30 Prosscr Hall Fryc 



Nor, on the other hand, could anything- appear less natural than 

 their language and sentiments. Pope's pastorals, we are told, 

 might have been written by a blind man for all the direct observa- 

 tion they show of the subject ; while his vocabulary is about three 

 parts convention and artifice. To account for this apparent dis- 

 crepancy between profession and practice a great number of ex- 

 planations have been proposed, some of them ingenious but all 

 more or less unsatisfactory. It has been pointed out that by their 

 own confession nature was nothing but a paraphrase for the imi- 

 tation of their classics. 



"Vos exemplaria Graeca 

 Nocturna versate nianu, versate diurna."^ 

 "Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem. 

 To copy nature is to copy them."" 



Or worse, their pretended deference for nature has been treated 

 as an empty formula to which they themselves never thought of 

 attaching any significance, unless it were as a cover for their arti- 

 ficiality. More suggestively, however, Leslie Stephen has ob- 

 served that the natural, after all, is nothing more or less than the 

 usual." What we are used to seems natural, and contrariwise. 

 And in just the same way that it seems natural to an Englishman 

 that a soldier should wear a red coat and unnatural that he should 

 wear any other; so the poetry of Pope, which seems unnatural to 

 us, seemed quite natural to his contemporaries , while our poetry, 

 which seems natural to us, would have seemed unnatural to Pope. 

 And the remark is valuable. On the score of use and wont it dis- 

 poses of a great part of our charges against the artificiality of the 

 eighteenth centur}- ; for I suppose that no one will maintain that 

 Shakespeare's poetry is any more properly a natural product than 

 is Pope's, or that Zola's Loiirdcs, which is the very dccalqiic of 

 actuality, is any better literature than Shakespeare's Midsumuicr 

 Night's Dream, which lies outside of the natural altogether. So 

 it is that Di'. Johnson, who is ridiculed for his own artificiality bv 



'Horace. Ars Poctica, 2G8-69. 



'Pope. Essay on Criticisms, i, 139-40. 



''English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century. 



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