8 Prosscr Hall Fryc 



sembled the French, while he came to look upon Boileau and 

 Rapin — "the latter of which," says Dryden, "is alone sufficient 

 were all other critics lost, to teach anew the rules of writing"^ — 

 very much as the Renaissance had looked upon Aristotle. 



"Learn Aristotle's rules by rote, 

 And at all hazards boldly quote ; 

 Judicious R'ymer oft review, 

 Wise Dennis and profound Bossu.'"' 



Under these circumstances it was inevitable that literature 

 should soon become conventional and imitative. To be sure, 

 every art without exception rests finally upon some convention 

 or other. In this sense, indeed, art is convention. So in drama 

 the action is supposed transparently to take place in a kind of 

 three-sided box, open on the fourth side to the inspection of men 

 •and critics. In the same way the ubiquity of reader and author 

 is a necessary postulate of the ordinary novel ; ^thile individu- 

 ally the enjoyment of Browning, for instance, depends upon the 

 acceptance of a thoroughly arbitrary dialectic, the so-called dra- 

 matic lyric, or lyrical monologue. For this reason, because of 

 some similar convention on which his art necessarily rests, every 

 original genius is likely to strike the unfamiliar reader as strange 

 and unnatural at first. At the same time it is 'necessary to dis- 

 tinguish. Apparently such a sort of initial convention is by no 

 means inimical to art. Of course its general character and its 

 extent have something to do with the matter. Browning's dra- 

 matic lyric is harder to get over than the ordinary dramatic solil- 

 oquy. But on the contrary nothing could be more conventional 

 in itself than the English pastoral ; and yet Milton's Lycidas is a 

 great poem — perhaps his finest if not his greatest. If Pope's 

 Pastorals, therefore, are not good poetry, it is not on this ac- 

 coiuit. It is only when a convention is used, not as a foundation 

 for an effect, but as a substitute for the eft'ect itself, that it be- 

 comes a blemish and a source of weakness. Even the unities of 

 time and place, which afford some of the purest examples of con- 



' Dryden. The Author's Apology for Heroic Poetry aiid Poetic License. 

 'Swift. Rhapsody on Poetry. 



