Drydcn and the Critical Canons of the Eighteenth Century 23 



Unfortunately, however, in despite of authority or tradition, its 

 defects are not only obvious but are so obnoxious to our present 

 prejudices as to have quite blinded us to its equally obvious mer- 

 its. It is monotonous, formal, cut and dried, lifeless, wooden, 

 inflexible. Some wit has likened it to the couple of dry sticks 

 which a savage rubs together in hopes of striking a spark. Even 

 its clarity has come to be a reproach. But none the less has our 

 scorn of it cost us a literary genre which we can hardly afford 

 to be without. To the expression of a certain kind of wisdom — 

 not altogether unworldly, perhaps, and } ct by no means destitute 

 of seriousness and elevation — a compositicMi of pathos, satire, and 

 humor, of the pity and the folly of life, in varying proportions, 

 there is no verse so well adapted. That such a poetry — a poetry 

 of which Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arhuthnot is an excellent exam- 

 ple — no longer exists in English is probably due to the gradual 

 deformation of the couplet. For just as Dry den misjudged and 

 despised blank verse because he knew it as a living species only 

 in a corrupt and degraded shape, so we. as though in revenge, 

 have mutilated the couplet until its powers are no longer recog- 

 nizable, and biting off our nose to spite our face, have lost the use 

 of one at least of our literary senses. 



"Immersed 

 In thought so deeply, Father? Sad, perliaps? 

 For whose sake, hers or mine or his who wraps 

 — Still plain I seem to see ! — about his head 

 The idle cloak, — about his heart (instead 

 Of cuirass) some fond hope he may elude 

 My vengeance in the cloister's solitude? 

 Hardly I think ! As little helped his brow 

 The cloak then. Father — as your grate helps now !'" 



This is what the heroic couplet has become in our hands. It is 

 nothing but blank verse tagged with rhyme — and poor blank 

 verse at that — a nondescript such as Jonson and Donne wrote, 

 not a distinct measure with its own character and its proper 

 beauty, such as Pope finally brought to perfection. It is the prim- 

 itive and imdift'erentiated rudiinent from which Dryden began, 



' Browning. A Forgiveness. 



23 



