is in itself a beautiful thing. And it confers, besides, that benediction which beauty alone is competent to bestow, whereby what were otherwise blight and mildew is turned to fairness and serenity. Nor is this beauty and serenity in his work as a whole merely external and superficial. It has its moral counterpart in the männer in which he himself threads his way, through this limbo of sense and spirit, amid these bewildering involutions of light and darkness, undazzled and untroubled. For the most remarkable thing about his work is that he himself is able to keep his head and hold the balance. He is like a sane man in a madhouse, who lives among the hallucinations of the crazed without losing his senses or suffering his judgment to become warped for a moment. Amid all the sick fancies of a guilty conscience or a mind deranged he is never dazed or staggered, though he walks at times on the dizzy edge of reason nor does he allow his reader's eye to waver or his step to falter. And it is because he was able to keep his own head and his reader's on an earth so tremulous and uncertain and in an atmosphere so fantastic and infected that he has succeeded with such subjects as he chose in producing a work which is at once true and beautiful.

DRYDEN AND THE CRITICAL CANONS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

DRY

I

RYDEN'S spirit, like that of the whole age which he determined, was largely, as we look at these matters nowadays, a prose spirit. That is, it was marked by common sense or intelligence more strongly than by fancy or imagination. In general terms he may be defined as a man of parts who applied himself to the business of letters. His lack of creative power is very conspicuous. He never in all his plays made a character. His dramas have no illusion. Even their mechanical construction is rather rickety. His themes are usually suggested, and his materials are frequently furnished in part, either by some other writer, as in Amphitryon, which is a clever compilation of Molière and Plautus and in some respects better than either, or else by some current truism or commonplace of the day. For this reason he is at his best poetically in translation or in satire. For even in poetry his chief merit is to say things in a downright manner, to hit the nail on the head and hit it

hard. This is no despicable quality, to be sure, but it is on the whole a quality more proper to prose than to poetry.

Indeed, in Dryden's conception and practice poetry is very nearly identical with propriety of thought and expression; that is, the thought or the sentiment must be just and the language suitable-clear, discursive, without grammatical violence, ellipses, inversions, and the like. He was not the first, as a matter of fact, to make wit and poetry synonymous; but he was the first to give that definition the support of a systematic criticism and the authority of a powerful example. "Wit," he says, is "a propriety of thoughts and words." And again, “a thing well said is wit in any language." If poetry, therefore, is nothing else than wit, poetry must obviously consist in a propriety of thoughts and words or in saying a thing well. And as this was virtually the idea of poetry that was to obtain for nearly a century and a half in English literature under the general canon of correctness, it would be as well to scrutinise it rather closely.

After all, it can not be denied that there is poetic quality in mere neatness of expression. The saying of a thing simply, clearly, and pointedly is poetic in itself. The French have always recognised such a character in aptness of expression; indeed, rhyme aside, much of

their poetry differs from prose only in being more nicely expressed. And the French are right as usual in these matters; for such a style is essentially organic. It fills the mind with perfectly clear ideas and images, and dispels the vague, the obscure, and the nebulous. It is this property of exquisite aptitude, of saying a thing plainly and yet fitly, which contributes to make Keats's Grecian Urn what it is-classic poetry in the noblest sense.

What little town by river or sea-shore
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

Or to take an example from Dryden himself:

But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be,
Within that circle none durst walk but he.

Though there is, to be sure, imagination, or at least fancy, in the figure, it is the propriety of the expression as a whole which is mainly responsible for the charm-a propriety which would not be amiss in prose but would be in its degree poetic anywhere. Of such bare correctness of expression without imaginative gilding or alloy it is Pope, however, who is the great master, as the currency of his phrases testifies. And remarkably enough, such is the capability of the process in its perfection, he has succeeded in imparting to these bald sententiæ a kind of vague emotional thrill, a sort of sentimental

tremolo, as though they were even more than they are.

E'en copious Dryden wanted, or forgot,

The last and greatest art, the art to blot.

This is very little, if at all, better than prose; and yet how well it apes the sensibility of poetry!

The last and greatest art, the art to blot!

It has quite the romantic quaver.

In order to define this idea of propriety a little more exactly, it might be well to compare, with such verses as these of Pope's and Dryden's, a poetry like the Elizabethan, which neither recognised nor followed any such principle. In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare has an admired passage, which begins as follows:

But value dwells not in particular will;
It holds his estimate and dignity

As well wherein 't is precious of itself

As in the prizer: 't is mad idolatry

To make the service greater than the God.

Here the purpose is the same as Pope's and Dryden's-the expression of a general moral truth. The first four lines lack clearness, but the figure is admirable and quite in Pope's and Dryden's way. They might either of them have been glad to write it, if they could have done so. But what they never would have