THE “STOCK” DICTION OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY
Since the time when Wordsworth launched his manifestoes on the language
fit and proper for poetry, it may almost be said that whenever the term
“poetic diction” is found used as a more or less generic term of critical
disparagement, it has been with reference, implied or explicit, to the
so-called classical poetry of the Augustan ages. But the condemnation has
perhaps been given too wide an application, and hence there has arisen a
tendency to place in this category all the language of all the poets who
were supposed to have taken Pope as their model, so that “the Pope style”
and “eighteenth century diction” have almost become synonymous terms, as
labels for a lifeless, imitative language in which poets felt themselves
constrained to express all their thoughts and feelings. This criticism is
both unjust and misleading. For when this “false and gaudy splendour” is
unsparingly condemned, it is not always recognized or remembered that it
is mainly to be found in the descriptive poetry of the period.
It is sufficient to glance at the descriptive verse of practically
all the typical “classical” poets to discover how generally true this
statement is. We cannot say, of course, that the varied sights and sounds
of outdoor life made no appeal at all to them; but what we do feel is
that whenever they were constrained to indulge in descriptive verse
they either could not, or would not, try to convey their impressions in
language of their very own, but were content in large measure to draw
upon a common stock of dead and colourless epithets. Local colour, in the
sense of accurate and particular observation of natural facts, is almost
entirely lacking; there is no writing with the eye on the object, and it
has been well remarked that their highly generalized descriptions could
be transferred from poet to poet or from scene to scene, without any
injustice. Thus Shenstone[58] describes his birthplace:
Romantic scenes of pendent hills
And verdant vales, and falling rills,
And mossy banks, the fields adorn
Where Damon, simple swain, was born—
a quatrain which, with little or no change of epithet, was the common
property of the versifiers, and may be met with almost everywhere in
early eighteenth century poetry. Every type of English scenery and every
phase of outdoor life finds its description in lines of this sort, where
the reader instinctively feels that the poet has not been careful to
record his individual impressions or emotions, but has contented himself
with accepting epithets and phrases consecrated to the use of natural
description. A similar inability or indifference is seen even in the
attempts to re-fashion Chaucer, or the Bible, or other old material,
where the vigour and freshness and colour of the originals might have
been expected to exercise a salutary influence. But to no purpose: all
must be cast in the one mould, and clothed in the elegant diction of
the time. Thus in Dryden’s modernization of the “Canterbury Tales” the
beautiful simplicity of Chaucer’s descriptions of the sights and sounds
of nature vanishes when garbed in the rapid and conventional phrases and
locutions of the classicists. Chaucer’s “briddes” becomes “the painted
birds,” a “goldfinch” is amplified into a “goldfinch with gaudy pride of
painted plumes,” whilst a plain and simple mention of sunrise, “at the
sun upriste,” has to be paraphrased into
Aurora had but newly chased the night
And purpled o’er the sky with blushing light.
The old ballads and the Psalms suffered severely in the same way.[59]
The fact that the words most frequently used in this stock poetic
diction have usually some sort of connexion with dress or ornament has
not escaped notice, and it has its own significance. It is, as it were,
a reflex of the fact that the nature poetry of the period is in large
measure the work of writers to whom social life is the central fact of
existence, for whom meadow, and woodland, and running water, mountain
and sea, the silent hills, and the starry sky brought no inspiration, or
at least no inspiration powerful enough to lead them to break through
the shackles of conventionality imposed upon them by the taste of their
age. Words like “paint” and “painted,” “gaudy,” “adorn,” “deck,” “gilds”
and “gilded,” “damasked,” “enamelled,” “embroidered,” and dozens similar
form the stock vocabulary of natural description; apart from the best of
Akenside, and the works of one or two writers such as John Cunningham,
it can safely be said that but few new descriptive terms were added to
the “nature vocabulary” of English poetry during this period. How far
English poetry is yet distant from a recognition of the sea as a source
of poetic inspiration may be perhaps seen from the fact that its most
frequent epithet is the feeble term “watery,” whilst the magic of the sky
by night or day evokes no image other than one that can be expressed by
changes rung on such words as “azure,” “concave,” “serene,” “ætherial.”
Even in “Night Thoughts,” where the subject might have led to something
new and fresh in the way of a “star-vocabulary,” the best that Young can
do is to take refuge in such periphrases as “tuneful spheres,” “nocturnal
sparks,” “lucid orbs,” “ethereal armies,” “mathematic glories,” “radiant
choirs,” “midnight counsellors,” etc.
And the same lack of direct observation and individual expression is
obvious whenever the classicists have to mention birds or animals. Wild
life had to wait for White of Selborne, and for Blake and Burns and
Cowper and Wordsworth, to be observed with accuracy and treated with
sympathy; and it has been well remarked that if we are to judge from
their verse, most of the poets of the first quarter of the eighteenth
century knew no bird except the goldfinch or nightingale, and even these
probably only by hearsay. For the same generalized diction is usually
called upon, and birds are merely a “feathered,” “tuneful,” “plumy”
or “warbling” choir, whilst a periphrasis, allowing of numerous and
varied labels for the same animal, is felt to be the correct thing. In
Dryden sheep are “the woolly breed” or “the woolly race”; bees are the
“industrious kind” or “the frugal kind”; pigs are “the bristly care” or
“the tusky kind”; frogs are “the loquacious race”; crows, “the craven
kind,” and so on: “the guiding principle seems to be that nothing must be
mentioned by its own name.”[60]
Many of these stock epithets owed their appearance of course to the
requirements imposed upon poets by their adherence to the heroic couplet.
Pope himself calls attention to the fact that the necessities of rhyme
led to the unceasing repetition of stereotyped phrases and locutions:
Where’er you find the “cooling western breeze.”
In the next line it “whispers through the trees”;
If crystal streams “with pleasing murmur creep”
The reader’s threaten’d, not in vain, with “sleep”—
adducing, with unconscious irony, the very rhymes prevalent in much of
his own practice.[61]
It was also recognized by the versifiers that the indispensable polish
and “correctness” of the decasyllabic line could only be secured by a
mechanical use of epithets in certain positions. “There is a vast beauty
[to me],” wrote Shenstone, “in using a word of a particular nature in
the 8th and 9th syllable of an English verse. I mean what is virtually a
dactyl. For instance,
And pykes, the tyrants of the wat’ry plains.
Let any person of any ear substitute _liquid_ for _wat’ry_ and he will
find the disadvantage.”[62] Saintsbury has pointed out[63] that the
“drastic but dangerous device of securing the undulating penetration
of the line by the use of the _gradus_ epithet was one of the chief
causes of the intensely artificial character of the versification and
its attendant diction.... There are passages in the ‘Dispensary’ and
‘The Rape of the Lock,’ where you can convert the decasyllable into the
octosyllable for several lines together without detriment to sense or
poetry by simply taking out these specious superfluities.”
In the year of Dryden’s death (or perhaps in the following year) there
had appeared the “Art of Poetry” by Edward Bysshe, whose metrical
laws were generally accepted, as authoritative, during the eighteenth
century. During the forty years of Dryden’s literary career the
supremacy of the stopped regular decasyllabic couplet had gradually
established itself as the perfect form of verse. But Bysshe was the first
prosodist to formulate the “rules” of the couplet, and in doing so he
succeeded, probably because his views reflected the general prosodic
tendencies of the time, in “codifying and mummifying” a system which
soon became erected into a creed. “The foregoing rules (_of accent on
the even places and pause mainly at the 4th, 5th, or 6th syllable_)
ought indispensably to be followed in all our verses of 10 syllables:
and the observation of them will produce Harmony, the neglect of them
harshness and discord.”[64] Into this rigid mechanical mould contemporary
and succeeding versifiers felt themselves constrained to place their
couplets. But to pad out their lines they were nearly always beset with
a temptation to use the trochaic epithets, of which numerous examples
have been given above. As a natural result such epithets soon became part
and parcel of the poetic stock of language, and hence most of them were
freely used by poets, not because of any intrinsic poetic value, but
because they were necessary to comply with the absurd mechanics of their
vehicle of expression.
Since the “Lives of the Poets” it has been customary to regard this
“poetic diction” as the peculiar invention of the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth century, and especially of Dryden and Pope, a belief
largely due to Johnson’s eulogies of these poets. As an ardent admirer of
the school of Dryden and Pope, it was only natural that Johnson should
express an exalted opinion of their influence on the poetic practice
of his contemporaries. But others—Gray amongst them—did not view their
innovations with much complacency, and towards the end of the century
Cowper was already foreshadowing the attack to be made by Wordsworth and
Coleridge in the next generation. To Pope’s influence, he says in effect,
after paying his predecessor a more or less formal compliment, was due
the stereotyped form both of the couplet and of much of the language in
which it was clothed. Pope had made
poetry a mere mechanic art
And every warbler had his tune by heart;
and in one of his letters he stigmatizes and pillories the inflated and
stilted phraseology of Pope, and especially his translation of Homer.[65]
Finally, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed in ascribing the “poetical
diction,” against which their manifestoes were directed, to that source.
It is to be admitted that Pope’s translation is to some extent open
to the charge brought against it of corrupting the language with a
meretricious standard of poetic diction. In his Preface he expresses his
misgivings as to the language fit and proper for an English rendering of
Homer, and indeed it is usually recognized that his diction was, to a
certain extent, imposed upon him both by the nature of his original, as
well as by the lack of elasticity in his closed couplet. To the latter
cause was doubtless due, not only the use of stock epithets to fill out
the line, but also the inevitable repetition of certain words, due to
the requirements of rhyme, even at the expense of straining or distorting
their ordinary meaning. Thus _train_, for instance, on account of its
convenience as a rhyming word, is often used to signify “a host,” or
“body,” and similarly _plain_, _main_, for the ocean. In this connexion
it has also been aptly pointed out that some of the defects resulted from
the fact that Pope had founded his own epic style on that of the Latin
poets, whose manner is most opposed to Homer’s. Thus he often sought to
deck out or expand simple thoughts or commonplace situations by using
what he no doubt considered really “poetical language,” and thus, for
instance, where Homer simply says, “And the people perished,” Pope has
to say, “And heaped the camp with mountains of the dead.” The repeated
use of periphrases: _feathered fates_, for “arrows”; _fleecy breed_ for
“sheep”; _the wandering nation of a summer’s day_ for “insects”; _the
beauteous kind_ for “women”; _the shining mischief_ for “a fascinating
woman”; _rural care_ for “the occupations of the shepherd”; _the social
shades_ for “the ghosts of two brothers,” may be traced to the same
influence.[66]
But apart from these defects the criticisms of Coleridge and Wordsworth,
and their ascribing of the “poetical diction,” which they wished to
abolish, to the influence of Pope’s “Homer,” are to a large extent
unjust. Many of the characteristics of this “spurious poetic language”
were well established long before Pope produced his translation. It is
probable that they are present to a much larger extent, for instance, in
Dryden; _painted_, _rural_, _finny_, _briny_, _shady_, _vocal_, _mossy_,
_fleecy_, come everywhere in his translations, and not only there. Some
of his adjectives in y are more audacious than those of Pope: _spongy
clouds_, _chinky hives_, _snary webs_, _roomy sea_, etc. Most of the
periphrases used by Pope and many more are already to be found in Dryden:
“summer” is _the sylvan reign_; “bees,” _the frugal_ or _industrious
kind_; “arrows,” _the feathered wood_ or _feathered fates_; “sheep,” _the
woolly breed_; “frogs,” _the loquacious race_! From all Pope’s immediate
predecessors and contemporaries similar examples may be quoted, like Gay’s
When floating clouds their spongy fleeces drain
(“Rural Sports”)
or Ambrose Philips:
Hark: how they warble in the brambly bush
The gaudy goldfinch or the speckly thrush
(“Fourth Pastoral”)
and that “Epistle to a Friend,” in which he ridicules the very jargon so
much used in his own Pastorals.[67]
Pope then may justly be judged “not guilty,” at least “in the first
degree,” of having originated the poetic diction which Johnson praised
and Wordsworth condemned; in using it, he was simply using the stock
language for descriptive poetry, whether original or in translations,
which had slowly come into being during the last decade of the
seventeenth century. If it be traced to its origins, it will be found
that most of it originated with that poet who may fairly be called the
founder of the English “classical” school of poetry—to Milton, to whom
in large measure is due, not merely the invention, but also, by the very
potency of the influence exercised by his great works, its vogue in the
eighteenth century.
Before the time of Milton, it is not too much to say, even when we
remember the practice of Spenser and Donne and their followers, that
there was no special language for poetry, little or nothing of the
diction consecrated solely to the purposes of poets. The poets of the
Elizabethan age and their immediate successors had access to all diction,
upon which they freely drew. But it seems natural, indeed inevitable,
that for Milton, resolved to sing of things “unattempted yet in prose
or rhyme,” the ordinary language of contemporary prose or poetry should
be found lacking. He was thus impelled, we may say, consciously and
deliberately to form for himself a special poetical vocabulary, which, in
his case, was abundantly justified, because it was so essentially fitted
to his purpose, and bore the stamp of his lofty poetic genius.
This poetical vocabulary was made up of diverse elements. Besides the
numerous “classical” words, which brought with them all the added charm
of literary reminiscence, there were archaisms, and words of Latin
origin, as well as words deliberately coined on Latin and Greek roots.
But it included also most of the epithets of which the eighteenth
century versifiers were so fond. Examples may be taken from any of the
descriptive portions of the “Paradise Lost”:
On the soft downy bank damasked with flowers
(IV, 334)
or
About me round I saw
Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains,
And liquid lapse of murmuring streams.
(VIII, 260-263)
Other phrases, like “vernal bloom,” “lucid stream,” “starry sphere,”
“flowery vale,” “umbrageous grots,” were to become the worn-out
penny-pieces of the eighteenth century poetical mint. Milton indeed
seems to have been one of the great inventors of adjectives ending in
y, though in this respect he had been anticipated by Browne and others,
and especially by Chapman, who has large numbers of them, and whose
predilection for this method of making adjectives out of nouns amounts
almost to an obsession.[68]
Milton was also perhaps the great innovator with another kind of
epithet, which called forth the censure of Johnson, who described it
as “the practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives the
terminations of participles,” though the great dictator is here attacking
a perfectly legitimate device freely used by the Jacobeans and by most of
the poets since their time.[69] Nor are there wanting in Milton’s epic
instances of the idle periphrases banned by Wordsworth: _straw-built
citadel_ for “bee-hive,” _vernal bloom_ for “spring flowers,” _smutty
grain_ for “gunpowder,” _humid train_ for the flowery waters of a river,
etc.[70]
With Milton, then, may be said to have originated the “poetic diction,”
which drew forth Wordsworth’s strictures, and which in the sequel
proved a dangerous model for the swarm of versifiers who essayed to
borrow or imitate it for the purpose of their dull and commonplace
themes. How much the Miltonic language, as aped and imitated by the
“landscape gardeners and travelling pedlars” of the eighteenth century,
lost in originality and freshness, may be felt, rather than described,
if we compare so well-known a passage as the following with any of the
quotations given earlier:
Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
Clear Spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallowed feet and warbling flow.
(P.L. III, 26-30)
But the minor poets of the eighteenth century, who, by their mechanical
imitations, succeeded in reducing Milton’s diction to the level of
an almost meaningless jargon, had had every encouragement from their
greater predecessors and contemporaries. The process of depreciation may
be seen already in Dryden, and it is probably by way of Pope that much
of the Miltonic language became part of the eighteenth century poetic
stock-in-trade. Pope was a frequent borrower from Milton, and, in his
“Homer” especially, very many reminiscences are to be found, often used
in an artificial, and sometimes in an absurd, manner.[71] Moreover,
Pope’s free and cheapened use of many of Milton’s descriptive epithets
did much to reduce them to the rank of merely conventional terms, and
in this respect the attack of Wordsworth and Coleridge was not without
justice. But on the whole the proper conclusion would seem to be that
what is usually labelled as “the _Pope_ style” could with more justice
and aptness be described as “the pseudo-Miltonic style.” It is true that
the versifiers freely pilfered the “Homer,” and the vogue of much of the
stock diction is thus due to that source, but so far as Pope himself is
concerned there is justice in his plea that he left this style behind him
when he emerged from “Fancy’s maze” and “moralized his song.”
To what extent this catalogue of lifeless words and phrases had
established itself as the poetical thesaurus is to be seen in the
persistency with which it maintained its position until the very end of
the century, when Erasmus Darwin with a fatal certainty evolved from
it all its worst features, and thus did much unconsciously to crush it
out of existence. James Thomson is rightly regarded as one of the most
important figures in the early history of the Romantic Revolt, and he
has had merited praise for his attempts to provide himself with a new
language of his own. In this respect, however, he had been anticipated
by John Philips, whose “Splendid Shilling” appeared in 1705, followed by
“Cyder” a year later. Philips, though not the first Miltonic imitator,
was practically the first to introduce the Miltonic diction and phrases,
whilst at the same time he acquired the knack of adding phrases of his
own to the common stock. He was thus an innovator from whom Thomson
himself learned not a little.
But though the “Seasons” is ample testimony to a new and growing
alertness to natural scenery, Thomson found it hard to escape from the
fetters of the current poetic language. We feel that he is at least
trying to write with his eye steadily fixed upon the object, but he could
perhaps hardly be expected to get things right from the very beginning.
Thus a stanza from his “Pastoral Entertainment” is purely conventional:
The place appointed was a spacious vale
Fanned always by a cooling western gale
Which in soft breezes through the meadow stray
And steal the ripened fragrances away—
while he paraphrases a portion of the sixth chapter of St. Matthew into:
Observe the rising lily’s snowy grace,
Observe the various vegetable race,
They neither toil nor spin, but careless grow
Yet see how warm they blush, how bright they glow,
where the stock terms scarcely harmonize with the simple Biblical
diction. He was well aware of the attendant dangers and difficulties,
and in the first book of “The Seasons” he gives expression to the need
he feels of a language fit to render adequately all that he sees in
Nature.[72] But though there is much that is fresh and vivid in his
descriptive diction, and much that reveals him as a bold pioneer in
poetic outlook and treatment, the tastes and tendencies of his age were
too strong entirely to be escaped. Birds are the _plumy_, or _feathered
people_, or _the glossy kind_,[73] and a flight of swallows is _a
feathered eddy_; sheep are _the bleating kind_, etc. In one passage
(“Spring,” ll. 114-135) he deals at length with the insects that attack
the crops without once mentioning them by name: they are _the feeble
race_, _the frosty tribe_, _the latent foe_, and even _the sacred sons
of vengeance_. He has in general the traditional phraseology for the
mountains and the sea, though a few of his epithets for the mountains,
as _keen-air’d_ and _forest-rustling_, are new. He speaks of the Alps as
_dreadful_, _horrid_, _vast_, _sublime_. _Shaggy_ and _nodding_ are also
applied to mountains as well as to rocks and forests; winter is usually
described in the usual classical manner as _deformed_ and _inverted_.
Leaves are the _honours_ of trees, paths are _erroneous_, caverns
_sweat_, etc., and he also makes large use of Latinisms.[74]
John Dyer (1700-1758), though now and then conventional in his diction,
has a good deal to his credit, and is a worthy contemporary of the author
of “The Seasons.” Thus in the “Country Walk” it is the old stock diction
he gives us:
Look upon that _flowery plain_
How the sheep surround their _swain_;
And there behold a _bloomy mead_,
A silver stream, a willow shade;
and much the same thing is to be found in “The Fleece,” published in 1757:
The crystal dews, impearl’d upon the grass,
Are touched by Phœbus’ beams and mount aloft,
With various clouds to paint the azure sky;
whilst he has almost as many adjectives in y as Ambrose Philips. But
these are more than redeemed by the new descriptive touches which appear,
sometimes curiously combined with the stereotyped phrases, as in “The
Fleece” (Bk. III):
The scatter’d mists reveal the dusky hills;
Grey dawn appears; the golden morn ascends,
And paints the glittering rocks and purple woods.
Nor must we forget “Grongar Hill,” which has justly received high praise
for its beauties and felicities of description.
It is scarcely necessary to illustrate further the vogue of this sort of
diction in the first half of the eighteenth century; it is to be found
everywhere in the poetry of the period, and the conventional epithets
and phrases quoted from Dyer and Thomson may be taken as typical of the
majority of their contemporaries. But this lifeless, stereotyped language
has also invaded the work of some of the best poets of the century,
including not only the later classicists, but also those who have been
“born free,” and are foremost among the Romantic rebels. The poetic
language of William Collins shows a strange mixture of the old style
and the new. That it was new and individual is well seen from Johnson’s
condemnation, for Johnson recognized very clearly that the language of
the “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands” did not conform
to what was probably his own view that the only language fit and proper
for poetry was such as might bear comparison with the polish and elegance
of Pope’s “Homer.” It is not difficult to make due allowance for Johnson
when he speaks of Collins’s diction as “harsh, unskilfully laboured, and
injudicially selected”; we deplore the classical bias, and are content
enough to recognize and enjoy for ourselves the matchless beauty and
charm of Collins’s diction at its best. Yet much of the language of his
earlier work betrays him as more or less a poetaster of the eighteenth
century. The early “Oriental Eclogues” abound in the usual descriptive
details, just as if the poet had picked out his words and phrases from
the approved lists. Thus,
Yet midst the blaze of courts she fixed her love
On the cool fountain or the shady grove
Still, with the shepherd’s innocence her mind
To the sweet vale and flowery mead inclined;
and even in the “Ode on the Popular Superstitions” there were expressions
like _watery surge_, _sheeny gold_, though now and then the “new” diction
is strikingly exemplified in a magnificent phrase such as _gleamy
pageant_.
When Collins has nothing new to say his poetic language is that of
his time, but when his inspiration is at its loftiest his diction is
always equal to the task, and it is then that he gives us the unrivalled
felicities of “The Ode to Evening.”
Amongst all the English poets there has probably never been one, even
when we think of Tennyson, more careful and meticulous (or “curiously
elaborate,” as Wordsworth styled it) about the diction of his verses, the
very words themselves, than Gray. This fact, and not Matthew Arnold’s
opinion that it was because Gray had fallen on an “age of prose,” may
perhaps be regarded as sufficient to explain the comparative scantiness
of his literary production. He himself, in a famous letter, has clearly
stated his ideal of literary expression: “Extreme conciseness of
expression, yet pure, perspicuous, and musical, is one of the grand
beauties of lyrical poetry.”[75] Hence all his verses bear evidence
of the most painstaking labour and rigorous self-criticism, almost as
if every word had been weighed and assessed before being allowed to
appear. His correspondence with Mason and Beattie, referred to in the
previous chapter, shows the same fastidiousness with regard to the work
of others. Gray indeed, drawing freely upon Milton and Dryden, created
for himself a special poetic language which in its way can become almost
as much an abuse as the otiosities of many of his predecessors and
contemporaries—the “cumbrous splendour” of which Johnson complained. Yet
he is never entirely free from the influence of the “classical” diction
which, for Johnson, represented the ideal. His earliest work is almost
entirely conventional in its descriptions, the prevailing tone being
exemplified in such phrases as _the purple year_, _the Attic Warbler
pours her throat_ (Ode on “The Spring”), whilst in the “Progress of
Poesy,” lines like
Through verdant vales and Ceres’ golden reign
are not uncommon, though of course the possibility of the direct
influence of the classics, bringing with it the added flavour of
reminiscence, is not to be ignored in this sort of diction. Moreover, a
couplet from the fragmentary “Alliance of Education and Government”:
Scent the new fragrance of _the breathing rose_
And quaff _the pendent vintage_ as it grows—
is almost typical, apart from the freshness of the epithet _breathing_,
of what Wordsworth wished to abolish. Even the “Elegy” has not escaped
the contagion: _storied urn_ or _animated bust_ is perilously akin to the
pedantic periphrases of the Augustans.
Before passing to a consideration of the work of Johnson and Goldsmith,
who best represent the later eighteenth century development of the
“classical” school of Pope, reference may be made to two other writers.
The first of these is Thomas Chatterton. In that phase of the early
Romantic Movement which took the form of attempts to revive the past,
Chatterton of course played an important part, and the pseudo-archaic
language which he fabricated for the purpose of his “Rowley” poems is
interesting, not only as an indication of the trend of the times towards
the poetic use of old and obsolete words, but also as reflecting, it
would seem, a genuine endeavour to escape from the fetters of the
conventional and stereotyped diction of his day. On the other hand, in
his avowedly original work, Chatterton’s diction is almost entirely
imitative. He has scarcely a single fresh image or description; his
series of “Elegies” and “Epistles” are clothed in the current poetic
language. He uses the stock expressions, _purling streams_, _watery
bed_, _verdant vesture of the smiling fields_, along with the usual
periphrases, such as _the muddy nation_ or _the speckled folk_ for
“frogs.” One verse of an “Elegy” written in 1768 contains in itself
nearly all the conventional images:
Ye variegated children of the Spring,
Ye blossoms blushing with the pearly dew;
Ye birds that sweetly in the hawthorn sing;
Ye flowery meads, lawns of verdant hue.
It can be judged from these examples how a stereotyped mode of expression
may depreciate to a large extent the value of much of the work of a
poet of real genius. Chatterton is content in most of his avowedly
“original” work to turn his poetic thoughts into the accepted moulds,
which is all the more surprising when we remember his laborious methods
of manufacturing an archaic diction for his mediaeval “discoveries,”[76]
even if we may assume that it reflected a strong desire for something
fresh and new.
A poet of much less genius, but one who enjoyed great contemporary
fame, was William Falconer, whose “Shipwreck,” published in 1762, was
the most popular sea-poem of the eighteenth century. The most striking
characteristic of the descriptive parts of the poem is the daring and
novel use of technical sea-terms, but apart from this the language is
purely conventional. The sea is still the same _desert-waste_, _faithless
deep_, _watery way_, _world_, _plain_, _path_, or _the fluid plain_, _the
glassy plain_, whilst the landscape catalogue is as lifeless as any of
the descriptive passages of the early eighteenth century:
on every spray
The warbling birds exalt their evening lay,
Blithe skipping o’er yon hill the fleecy train
Join the deep chorus of the lowing plain.
When he leaves this second-hand description, and describes scenes
actually experienced and strongly felt, Falconer’s language is
correspondingly fresh and vivid, the catastrophe of the shipwreck itself,
for example, being painted with extraordinary power.[77]
When we come to Johnson and Goldsmith, here again a distinction must be
made between the didactic or satiric portion of their work and that which
is descriptive. Johnson’s didactic verse, marked as it is by a free use
of inversion and ellipsis, rarely attains the clearness and simplicity of
Goldsmith’s, whilst he has also much more of the stock descriptive terms
and phrases. His “Odes” are almost entirely cast in this style. Thus in
“Spring”:
Now o’er the rural Kingdom roves
Soft Pleasure with her laughing train,
Love warbles in the vocal groves
And vegetation plants the plains,
whilst exactly the same stuff is turned out for a love poem, “To Stella”:
Not the soft sighs of vernal gales
The fragrance of the flowery vales
The murmurs of the crystal rill
The vocal grove, the verdant hill.
Though there is not so much of this kind of otiose description in the
poems of Goldsmith, yet Mr. Dobson’s estimate of his language may be
accepted as a just one: “In spite of their beauty and humanity,” he
says, “the lasting quality of ‘The Traveller’ and ‘The Deserted Village’
is seriously prejudiced by his half-way attitude between the poetry of
convention and the poetry of nature—between the _gradus_ epithet of Pope
and the direct vocabulary of Wordsworth.”[78] Thus when we read such
lines as
The slow canal, the yellow-blossomed vale,
The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail
(“Traveller,” ll. 293-4)
we feel that Goldsmith too has been writing with his eye on the object,
and even in such a line as
The breezy covert of the warbling grove
(_Ibid._, 360)
there is a freshness of description that compensates for the use of the
hackneyed _warbling grove_. On the other hand, there are in both pieces
passages which it is difficult not to regard as purely conventional in
their language. Thus in “The Traveller,” the diction, if not entirely of
the stock type, is not far from it:
Ye glittering towns, with wealth and splendour crowned
Ye fields, where summer spreads profusion round
Ye lakes, whose vessels catch the busy gale
Ye bending swains, that dress the flowery vale,
and so on for another dozen lines.[79]
Only the slightest traces, however, of this mechanical word-painting
appear in “The Deserted Village,” almost the only example of the
stereotyped phrase being in the line
These simple blessings of _the lowly train_
(l. 252).
Thus whilst Goldsmith in much of his work continues the classical school
of Pope, alike in his predilection for didactic verse and his practice of
the heroic couplet, in his poetic language he is essentially individual.
In his descriptive passages he rarely uses the conventional jargon, and
the greater part of the didactic and moral observations of his two most
famous poems is written in simple and unadorned language that would
satisfy the requirements of the Wordsworthian canon.
That pure and unaffected diction could be employed with supreme effect
in other than moral and didactic verse was soon to be shown in the lyric
poetry of William Blake, who, about thirty years before Wordsworth
launched his manifestoes, evolved for himself a poetic language,
wonderful alike in its beauty and simplicity. In those of the “Songs
of Innocence” and “The Songs of Experience,” which are concerned with
natural description, the epithets and expressions that had long been
consecrated to this purpose find little or no place. Here and there we
seem to catch echoes of the stock diction, as in the lines,
the starry floor
the watery shore
of the Introduction to the “Songs of Experience,” or the
happy, silent, _moony_ beams
of “The Cradle Song”; but in each case the expressions are redeemed and
revitalized by the pure and joyous singing note of the lyrics of which
they form part. Only once is Blake to be found using the conventional
epithet, when in his “Laughing Song” he writes
the _painted_ birds laugh in the shade,
whilst with his usual unerring instinct he marks down the monotonous
smoothness of so much contemporary verse in that stanza of his ode “To
the Muses” in which, as has been well said, the eighteenth century dies
to music:[80]
How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoyed in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few.
Not that he altogether escaped the blighting influence of his time. In
the early “Imitation of Spenser,” we get such a couplet as
To sit in council with his modern peers
And judge of tinkling rhimes and elegances terse,
whilst the “vicious diction” Wordsworth was to condemn is also to be seen
in this line from one of the early “Songs”:
and Phœbus fir’d my vocal rage.
Even as late as 1800 Blake was capable of writing
Receive this tribute from a harp sincere.[81]
But these slight blemishes only seem to show up in stronger light the
essential beauty and nobility of his poetical style.
But the significance of Blake’s work in the purging and purifying of
poetic diction was not, as might perhaps be expected, recognized by his
contemporaries and immediate successors. For Coleridge, writing some
thirty years later, it was Cowper, and his less famous contemporary
Bowles, who were the pioneers in the rejecting of the old and faded
style and the beginning of the new, the first to combine “natural
thoughts with natural diction.”[82] Coleridge’s opinion seems to us
now to be an over-statement, but we rather suspect that Cowper was not
unwilling to regard himself as an innovator in poetic language. In his
correspondence he reveals himself constantly pre-occupied with the
question of poetic expression, and especially with the language fit and
proper for his translation of Homer. His opinion of Pope’s attempt has
already been referred to, but he himself was well aware of the inherent
difficulties.[83] He had, it would seem, definite and decided opinions
on the subject of poetic language; he recognized the lifelessness of the
accepted diction, which, rightly or wrongly, he attributed especially to
the influence of Pope’s “Homer,” and tried to escape from its bondage.
His oft-quoted thesis that in the hands of the eighteenth century poets
poetry had become a “mere mechanic art,” he developed at length in his
ode “Secundum Artem,” which comprises almost a complete catalogue of the
ornaments which enabled the warblers to have their tune by heart. What
Cowper in that ode pillories—“the trim epithets,” the “sweet alternate
rhyme,” the “flowers of light description”—were in the main what were to
be held up to ridicule in the _Lyrical Ballads_ prefaces; Wordsworth’s
attack is here anticipated by twenty years.
But, as later in the case of Wordsworth, Cowper in his early work has
not a little of the language which he is at such pains to condemn. Thus
Horace again appears in the old familiar guise,
Now o’er the spangled hemisphere,
Diffused the starry train appear
(“Fifth Satire”)
whilst even in “Table Talk” we find occasional conventional descriptions
such as
Nature...
Spreads the fresh verdure of the fields and leads
The dancing Naiads through the dewy meads.
But there is little of this kind of description in “The Task.” Now
and then we meet with examples of the old periphrases, such as the
_pert voracious kind_ for “sparrows,” or the description of kings
as the _arbiters of this terraqueous swamp_, though many of these
pseudo-Miltonic expressions are no doubt used for playful effect. In
those parts of the poem which deal with the sights and sounds of outdoor
life the images are new and fresh, whilst in the moral and didactic
portions the language is, as a rule, uniformly simple and direct. But for
the classical purity of poetical expression in which the poet is at times
pre-eminent, it is perhaps best to turn to his shorter poems, such as “To
Mary,” or to the last two stanzas of “The Castaway,” and especially to
some of the “Olney Hymns,” of the language of which it may be said that
every word is rightly chosen and not one is superfluous. Indeed, it may
well be that these hymns, together with those of Watts and Wesley,[84]
which by their very purpose demanded a mode of expression severe in its
simplicity, but upon which were stamped the refinement and correct taste
of the scholars and gentlemen who wrote them—it may well be that the
more natural mode of poetic diction which thus arose gave to Wordsworth
a starting point when he began to expound and develop his theories
concerning the language of poetry.[85]
Whilst Cowper was thus at once heralding, and to a not inconsiderable
extent exemplifying, the Romantic reaction in form, another poet, George
Crabbe, had by his realism given, even before Cowper, an important
indication of one characteristic aspect of the new poetry.
But though the force and fidelity of his descriptions of the scenery
of his native place, and the depth and sincerity of his pathos, give
him a leading place among those who anticipated Wordsworth, other
characteristics stamp him as belonging to the old order and not to the
new. His language is still largely that perfected by Dryden and Pope,
and worked to death by their degenerate followers. The recognized
“elegancies” and “flowers of speech” still linger on. A peasant is still
a _swain_, poets are _sons of verse_, fishes _the finny tribe_, country
folk _the rural tribe_. The word _nymph_ appears with a frequency that
irritates the reader, and how ludicrous an effect it could produce by its
sudden appearance in tales of the realistic type that Crabbe loved may be
judged from such examples as
It soon appeared that while this nymph divine
Moved on, there met her rude uncivil kine.
Whilst he succeeds in depicting the life of the rustic poor, not as
it appears in the rosy tints of Goldsmith’s pictures, but in all its
reality—sordid, gloomy and stern, as it for the most part is—the old
stereotyped descriptions are to be found scattered throughout his grimly
realistic pictures of the countryside. Thus when Crabbe writes of
tepid meads
And lawns irriguous and the blooming field
(“Midnight”)
or
The lark on quavering pinion woo’d the day
Less towering linnets fill’d the vocal spray
(“The Candidate”)
we feel that he has not had before his eyes the real scenes of his
Suffolk home, but that he has been content to recall and imitate the
descriptive stock-in-trade that had passed current for so many years;
even the later “Tales,” published up to the years when Shelley and Keats
were beginning their activities, are not free from this defect.
About ten years before Wordsworth launched his manifestoes, there were
published the two works of Erasmus Darwin, to which reference has already
been made, and in which this stock language was unconsciously reduced to
absurdity, not only because of the themes on which it was employed, but
also because of the fatal ease and facility with which it was used. It
is strange to think that but a few years before the famous sojourn of
Coleridge and Wordsworth on the Quantocks, “The Loves of the Plants,” and
its fellow, should have won instant and lasting popularity.[86]
That Darwin took himself very seriously is to be seen from “The
Interludes,” in which he airs his views,[87] whilst in his two poems he
gave full play to his “fancy” (“‘theory’ we cannot call it,” comments
De Quincey) that nothing was strictly poetic except what is presented in
visual image. This in itself was not bad doctrine, as it at least implied
that poetry should be concrete, and thus reflected a desire to escape
from the abstract and highly generalized diction of his day. But Darwin
so works his dogma to death that the reader is at first dazzled, and
finally bewildered by the multitude of images presented, in couplets of
monotonous smoothness, in innumerable passages, such as
On twinkling fins my pearly nations play
Or wind with sinuous train their trackless way:
My plumy pairs in gay embroidery dressed
Form with ingenious bill the pensile nest.
(“Botanic Garden,” I)
Still there is something to be said for the readers who enjoyed having
the facts and theories of contemporary science presented to them in so
coloured and fantastic a garb.
Nor must it be forgotten that the youthful Wordsworth was much influenced
by these poems of Darwin, so that his early work shows many traces of
the very pseudo-poetic language which he was soon to condemn. Thus in
“An Evening Walk”[88] there are such stock phrases as “emerald meads,”
“watery plains,” the “forest train.”
In “Descriptive Sketches” examples are still more numerous. Thus:
Soft bosoms breathe around contagious sighs
And amorous music on the water dies,
which might have come direct from Pope, or
Here all the seasons revel hand-in-hand
’Mid lawns and shades by breezy rivulets fanned.
The old epithet _purple_ is frequently found (_purple_ lights and vernal
plains, the _purple_ morning, the fragrant mountain’s _purple_ side), and
there are a few awkward adjectives in y (“the _piny_ waste”), whilst a
gun is described as the _thundering tube_.
Few poems indeed are to be found in the eighteenth century with so many
fantastic conceits as these 1793 poems of Wordsworth. Probably, as has
been suggested, the poet was influenced to an extent greater than he
himself imagined by “The Botanic Garden,” so that the poetical devices
freely employed in his early work may be the result of a determination
to conform to the “theory” of poetry which Darwin in his precept and
practice had exemplified. Later, the devices which had satisfied him
in his first youthful productions must have appeared to him as more or
less vicious, and altogether undesirable, and in disgust he resolved to
exclude at one stroke all that he was pleased to call “poetic diction.”
But, little given to self-criticism, when he penned his memorable
Prefaces, he fixed the responsibility for “the extravagant and absurd
diction” upon the whole body of his predecessors, unable or unwilling to
recognize that he himself had begun his poetic career with a free use of
many of its worst faults.[89]
Of the stock diction of eighteenth century poetry we may say, then, that
in the first place it is in large measure a reflection of the normal
characteristic attitude of the poets of the “neo-classical” period
towards Nature and all that the term implies. The “neo-classical” poets
were but little interested in Nature; the countryside made no great
appeal to them, and it was the Town and its teeming life that focused
their interest and attention. Man, and his life as a social being, was
their “proper study”; and this concentration of interest finds its
reflection in the new and vivid language of the “essays,” satires, and
epistles, whilst in the “nature poetry” the absence of genuine feeling is
only too often betrayed by the dead epithets of the stock diction each
poet felt himself at liberty to draw upon according to his needs. It is
scarcely necessary to remind ourselves that it is in Pope’s “Pastorals”
and the “Homer,” not in the “Dunciad” or “The Essay on Man,” that the
stock words, phrases, and similes are to be found, and the remark is
equally true of most of the poets of his period. But Pope has been
unjustly pilloried, for the stock diction did not originate with him. It
is true that the most masterly and finished examples of what is usually
styled “the eighteenth century poetic diction” are to be found in his
work generally, and no doubt the splendour of his translation of Homer
did much to establish a vogue for many of the set words and phrases. At
the same time the supremacy of the heroic couplet which he did so much to
establish played its part in perpetuating the stock diction, the epithets
of which were often technically just what was required to give the
decasyllabic verse the desired “correctness” and “smoothness.” But it is
unjust to saddle him with the responsibility for the lack of originality
evident in many of his successors and imitators.
The fact that this stock language is not confined to the neo-classical
poets proper, but is found to a large extent persisting to the very end
of the eighteenth century, and even invading the early work of the writer
who led the revolt against it, is indicative of another general cause of
its widespread prevalence. Briefly, it may be said that not only did the
conventional poetic diction reflect in the main the average neo-classical
outlook on external nature; it reflected also the average eighteenth
century view as to the nature of poetical language, which regarded its
words and phrases as satisfying the artistic canon, not in virtue of the
degree in which they reflected the individual thought or emotion of the
poet, but according as they conformed to a standard of language based on
accepted models.