From this practice the older school of critics
would seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the limits of good
taste, and what was somewhat vaguely called _classical_ English. To mark
these limits in poetry, they set up as Hermae the images they had made to
them of Dryden, of Pope, and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnly
castigated every new aspirant in verse, who in turn performed the same
function for the next generation, thus helping to keep always sacred and
immovable the _ne plus ultra_ alike of inspiration and of the vocabulary.
Though no two natures were ever much more unlike than those of Dryden and
Pope, and again of Pope and Goldsmith, and no two styles, except in such
externals as could be easily caught and copied, yet it was the fashion,
down even to the last generation, to advise young writers to form
themselves, as it was called, on these excellent models. Wordsworth
himself began in this school; and though there were glimpses, here and
there, of a direct study of nature, yet most of the epithets in his
earlier pieces were of the traditional kind so fatal to poetry during
great part of the last century; and he indulged in that alphabetic
personification which enlivens all such words as Hunger, Solitude,
Freedom, by the easy magic of an initial capital.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25