Drydcn and the Critical Canons of the Eighteenth Century 31 



Lowell/ ridicules Cowley on the same score;- while Shakespeare, 

 whom we extol for his naturalness, is denounced for his artifi- 

 ciality by Dryden. In fact, there was never an age that was not 

 artificial to some other and natural to itself. But while this is 

 quite true, Leslie Stephen's suggestion fails to hit the mark. It 

 fails to explain how the poetry of Pope, though it might have 

 seemed natural in this one sense to its habitues when once estab- 

 lished, should ever have succeeded in recommending itself to any 

 one in the first instance or in justifying its own pretensions as an 

 imitation of nature. 



As a matter of fact the difficulty is entirely of our own raising 

 and is due to one of our modern "scientific" confusions. By na- 

 ture we have come to understand the physical order almost ex- 

 clusively, the material universe together with the sentient world 

 as far as the latter constitutes a dependency of the former. The 

 natural, thel"efore, is restricted in our sense to the iliechanical and 

 the instinctive or impulsive. Landscape, what was once called 

 "external nature," the animal and the vegetable, are natural still. 

 It is natural apparently to act like a beast ; cjuite unnatural to act 

 like a man. It is in this sense that Renan declares that nature has 

 no regard for chastity — or in other words that chastity is unnat- 

 ural and hence monstrous." As an inevitable conseciuence it is 

 held almost universally nowadays that such of our institutions 

 and beliefs, moral, social, political, and the like, as can not be ac- 

 counted for bv some purely physical explanation are necessarily 

 idle, illusory, and invalid. Morality must be utilitarian, or it is 

 superstition. And finally it is seriously proposed to apply the 

 methods of "natural" science to the study of society, of history, 

 even of literature and of humanity as a whole, in total forgetful- 

 ness apparently that there is another nativre than that of natural 

 science. With such notions in our heads it is no wonder if we 

 miss the sense of the eighteenth century. For this conception of 

 nature, in which we have allowed ourselves to become wholly ab- 



' Lowell. Pope. 



"Johnson. Lives of the Poets, Cowley. 



^ Renan. Souvenirs d'Eiifanee et de .leitnesse. ^lattliew Arnold. Dis- 

 courses in America, Nin>ibeys. 



