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":
