*

overflow for these verses in which the sense is not concluded at the end of one line or of one couplet, but straggles on, at its own free will, until it naturally closes; and I will, if you please, adopt it throughout this course of lectures, as equivalent to the vers enjambé of the French. In its simplest definition, then, the formular difference between the two classes or orders of English poetry is, that the romantic class is of a loose and elastic kind, full of these successive overflows, while the classical is closely confined to the use of distich, that is to say, of regular couplets, within the bounds of each of which the sense is rigidly confined.

It will now be well to show the distinction between these two orders by examples. The passage just quoted from Keats will serve us very well as a specimen of the romantic order. While the wayward music of it is still in our ears, I will contrast it with a few lines from Dryden :

"All human things are subject to decay,

And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey.
This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young
Was called to empire, and had governed long,
In prose and verse was owned, without dispute,
Through all the realms of Nonsense, absolute.
This aged prince, now flourishing in peace
And blest with issue of a large increase,
Worn out with business, did at length debate

To settle the succession of the state;

* Milton describes the same peculiarity in The Verse (Paradise Lost, fifth title-page) as "the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another."

And, pondering which of all his sons was fit
To reign and wage immortal war with wit,
Cried, ''Tis resolved, for Nature pleads that he
Should only rule who most resembles me.'

The temper in which these two writers, Dryden and Keats, are here displayed, is almost identical. I have selected the second piece, because, like the first, it breathes indignation against the mediocrity of poetasters. Our ears will none the less instruct us in a moment that here we have two brilliant artists whose methods, whose ambitions, whose whole conception of style, are at the poles of contrast. Briefly, then, it may be said that each of the manners thus exemplified has been twice in the ascendant in English poetry. The classical, or precise, when poetry first began to be written in modern English; the romantic, when poetry revived under the Tudor monarchs; the classical again from the English Commonwealth to the French Revolution; the romantic again ever since. The subject of our present investigation is confined to the phenomena and history of the second of these changes, that which succeeded the career of Shakespeare, and led to a new fashion which culminated in the art of Pope. That this change occurred is obvious to everybody, but the causes that led to it are so obscure, and even the history of it has hitherto been so little studied, that the inquiry we are about to pursue may be said to be practically a novel one. In un

*Mac-Flecknoe (1682), ll. 1-14.

dertaking it we are confronted by the difficulty which a traveller encounters in attempting minutely to survey a passage of country, part of which is flat and part is hilly. From a distance nothing is easier than to distinguish between plain and acclivity, but when we are on the spot we find ourselves baffled, for these melt into one. It is because we have again retired to a distance from the scene of our survey that the time seems to me to have arrived for a just consideration of the classical school. We can now contemplate in a calm perspective what was too near for the generation of Keats to observe without the injustice of foreshortening.

I have hitherto spoken only of the formal character of the change which took place in English poetry towards the middle of the seventeenth century, and not of its ethical or essential character; because poetry is an art, and must be regarded primarily from an artistic and not from a philosophical point of view. To fail to acknowledge this to be a postulate, is to fall into an error such as a critic of music would make, although a less serious one, if he gave attention to the emotional sentiments awakened in the hearer by the performance, in priority to the science of the harmonical and melodious sounds of which that performance was the executive production. I must therefore dwell a moment longer on the formal character of the change, and beg my readers to consider the marvel of a nation that was free to use in any combination all the endless varieties of iambic and trochaic movement (for the dactylic

and anapæstic* movement was, curiously enough, entirely unknown to the Elizabethans) trammelling themselves by a series of pedantic and artificial rules, the function of which was to reduce to a minimum the effects possible to poetic art.

But this change of form was accompanied by an equally extraordinary change of subject and of treatment. Here, again, where all had been liberty, where no bounds of space or time, no regulations of any kind, had curbed the erratic inclinations of the poets, they suddenly and wilfully shut themselves up between walls of rule, and abandoned the wild woods for stately and mechanical circuits around the box-walks of a labyrinth. For the direct appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific objects, they substituted generalities and second-hand allusions. They no longer mentioned the gilly-flower and the daffodil, but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath. It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising, the gentlemanly expression was, "Cynthia is lifting her silver horn." Women became "nymphs" in this new phraseology, fruits became "the treasures of Pomona," a horse

* I purposely take no note here of the experiments in tumbling rimeless measure made by certain Elizabethans. These were purely exotic, and, even in the hands of Campion himself, neither natural nor successful. I would at the same time guard myself from being supposed to think, though for conscience sake I speak of iambs and dactyls, that we possess real metrical quantity in English.

became "the impatient courser.' The result of coining these conventional counters for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was lost in literature. Apples were the treasures of Pomona, but so were cherries too, and if one wished to allude to peaches, they also were the treasures of Pomona. This decline from particular to general language was regarded as a great gain in elegance. It was supposed that to use one of these genteel tokens which passed for coin of poetic language brought the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity. It was thought that the old direct manner of speaking was crude and futile; that a romantic poet who wished to allude to caterpillars could do so without any exercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the word "caterpillars," whereas the classical poet had to prove that he was a scholar and a gentleman by inventing some circumlocution such as "the crawling scourge that smites the leafy plain." Shaftesbury introduced this exaggerated elegance of diction into the field of prose, and his success increased the foppishness of the poets. It made their vices inveterate, and in course of time the desire politely to

* It may be noticed that it is in the Cyder of John Philips (written in 1699) that this pompous and allusive language is first used without stint or shame. Philips united two strains of influence, that of Waller and that of Paradise Lost, and introduced into Augustan poetry the sub-Miltonic phraseology which took so fast a hold of the eighteenth century. He had not learned, however, to avoid the exact expression, and names his peaches and walnuts like a market-gardener.