Some Diversions of a Man of Letters. Edmund Gosse
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Название: Some Diversions of a Man of Letters
Автор: Edmund Gosse
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Документальная литература
isbn: 4057664642264
isbn:
It is not necessary to indicate more than very briefly what the principles of the classic poetry had been. The time had passed when readers and writers in England gave much attention to the sources of the popular poetry of their day. Malherbe had never been known here, and the vigorous Art poétique of Boileau, which had been eagerly studied at the close of the seventeenth century, was forgotten. Even the Prefaces of Dryden had ceased to be read, and the sources of authority were now the prose of Addison and the verse of Pope. To very young readers these stood in the same relation as the writings of the post-Tennysonian critics stand now. To reject them, to question their authority, was like eschewing the essays of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. In particular, the Essay on Criticism was still immensely admired and read; it had crystallised around cultivated opinion very much as the Studies in the Renaissance did from 1875 onwards. It was the last brilliant word on the aims and experiences of poetical art, and how brilliant it was can be judged by the pleasure with which we read it to-day, in spite of our total repudiation of every æsthetic dogma which it conveys. It is immortal, like every supreme literary expression, and it stands before us in the history of poetry as an enduring landmark. This was the apparently impregnable fortress which the Wartons had the temerity to bombard.
Pope had said that Nature was the best guide to judgment, but what did he mean by nature? He had meant the "rules," which he declared were "Nature methodis'd" or, as we should say, systematised. The "rules" were the maxims, rather than laws, expressed by Aristotle in a famous treatise. The poet was to follow the Stagirite, "led"—as Pope says in one of those rare lines in which he catches, in spite of himself, the Romantic accent—"led by the light of the Mæonian Star." Aristotle illustrated by Homer—that was to be the standard of all poetic expression. But literature had wandered far from Homer, and we have to think of what rules the Essay on Criticism laid down. The poet was to be cautious, "to avoid extremes": he must be conventional, never "singular"; there was constant reference to "Wit," "Nature," and "The Muse," and these were convertible terms. A single instance is luminous. We have the positive authority of Warburton for saying that Pope regarded as the finest effort of his skill and art as a poet the insertion of the machinery of the Sylphs into the revised edition of The Rape of the Lock (1714). Now this insertion was ingenious, brilliant, and in strict accordance with the practice of Vida and of Boileau, both of whom it excelled. But the whole conception of it was as unlike that of Romanticism as possible.
In particular, the tendency of the classic school, in its later development, had been towards the exclusion of all but didactic and ethical considerations from treatment in verse. Pope had given great and ever-increasing emphasis to the importance of making "morals" prominent in poetry. All that he wrote after he retired to Twickenham, still a young man, in 1718, was essentially an attempt to gather together "moral wisdom" clothed in consummate language. He inculcated a moderation of feeling, a broad and general study of mankind, an acceptance of the benefits of civilisation, and a suppression of individuality. Even in so violent and so personal a work as the Dunciad he expends all the resources of his genius to make his anger seem moral and his indignation a public duty. This conception of the ethical responsibility of verse was universal, and even so late as 1745, long after the composition of Warton's "Enthusiast," we find Blacklock declaring, with general acceptance, that "poetical genius depends entirely on the quickness of moral feeling," and that not to "feel poetry" was the result of having "the affections and internal senses depraved by vice."
The most important innovation suggested by Joseph Warton was an outspoken assertion that this was by no means the object or the proper theme of poetry. His verses and those of his brother, the Essay on Pope of the elder, the critical and historical writings of the younger, may be searched in vain for the slightest evidence of moral or didactic sentiment. The instructive and ethical mannerisms of the later classicists had produced some beautiful and more accomplished verse, especially of a descriptive order, but its very essence had excluded self-revelation. Dennis, at whom Pope taught the world to laugh, but who was in several respects a better critic than either Addison or himself, had come close to the truth sometimes, but was for ever edged away from it by the intrusion of the moral consideration. Dennis feels things æsthetically, but he blunders into ethical definition. The result was that the range of poetry was narrowed to the sphere of didactic reflection, a blunt description of scenery or objects being the only relief, since
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