After a long literary revolt--one of the recurrences of imperishable Romance--against the eighteenth-century authors, a reaction was due, and it has come about roundly. We are guided back to admiration of the measure and moderation and shapeliness of the Augustan age. And indeed it is well enough that we should compare--not necessarily check--some of our habits of thought and verse by the mediocrity of thought and perfect propriety of diction of Pope's best contemporaries. If this were all! But the eighteenth century was not content with its sure and certain genius. Suddenly and repeatedly it aspired to a "noble rage." It is not to the wild light hearts of the seventeenth century that we must look for extreme conceits and for extravagance, but to the later age, to the faultless, to the frigid, dissatisfied with their own propriety. There were straws, I confess, in the hair of the older poets; the eighteenth- century men stuck straws in their periwigs.
That time--surpassing and correcting the century then just past in "taste"--was resolved to make a low leg to no age, antique or modern, in the chapter of the passions--nay, to show the way, to fire the nations. Addison taught himself, as his hero "taught the doubtful battle," "where to rage." And in the later years of the same literary century Johnson himself summoned the lapsed and alien and reluctant fury. Take such a word as "madded"--"the madded land"; there indeed is a word created for the noble rage, as the eighteenth century understood it. Look you, Johnson himself could lodge the fury in his responsible breast:
And dubious title shakes the madded land.
There is no author of that time of moderation and good sense who does not thus more or less eat a crocodile. It is not necessary to go to the bad poets; we need go no lower than the good.
And gasping Furies thirst for blood in vain,
says Pope seriously (but the sense of burlesque never leaves the reader). Also
There purple vengeance bath'd in gore retires.
In the only passage of the _Dunciad_ meant to be poetic and not ironic and spiteful, he has "the panting gales" of a garden he describes. Match me such an absurdity among the "conceits" of the age preceding!
A noble and ingenious author, so called by high authority but left anonymous, pretends (it is always pretending with these people, never fine fiction or a frank lie) that on the tomb of Virgil he had had a vision of that deceased poet:
Crowned with eternal bays my ravished eyes
Beheld the poet's awful form arise.
Virgil tells the noble and ingenious one that if Pope will but write upon some graver themes,
Envy to black Cocytus shall retire
And howl with furies in tormenting fire.
"Genius," says another authoritative writer in prose, "is caused by a furious joy and pride of soul."
If, leaving the great names, we pass in review the worse poets we find, in Pope's essay "On the Art of Sinking in Poetry," things like these, gathered from the grave writings of his contemporaries:
In flaming heaps the raging ocean rolls,
Whose livid waves involve despairing souls;
The liquid burnings dreadful colours shew,
Some deeply red, and others faintly blue.
And a war-horse!
His eye-balls burn, he wounds the smoking plain,
And knots of scarlet ribbon deck his mane.
And a demon!
Provoking demons all restraint remove.
Here is more eighteenth-century "propriety":
The hills forget they're fixed, and in their fright
Cast off their weight, and ease themselves for flight.
The woods, with terror winged, out-fly the wind,
And leave the heavy, panting hills behind.
Again, from Nat Lee's _Alexander the Great_:
When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood
Perched on my beaver in the Granic flood;
When Fortune's self my standard trembling bore,
And the pale Fates stood 'frighted on the shore.
Of these lines, with another couplet, Dr. Warburton said that they "contain not only the most sublime but the most judicious imagery that poetry could conceive or paint." And here are lines from a tragedy, for me anonymous:
Should the fierce North, upon his frozen wings,
Bear him aloft above the wondering clouds,
And seat him in the Pleiads' golden chariot,
Thence should my fury drag him down to tortures.
Again:
Kiss, while I watch thy swimming eye-balls roll,
Watch thy last gasp, and catch thy springing soul.
It was the age of common-sense, we are told, and truly; but of common- sense now and then dissatisfied, common-sense here and there ambitious, common-sense of a distinctively adult kind taking on an innocent tone. I find this little affectation in Pope's word "sky" where a simpler poet would have "skies" or "heavens." Pope has "sky" more than once, and always with a little false air of simplicity. And one instance occurs in that masterly and most beautiful poem, the "Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady":
Is there no bright reversion in the sky?
"Yes, my boy, we may hope so," is the reader's implicit mental aside, if the reader be a man of humour. Let me, however, suggest no disrespect towards this lovely elegy, of which the last eight lines have an inimitable greatness, a tenderness and passion which the "Epistle of Eloisa" makes convulsive movements to attain but never attains. And yet how could one, by an example, place the splendid seventeenth century in closer--in slighter yet more significant--comparison with the eighteenth than thus? Here is Ben Jonson:
What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew,
Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?
And this is Pope's improvement:
What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?
But Pope follows this insipid couplet with two lines as exquisitely and nobly modulated as anything I know in that national metre:
'Tis she! but why that bleeding bosom gored,
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?
That indeed is "music" in English verse--the counterpart of a great melody, not of a tune.
The eighteenth century matched its desire for wildness in poetry with a like craving in gardens. The symmetrical and architectural garden, so magnificent in Italy, and stately though more rigid and less glorious in France, was scorned by the eighteenth-century poet-gardeners. Why? Because it was "artificial," and the eighteenth century must have "nature"--nay passion. There seems to be some plan of passion in Pope's grotto, stuck with spar and little shells.
Truly the age of the "Rape of the Lock" and the "Elegy" was an age of great wit and great poetry. Yet it was untrue to itself. I think no other century has cherished so persistent a self-conscious incongruity. As the century of good sense and good couplets it might have kept uncompromised the dignity we honour. But such inappropriate pranks have come to pass in history now and again. The Bishop of Hereford, in merry Barnsdale, "danced in his boots"; but he was coerced by Robin Hood.
[The end]
Alice Meynell's essay: The Century Of Moderation