions should be adopted.[49] Gray, however, enters a caveat against coinages; in the letter to Beattie, already quoted, he objects to the word “infuriated,” and adds a warning not to “make new words without great necessity; it is very hazardous at best.”
Finally, as a legacy or survival of that veneration for the “heroic poem,” which had found its latest expression in Davenant’s “Preface to Gondibert”[50] (1650), the question of technical words is occasionally touched upon. Dryden, who had begun by asserting that general terms were often a mere excuse for ignorance, could later give sufficient reasons for the avoidance of technical terms,[51] and it is not surprising to find that Gray was of a similar opinion. In his criticism of Beattie’s “Minstrel” he objects to the terms medium and incongruous as being words of art, which savour too much of prose. Gray, we may presume, did not object to such words because they were not “elegant,” or even mainly because they were “technical” expressions. He would reject them because, for him, with his keen sense of the value of words, they were too little endowed with poetic colour and imagination. When these protests are remembered, the great and lasting popularity of “The Shipwreck” (1762) of William Falconer, with its free employment of nautical words and phrases, may be considered to possess a certain significance in the history of the Romantic reaction. The daring use of technical terms in the poem must have given pleasure to a generation of readers accustomed mainly to the conventional words and phrases of the accepted diction.
When we review the “theory” of poetical language in the eighteenth century, as revealed in the sayings, direct and indirect, of poets and critics, we feel that there is little freshness or originality in the views expressed, very little to suggest the changes that were going on underneath, and which were soon to find their first great and reasoned expression. Nominally, it would seem that the views of the eighteenth century “classicists” were adequately represented and summed up in those of Johnson, for whom the ideal of poetical language was that which Dryden had “invented,” and of which Pope had made such splendid use in his translation of Homer. In reality, the practice of the “neo-classical” poets was largely influenced by the critical tenets of the school to which they belonged, especially by that pseudo-Aristotelian doctrine according to which poetry was to be an “imitation” of the best models, whilst its words, phrases, and similes were to be such as were generally accepted and consecrated by poetic use. It was this conventionalism, reinforced by, as well as reflecting, the neo-classical outlook on external nature, that resulted in the “poetic diction” which Wordsworth attacked, and it is important to note that a similar stereotyped language is to be found in most of the contemporary poetry of Western Europe, and especially in that of France.[52]
We need not be surprised, therefore, to find that neither Johnson, nor any of his “classical” contemporaries, appears to attach any importance to the fact that Pope in his essays and epistles had set up a standard of diction, of which it is not too much to say that it was an ideal vehicle of expression for the thoughts and feelings it had to convey. So enamoured were they of the pomp and glitter of the “Homer” that they apparently failed to see in this real “Pope style” an admirable model for all writers aiming at lucidity, simplicity, and directness of thought. We may see this clearly by means of an instructive comparison of Johnson’s judgments on the two “Pope styles.” “It is remarked by Watts,” he writes, “that there is scarcely a happy combination of words or a phrase poetically elegant in the English language which Pope has not inserted into his version of Homer.”[53] On the other hand, he is perhaps more than unjust to Pope’s plain didactic style when he speaks of the “harshness of diction,” the “levity without elegance” of the “Essay on Man.”[54]
It was not until the neo-classical poetry was in its death-agony that we meet with adequate appreciation of the admirable language which Pope brought to perfection and bequeathed to his successors. “The familiar style,” wrote Cowper to Unwin,[55] “is of all the styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose without being prosaic—to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of the rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.” The “familiar style,” which Cowper here definitely characterizes, was in its own special province as good a model as was the beautiful simplicity of Blake when “poetical poetry” had once more come into its own; and it is important to remember that this fact received due recognition from both Wordsworth and Coleridge. “The mischief,” wrote the former,[56] “was effected not by Pope’s satirical and moral pieces, for these entitle him to the highest place among the poets of his class; it was by his ‘Homer.’... No other work in the language so greatly vitiated the diction of English poetry.” And Coleridge, too, called attention to the “almost faultless position and choice of words” in Pope’s original compositions, in comparison with the absurd “pseudo-poetic diction” of his translations of Homer.[57] The “Pope style” failed to produce real poetry—poetry of infinite and universal appeal, animated with personal feeling and emotion not merely because of its preference for the generic rather than the typical, but because its practitioners for the most part lacked those qualities of intense imagination in which alone the highest art can have its birth.