the best and sagest things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect. That what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old, did for their country, I, in my proportion, with this over and above of being a Christian, might do for mine; not caring to be once named abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that, but content with these British islands as my world.' This sentiment was read and echoed by Wordsworth, who consciously tried to take up the work of Milton, and to carry out some of his plans for relating the best and sagest things among his own citizens.1 Hence, even Milton, whose diction is the very antithesis of the 'language of conversation in the lower and middle classes,' and who certainly was responsible for some of the dulcia vitia in the poetry of the eighteenth century, proves upon examination to hold an ideal not altogether different from that of Wordsworth. The difference in their application of it was due to the immense range of Milton's historical and geographical imagination, and to his cosmopolitan culture. What a little group of lakes and hills was to Wordsworth, 'these British islands' were to Milton. He could localize his conceptions no further. As Wordsworth modifies the language of conversation in order to give it the melody and grace of the English poets whom he loves, so Milton raises and harmonizes the homely or over-luxuriant vernacular to the dignity of Greek and Latin.

1 See Prelude 1. 168-169, and the brief preface to Artegal and Elidure.

CHAPTER 2.

POETIC DICTION IN 'MODERN TIMES.'

Milton was the last of the elder poets. Even in his own lifetime, a reform had begun which was to render him almost as obsolete as Spenser and Shakespeare. Despite the efforts of the Elizabethan classicists and purists, English poetry hitherto had never attained to that even simplicity which had been the ideal of many. There were still 'rough and braky seats' between its purple patches of flowery bloom. In Shakespeare there is no such relation between taste and genius, inspiration and moderating good sense, the glowing inner life and the gracious external manner, as that which we find in the tragedies of Sophocles; even in Milton there is an occcasional harshness and irregularity of style which seems crude beside the bright and limpid verse of Homer.1 As the first flush of the wonderful creative energy of the Renaissance died away, this disproportion became more and more evident.2 It was

1

1 From the standpoint of the new school of poetic diction, Phillips, Milton's nephew, refers to 'Spenser, with all his rusty, obsolete words' and his 'rough hewn, clouterly verses,' and Shakespeare 'with all his unfiled expressions' and his 'rambling and indigested fancies' (Spingarn 2. 271). Dryden speaks in a similar tone, though in somewhat less picturesque terms: 'Yet it must be allowed to the present age that the tongue in general is so much refined since Shakespeare's time that many of his words, and more of his phrases, are scarce intelligible. And, of those which we understand, some are ungrammatical, others coarse, and his whole style is so pestered with figurative expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure' (Ker 1. 203).

2

Sprat's analysis of the influence of the Civil Wars upon the language is interesting in this connection: 'The truth is, it has hitherto been a little too carelessly handled, and, I think, has had less labor spent about its polishing than it deserves. Till the time of King Henry the Eighth, there was scarce any man regarded it but Chaucer, and nothing was written in it which one would be

then discovered that, while poets had been singing so sweetly, and speaking so clearly and well, the laws of English prosody and grammar had never been really defined.1 Each man had found them out for himself. The treatises of Gascoigne and Puttenham had been individual willing to read twice but some of his poetry. But then it began to raise itself a little, and to sound tolerably well. From that age down to our late Civil Wars, it was still fashioning and beautifying itself. In the wars themselves (which is a time wherein all languages use, if ever, to increase by extraordinary degrees, for in such busy and active times there arise more new thoughts of men which must be signified and varied by new expressions), then, I say, it received many fantastical terms, which were introduced by our religious sects, and many outlandish phrases, which several writers and translators in that great hurry brought in and made free as they pleased, and withal it was enlarged by many sound and necessary forms and idioms. . . . And now, when men's minds are somewhat settled and their passions allayed, . . if some sober and judicious men would take the whole mass of our language into their hands as they find it, and would set a mark on the ill words, correct those which are to be retained, admit and establish the good, and make some emendations in the accent and grammar, I dare pronounce that our speech would quickly arrive at as much plenty as it is capable to receive, and at the greatest smoothness which its derivation from the rough German will allow it.'-Spingarn 2. 113-14.

1 See William Wotton's review of English grammar down to 1694 (Spingarn 3. 224-225). He says very sensibly: 'For, in the first place, it ought to be considered that every tongue has its own peculiar form as well as its proper words, not communicable to, nor to be regulated by the analogy of another language; wherefore he is the best grammarian who is the perfectest master of the analogy of the language which he is about, and gives the truest rules by which another man may learn it. Next, to apply this to our own tongue, it may certainly be affirmed that the grammar of English is so far our own that skill in the learned languages is not necessary to comprehend it. Ben Jonson was the first man that I know of that did anything considerable in it; but Lyly's grammar was his pattern, and for want of reflecting upon the grounds of a language which he understood as well as any man of his age, he drew it by violence to a dead language that was of a different make, and so left his work imperfect.' Some years before this (in 1679) Dryden had written: 'In the age of that poet [Eschylus] the

efforts only; there had been no general and consistent attempt on the part of the whole literary world to discover exactly what constituted the virtues and vices of poetic style. If the classical and puristic criticism, which had hitherto been the organizing and restraining influence in English verse, was not to fail entirely, it must cease to be general and spasmodic. It was now necessary to descend to minutiæ, and to develop a standard so narrow and definite that its demands should be always quite unmistakable. It was not enough to say that poets should make a judicious selection from the spoken language. All the literary expressions that did not occur in that language must be interdicted one by one, specifically and by name; and the interpretation of the phrase, 'judicious selection', must not be left to the judgment of every scribbler. The wild individualism of the metaphysical school had shown that private judgments were not to be trusted.

Hence came the reform of Dryden and his school. They did not invent a new standard; they merely tried to make the Latin standard inherited from Sidney through Ben Jonson as specific and practical as possible. It was the old war, conducted with slightly different tactics, on the old enemy in a new guise, with substantial re-enforcements from France. Even before the Revolution the sons of Ben, with their doughty sire, had begun to anticipate the conception of a more chastened style and a smoother versification. Ben Jonson seemed to Dryden to illustrate the

Greek language was arrived to its full perfection; they had amongst them an exact standard of writing and speaking. The English language is not capable of such certainty; and we are so far from it that we are wanting in the very foundation of it, a perfect grammar' (Preface to Troilus and Cressida, Ker 1. 203). In 1693 he wrote: 'We have yet no English prosodia, not so much as a tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; so that our language is in a manner barbarous' (ibid. 2. 110).

1

'See Schelling, 'Ben Jonson and the Classical School,' Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc. 13. 235.

ideal of correctness which was to dominate the eighteenth century. Jonson, he said, 'is to be admired for many excellencies; and can be taxed with fewer failings than any English poet." But to the Horatian criticism of the royal Ben was now added the Horatian criticism of Malherbe and Boileau and the new French Academy, which insisted on the need of discarding the tawdry and outworn decorations of the old poetic diction, in favor of a judicious selection from the spoken language. In England, as in France, an attack was directed against distortions and intricacies in all forms of literature. The substitution of general for technical terms and imagery, the elimination of the Latin coinage of Browne and his school,

the attempt to make literature approximate more and more to conversation, the trend toward precision of word and idea these are different phases of the same movement, and all find reasoned expression in the criticism of the period." A certain sobriety and externality in the new criticism was mainly due to the loss of energy which had made the reform necessary and possible. The splendor and bravery of the old lawlessness was gone, and with it some of the freedom and spirit which had animated the stout defenders of the law. But the vivid animation was no longer necessary. Henceforth there was to be a steady and peaceable conquest.

The relation of the criticism of Dryden and Pope to the age of Shakespeare and the aberrations of the metaphysical school may be best described in the language of Petit de Julleville concerning the relation of Malherbe and Boileau

1Ker 1. 138. Dryden notes also that Jonson 'did a little too much Romanize our tongue.'—Ibid. 1. 82.

2 'La principale fonction de l'Académie sera de travailler avec tout le soin et toute la diligence possible, à donner des règles certaines à notre langue, et à la rendre pure, éloquente et capable de traiter les arts et les sciences.'-Quoted by Petit de Julleville from the statutes of the Academy, Histoire 4. 138.