340 POPE. 



asking himself, &quot;Why, in the name of all the gods at once, 

 is this not the real thing 1 &quot; He seems to have felt that 

 there was a dreadful mistake somewhere, when poetry must 

 be called upon to prove itself inspired, above all when it 

 must demonstrate that it is interesting, all appearances to 

 the contrary notwithstanding. Difficulty, according to 

 Voltaire, is the tenth Muse ; but how if there were 

 difficulty in reading as well as writing 1 It was something, 

 at any rate, which an increasing number of persons were 

 perverse enough to feel in attempting the productions of a 

 pseudo-classicism, the classicism of red heels and periwigs. 

 Even poor old Dennis himself had arrived at a kind of 

 muddled notion that artifice was not precisely art, that 

 there were depths in human nature which the most perfectly 

 manufactured line of five feet could not sound, and pas 

 sionate elations that could not be tuned to the lullaby 

 seesaw of the couplet. The satisfactions of a conventional 

 taste were very well in their own way, but were they, after 

 all, the highest 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 may, 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 satisfac 

 torily 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 man 

 nerism of any single author in the rapid and almost 



* 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 efl ect not seldom subjugates the thought as 

 well as the phrase. 



