Drydcn and the Critical Canons of the Eighteentli Century 15 



the poetical qualities of feeling, imagination, and temperament 

 they were generously endowed ; of the prose qualities of measure, 

 restraint, precision, and reason they were well-nigh destitute. 



Nor is the luster of the achievement diminished by the circum- 

 stance that the distinction as once established has been again ob- 

 literated. In spite of the havoc and confusion wrought by De 

 Ouincey, Ruskin, and Pater, it is the tradition of Addison and 

 Swift which represents, for all their faults, the genre tranche, 

 the English prose idea in its integrity. Of this prose, it should 

 be borne in mind, Dryden, however high his deserts, was but the 

 originator. With him prose was very largely a means to end, a 

 matter of business rather than of literature, an instrument for the 

 production of prefaces, dedications, manifestoes, and proclama- 

 tions of one sort and another incidental to the actual practice of 

 his art in poetry and drama. Had the case been otherwise, had 

 he failed to divest himself of his literary pretension, to begin 

 with, it is doubtful whether his experiments would have turned 

 out very much better than those of his predecessors. As a conse- 

 quence of his literary insouciance, however, his style is naturally 

 very uneven and irregular. He has an official statement to make, 

 a matter of professional business to transact ; and he is by no 

 means finical about the manner in which he expresses himself.^ 

 Nor is it quite fair to expect of him as a beginner that he should 

 thoroughly explore the path upon which he was the first to stum- 

 ble, or should himself bring his own invention to perfection. For 

 that we must look to a later period, to the period of Swift and 

 Addison. 



In the interval, however, though the general conception re- 

 mains unchanged, the accidental standards have suffered a grad- 

 ual transformation. Of Dryden's ]jrose the main characteristic is 

 energy. Even at its best it has something of the clumsiness of a 

 bludgeon. In spite of his artlessness and informalitv it is evident 

 that he still feels written language as something quite dift'erent 

 from spoken. By Addison's time, however, conversation has 

 come to be the general standard of prose. For the change the 



\-lll for Loz'c, Preface. 



15 



