Drydcn and the Critical Canons of the Eighteenth Century 27 



V 



It is obvious from these instances that the school of Dryden 

 and his successors was hkely to have scant patience with enthusi- 

 asm of any sort. Even in the mouth of Addison, the most hberal, 

 the most open to ahen ideas of them all, it is a term of reproach, 

 synonymous with bad taste, license, and extravagance. From 

 their particular point of view poetry was a judicious exercise of 

 the intelligence, not a raiiscJi or an intoxication. Substantially it 

 consisted in a neat and epigrammatic way of expressing general 

 truth. And its practitioners probably thought quite as well of 

 their sententiae as w-e do of our "purple patches," and very likely 

 with quite as good reason. In fact, it is difficult to see what other 

 advantage than its modishness Tennyson's In Meinoriain pos- 

 sesses over Pope's Essav on Man, in the eyes of whose contem- 

 poraries "reason alone is sufficient to govern a rational creature." 

 In his life of ]\Iilton Johnson defines poetry as "the art of uniting 

 pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the aid of reason."' 

 i\nd in the same strain he explains genius as "a mind of large 

 general powers accidentally determined to some particular direc- 

 tion."^ While to like effect Addison laments "the unhappy force 

 of an imagination unguided bv the check [,s'/V] of reason and 

 judgment." And slight as it is at best, even this apparent con- 

 cession to imagination is merely nominal, for it must not be for- 

 gotten that in the interval the significance of the word has suft'ered 

 something of a change. In the intention of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, imagination was more nearly identical with what we now 

 think of — if we ever think of it at all — as the constructive faculty, 

 than with that state of ecstatic excitement which is usually signi- 

 fied by the word at present. Whereas the art of writing has finally 

 come of modem times to be associated with the pictorial and the 

 musical arts, it was in those days regarded rather as plastic or 

 structural, while the analogies by which it was illustrated were 

 drawn largely from architecture. Agreeably with this view the 

 literary or poetic imagination was considered to consist mainly in 

 the ability to plan, to conceive a whole through the disposition of 



\Tohnson. Lix'cs of the Poets, Cozeley. 



27 



