Drydcii and the Critical Canons of the Eighteenth Century ii 



cidental to the culmination of every art, was rather essential to 

 that of the eighteenth century on account of the character of its 

 fundamental tenets — the dogma of the distinction and fixit}- of 

 genres and the dogma of absolute and permanent literary per- 

 fection, survivals both of them of renaissance criticism, for which 

 we have not yet entirely rid ourselves of a certain amount of tra- 

 ditional and superstitious veneration. In accordance with such 

 a faith every after-poet was necessarily a copyist. He could not 

 alter, or he deformed, the genre; improvement and modification 

 were alike impossible. At most he could, only adapt. Theoretic- 

 allv, therefore, the whole classic movement was an imitation. 

 Practicallv, however, the English did add something of their own 

 both to the forms and the ideas which they took from others. 

 Their temper was their own, and the conditions which their adap- 

 tations had to meet, so that their work has a distinctive tang after 

 all. Their drama, for instance, cramped as it is, is still broader, 

 freer, and bolder than the French, though it is looser, more licen- 

 tious, and inchoate too. Like most borrowers they were as likely 

 as not to acquire their neighbors' vices without correcting their 

 own. Even their originality is a result of their defects — or at 

 least of their limitations — domestic and foreign, and belongs to 

 their prose rather than to their poetry. In prose, as it happened, 

 they were innovators. But on the whole, consonant as their lit- 

 erary theory was with their mood at the time, they got it, as a 

 conscious possession, from others. Unprompted from without 

 they would probablv have never come to literary consciousness 

 at all. At the same time the prompting was opportune and agree- 

 able. In giving shape and solidity to what was floating vaguely 

 in their own minds, it was just the kind of thing to which they 

 were inclined to listen. There is a curious assumption which has 

 worked its way pretty generally into modern criticism, as though 

 the school of Dryden and Pope had been wickedly seduced from 

 their proper allegiance to the Elizabethans by the perfidious mis- 

 representations of French critics. But as a matter of fact it was 

 the English themselves who helped to raise the prejudice and 

 who threw themselves into the embraces of the stranger because 

 they did not care for Shakespeare and his colleagues. The truth 



