286 POPE. 



of which men were capable who had obscurely divined the 

 Greeks, and who had seen Hamlet, Lear, and Othello upon the 

 stage? Was not poetry, then, something which delivered us 

 from the dungeon of actual life, instead of basely reconciling us 

 with it ? 



A century earlier the school of the cultists had established a 

 dominion, ephemeral, as it soon appeared, but absolute while it 

 lasted. Du Bartas, who m&amp;lt; \ perhaps, as fairly as any, lay 

 claim to its paternity,* had been called divine, and similar 

 honours had been paid in turn to Gongora, Lilly, and Marini, 

 who were in the strictest sense contemporaneous. The infection 

 of mere fashion will hardly account satisfactorily for a vogue so 

 sudden and so widely extended. It may well be suspected that 

 there was some latent cause, something at work more potent 

 than the fascinating mannerism of any single author in the rapid 

 and almost simultaneous diffusion of this purely cutaneous 

 eruption. It is not improbable that, in the revival of letters, 

 men whose native tongues had not yet attained the precision 

 and grace only to be acquired by long literary usage, should 

 have learned from a study of the Latin poets to value the form 

 above the substance, and to seek in mere words a conjuring 

 property which belongs to them only when they catch life and 

 meaning from profound thought or powerful emotion. Yet this 

 very devotion to expression at the expense of everything else, 

 though its excesses were fatal to the innovators who preached 

 and practised it, may not have been without good results in 

 refining language and fitting it for the higher uses to which it 

 was destined. The cultists went down before the implacable 

 good sense of French criticism, but the defect of this criticism 

 was that it ignored imagination altogether, and sent Nature 

 about her business as an impertinent baggage whose household 

 loom competed unlawfully with the machine-made fabrics, so 

 exquisitely uniform in pattern, of the royal manufactories. 

 There is more than a fanciful analogy between the style which 

 Pope brought into vogue and that which for a time bewitched 

 all ears in the latter half of the sixteenth century. As the 

 master had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, 

 so the disciples endeavoured to escape from what was common. 

 This they contrived by the ready expedient of the periphrasis. 

 They called everything something else. A boot with them was 



* Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in the Roman de la Rose, and (yet 

 more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy ; but in Du Bartas the research of effect 

 not seldom subjugates the thought as well as the phrase. 



