poetry. The poet was never to throw the reins upon the neck of his passion, or to abandon himself to a fine frenzy in defiance of mechanical laws. No sane critic will deny that there was a core of truth in these assumptions. The desire for correctness, so far as correctness implies symmetry, a continuous reference to the general effect in working out subordinate details, temperance in expression, and careful polish of style, is a sentiment indispensable to the creation of great and permanent work. The weakness of the Pope school consisted chiefly in the assumption that such a code of laws could be laid down in a series of mathematical propositions. The essence of poetry is to be spontaneous, and the laws obeyed by the imagination must, so to speak, be imbedded in its structure, not imposed from without. In the great ages of art the creative imagination is instinctively shocked by defects of harmony. In the more conscious and less passionate periods the instinct disappears, and the place is ill supplied by rules which can never be adequate, and which, therefore, appear to be artificial. The fine sense which enables a painter to draw an exquisite curve cannot be compensated by a pair of compasses, which enables a mechanic to draw a perfectly accurate and perfectly monotonous circle. The rules of Pope's period sanctioned the attempt to do by rule and compass what ought to be done by the eye. That is the natural result of reason intruding into the place of imagination, which makes poetry prosaic, as it lowers morality to a set of prudential maxims, and forces the religious instinct to abandon ideal symbols for a system of abstract laws.

30. But how were these rules to be framed? Where were men to look for that poetical code which was to take a place analogous to that of the law of nature?' The classical models, as interpreted by French critics, had the appearance of giving just the system of abstract rules founded on common sense which was required by the artist. There were difficulties, indeed, in accepting the French empire. The old English tradition remained throughout the century. Hume and Gibbon might prefer Racine to Shakespeare; but English writers in a blind way continued to protest against the chains imposed upon them. The rules of epic poetry and the law of dramatic unities never fairly established themselves. Addison, indeed,

criticised Milton by the help of Aristotle and Bossu, with all the correct jargon about the machinery, and the episodes, and the fable, and composed 'Cato' as a model of dramatic propriety. The old national vigour struggled against the imposition of these handcuffs, and Dennis, worst of critics though he might be, ridiculed 'Cato' effectively enough. But though the code of rules never became satisfactorily formulated, its potential existence was more or less tacitly assumed. The classical poets and their commentators occupied a poetical status precisely analogous to that of the Bible in theology. The once living forces were paralysed but not dead. The critic had succeeded to the commentator, but had not yet become openly sceptical. Similarly the classicalism of the time was midway between the taste of the Renaissance and that of modern times. The poet, down to the time of Milton, could avail himself freely of classical types, and mix the Christian and heathen mythology without any perception of incongruity. In our own day the growth of an historical sense has enabled us to understand classical art more perfectly, but has forced us to recognise the impossibility of reanimating the dead bones. The modern revivals are free from the old daring anachronisms, but the old fire is quenched. They can exhibit at best a momentary play of the poetic fancy, or the painful industry of the antiquarian. The transitional period presents a compromise between these opposite points of view. The old incongruities had become shocking. Lycidas appeared to be simply a monstrosity when tried. at the tribunal of common sense. St. Peter, it was plain, belonged to a different family from Phoebus and Comus, and the herald of the seas, and they ought not to be brought together. Milton, no one could deny, was guilty of the grossest anachronism. But, meanwhile, an incongruity of a different, and to us more vexatious, kind passed without notice. The old mythology was regarded as dead, but it was still to be employed.

31. How was the difficulty to be surmounted? By accepting as a principle that poets might deal in consciously devised figments, so long as they took care not to break the illusion by figments belonging to different categories. The

old spontaneous symbolism thus passed imperceptibly into an arbitrary conventionalism. What passed with ancient poets for divine inspiration was taken to be a process of conscious and deliberate invention. The process was precisely that which we have seen exemplified in theological and political controversies. Ancient prophets and legislators were no longer regarded as supernaturally inspired, but they were thought to have invented at one blow the mythologies and religious rites and political institutions which we now see to have been the slow growth of uncounted ages. In the same way the poet was thought to have consciously devised the legends and the imagery which formed the subject of his song. When the poetical writers personified abstract qualities by the help of capital letters, they fancied that they were simply repeating the process by which the pagan pantheon had been originally filled. And as the classical poetry had thus been constructed by a consciously artificial process, there was no reason why the same plan should not answer as well in the eighteenth century. It never occurred, apparently, to the writers of the time that the old gods could ever have been the objects of a genuine and spontaneous belief. The theory is very clearly expressed in Pope's preface to his translation.

32. Homer, he says, is specially distinguished by the strength of his 'invention,' and by this he meant something quite different from exuberant vigour of expression or intense glow of imaginative insight. Homer,' says Pope, 'not only appears the inventor of poetry, but he excels the inventors of all other arts in this, that he has swallowed up the honour of those who succeeded him.' Homer invented' poetry as, according to the deists, ancient legislators invented heaven and hell, or as Watt invented the steam-engine. He sat down deliberately to invent a story with a proper set of characters, which should be in conformity with the best canons of criticism. He invented allegorical personages, moreover, in which he wrapped up secrets of nature and physical philosophy.' 'How fertile will that imagination appear which was able to clothe all the properties of the elements, the qualifications of the mind, the virtues and vices, in forms and persons, and to introduce them into actions agreeable to the nature of the things they shadowed!' Then Homer, though

he did not exactly invent the gods, turned them to account for the first time. He seems the first who brought them into a system of machinery for poetry, and such a one as makes its greatest importance and dignity.' Nobody has been able to improve upon his invention, and after all changes of time and religion 'his gods continue to this day the gods of poetry.' This indeed is, unluckily, too near the truth. The gods now became mere theatrical properties, which did not even affect to be more than cunningly devised masks, the secret of whose construction was fully understood by all. Unable to excite any true sentiment, the old spontaneity was to be replaced by the judicious code of rules about the fable and the machinery'-a most characteristic phrase—which recent critics defended by the authority of Aristotle.

33. The change was, in fact, the same which was taking place, though not so avowedly, in religion. There, too, the old supernatural agents were becoming parts of a cunningly devised machinery, intended to keep the wicked in order. The more cultivated classes did not wish to part with the old conceptions, but were content to use the old phrases, and explain them more or less distinctly to be merely conventional and allegorical. The palpable artificiality of these devices gave a hollowness and pomposity to the whole poetical school, which was faithfully reflected in the formal diction which excited Wordsworth's indignant rebellion. The poet, unable to use the vivid language of downright passion, lest the poor ghosts of old superstitions should be shrivelled into nothingness, was forced to distinguish his work from prose by the adoption of conventional phrases. Like the ancient actors, he wore a mask which produced the effect of a speaking-trumpet, and gave a certain factitious dignity to his empty words. A man of real genius like Pope still might preserve, amidst his conventionalities, some genuine sense of large effects and vigour of style; but in the succeeding generation the pseudo-classicalism became hopelessly effete, and could oppose no resistance to the new reaction. The epic poems of the latter part of the century, which still obeyed the old canons, such as Glover's 'Leonidas' and Wilkie's 'Epigoniad,' have sunk irrecoverably into the deepest gulfs of oblivion. Pope, however, though he struts and mouths, is not yet puerile or affectedly sim

ple. He is not consciously trying to ape the manner of simpler ages; and though his theory as to ancient poetry is grotesquely wrong, it still leaves him a certain freedom of motion. If he has not the independent daring with which the great poets of the Renaissance use the old materials where they find them, he is not a mere imitator of extinct forces of thought. There is just a flutter of life in these dying conventionalities. By the side of Pope's 'Homer' we may, perhaps, place Addison's 'Cato,' as the most successful attempt to transplant to the English stage something of the contemporary classicalism. Addison, however, was trying an unfortunate experiment. He had to lay aside that exquisite humour in which he was unrivalled, and had not the fire which could have given some animation to his lay figures. A few familiar quotations have survived the decay of the general fabric, to show that his elegance of style had not quite deserted him; but his characters are scarcely even shadows; they are nonentities.

34. Pope's influence remained, in a certain sense, predominant until the revolutionary era. His versification became the common form for all poets of the second order. He was placed by ordinary critics in the front rank of English poets; and the poetical revolution led by Wordsworth and Coleridge took the form of a protest against his authority. It must, however, be observed that the supremacy was never so complete as is sometimes assumed. There were many symptoms of revolt from the very beginning of the dynasty, and Pope is to be considered more accurately as marking the culmination of the tendencies which his writings embody than as inaugurating a new period. Like the Deism with which his poetical doctrines are correlated, the poetry of the true Pope school was a rather evanescent phenomenon, and was in full vigour for his own generation alone. The chief poetical writers of the century all deviate more or less from Pope's peculiar model. The divergence of form is significant. Thomson, Young, and Akenside, for example, discard the monotony of the heroic couplet in favour of blank verse, though their blank verse is of a stilted and constrained character. Collins and Gray express themselves in the lyrical form which is least adapted to Pope's calmer and more reasoning temperament. Another