There is, however, in classical literature much that is freely imaginative. There are works in which the poet's imagination oversteps the bounds of prosaic reason. Consequently such critics as were most devoted to the white light of reason, those who were most offended by the extravagances of such writers as the 'metaphysicals', believed the classics somewhat lacking in qualities essential to a true literary guide. We find, therefore, among the critics of the seventeenth century, besides those who regarded the classics as infallible, others who wished a dual government of classics and reason, and a third class who felt that safety lay only in the constant restraint of the fancy by the judgment. These last cannot be called classicists without confusion of terms. It is simpler to label them rationalists.

The romanticists in criticism are easy to define for our purposes. The others are romanticists-the men who preferred Elizabethan to Greek or French drama-the men who saw possibilities in mediæval literature.

But all such division, as far as the first quarter of the eighteenth century is concerned, is of use solely as offering definitions of terms which are convenient to use. Practically no critic fits into one of these categories to the exclusion of the others. And no one-this cannot be too much emphasized-no one was the kind of classicist or rationalist that is to be found in some popular books and essays dealing with eighteenth century literature. The only appearance of this imaginary creature is among the straw figures which writers put together for purposes of demolition. That there was in this period any critic of importance who actually believed that one. could make a poet by teaching rules, or that art could. replace genius, or any such silly stuff, I emphatically

deny. There were many shades of opinion, many opinions with which most of us would totally disagree, but none so patently absurd as they are often supposed to be, none that do not contain some truth-distorted, under or overstated, perhaps-but still truth.

The following discussions of individual men make no attempt, therefore, at any definite classification. They are neither pleas nor verdicts. They aim merely to point out such salient features as are especially significant for students of English criticism.

CHARLES If Charles Gildon occupies first place, it is GILDON not because of his deserts. Whatever critical ability he possessed best appears in the work he published before the beginning of the century, so that in fairness he had to be taken from the place in the second decade which his most pretentious work would have given him.

This duality of chronological position corresponds to a duality in character. As his life was divided between two centuries, so his opinions were divided between two extremes. Once a Catholic, he became a Deist; once a critic, he became a criticaster. It is not impossible that there was a connection between the two declensions, though they were not synchronous and though he partially recovered from the first. Certainly in both cases he substituted a barren and superficial rationalism for conceptions at once more fruitful and more profound.

In his earlier work, such as the attack on Rymer and the two essays here reprinted from the same Miscellany, he uses such authority as he has in defence of literary freedom, refusing to attribute universal validity to the opinions of Aristotle, and maintaining the principle that

new times and new conditions demand new forms of literary expression. "And as in Physic, so in Poetry, there must be a regard had to the Clime, Nature, and Customs of the People." Such a dictum was by no means a critical commonplace in the seventeenth century. Apparently this young man-for he was not yet thirty⚫was in a fair way to become a critic of some ability. If his enthusiasm for Dryden touched madness, it drove him at times to unusual sanity.

It is, therefore, with considerable surprise that one finds him publishing in 1710 an essay of a very different sort, that on the Art, Rise, and Progress of the Stage. This presents the same uncompromisingly rationalistic opinions as were later developed in the Art of Poetry. And here, as commonly elsewhere, rationalism is another name for crude dogmatism. The Art of Poetry is almost devoid of real thinking. It is an echo of echoes; for the sections that follow the one here reprinted are a cento of quotations from Roscommon, Mulgrave, and Boileau, with prose comments which are additions to the bulk rather than to the ideas of the work. Obviously, then, the thought of the book is not of the eighteenth, but of the seventeenth century, and its positive value lies almost solely in the fact that it is the most complete statement which we have from this period of the point of view which is often supposed to have dominated it. The fact that such a statement found few purchasers is consequently significant.

Poor as the book is, it would be unfair to ignore its occasional flashes of insight. Although the doctrine of 'English numbers' which forms the concluding section is mistaken, Gildon at any rate recognizes the existence of

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quantity in English verse. Unlike some modern theorists, he realized that even in English a pyrrhic and a spondee are not the same. He was able to perceive the genius of Milton and Shakespeare, although his praise is not ours; and in what he says of Shakespeare and Homer he shows a recognition of the fact that genius may come unconsciously and intuitively to the heights of art.

Despite such faint lights, however, our interest in the book is derived not from Gildon's opinions, but from those of his opponents. Whatever the cause of his change of front, it was certainly not the desire to be with the crowd. In presenting the views of Mrs. LaMode and her friends he shows that popular taste was against him. By ridiculing Pope under the name of Sawney Dapper, by attacking the Tatler and Spectator, he consciously ranges himself with the few against the many. Consequently we have here, as in no other single volume, evidence of the lack of unanimity among critics of the period, of the gulf fixed between the thought of the periodicals and that of the rationalists, and of the fact that the uncompromising defenders of the rules were fighting a losing battle. Whoever will read the book without prejudice will find the rigid neo-classical theory— even as Gildon presents it, with all his shallow thought and clumsy style-to be a point of view not without reason; but he will also find something of much greater significance, that most of the critics of the day, even those who thoroughly appreciated the worth of this point of view, were freeing the theory from its most glaring crudities, and were so altering it that from the standpoint of the stalwarts they seemed its enemies. Thus regarded the book becomes a valuable document, one indispensable to a real perception of critical conditions.

JOHN
HUGHES

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To both Pope and Swift, John Hughes seemed "among the mediocribus, in prose as well as verse. Certainly there is nothing in the Essay on Style to prove them wrong. But after the straggling sentences of the Art of Poetry one turns with relief even to mediocrity. Hughes, unlike some who have written on style, practises his own precepts. These precepts pretend to be nothing more than the simple rules which are now the commonplaces of a thousand textbooks; but they have for us an interest as presenting the point of view towards English prose-the principles held and the men admired by the authors of the great periodicals: for, next to Eustace Budgell, Hughes was the most regular of the minor contributors to the Spectator, and his intimate friendship with Addison is well known. It would seem unnecessary to point out that Hughes expressly asserts that genius is not communicable by rules, were it not for the delusion that eighteenth century critics denied this truism. Even today long-suffering teachers of English composition are supposed to fail because they cannot make geniuses, a thing which neither they nor John Hughes ever set out to do.

What Hughes has to say about Spenser is, however, of much more interest than what he has to say about style. That the edition of Spenser to which these essays were prefaced was not reprinted for thirty years is perhaps less symptomatic of popular taste than is sometimes supposed. If we except those who read Spenser under compulsion in our schools and colleges and those. who read him because they wish to be 'cultured', we should not find to-day a startlingly large number of people whose familiarity with him went much beyond hearsay. The important fact is that an edition with 1Pope's Works, ed. Elwin-Courthope, 7. 334, 335.