The Course of English Poetry – 4 97sweetness, lyrism, grace and colour, and replaced it with acute
point and emphatic glitter. They got rid too of Milton’s Latinisms
and poetic inversions, substituting smaller rhetorical artifices of
their own device, — dismissed his great and packed turns of
speech, filling in the void left by the departure of this grandeur
with what claimed to be a noble style, but was no more than a
spurious rhetorical pomp. Still the work they had to do they did
effectively, with talent, energy, even an undeniable genius.
If the substance of this poetry had been of a higher worth,
it would have been less open to depreciation and need not have
excited so vehement a reaction or fallen so low from its exag-
gerated pride of place. But the substance was too often on a par
with the method and often below it. It took for its models the
Augustan poets of Rome, but it substituted a certain perfection
of polish and brilliance and often an element of superficiality
and triviality for the strength and weight of the Latin manner. It
followed more sincerely the contemporary French models; but
it missed their best normal qualities, their culture, taste, tact
of expression, and missed too the greater gifts of the classical
French poetry. For, though that poetry may often fall short of
the intensest poetic delight by its excessive cult of reason and
taste, though it may run often in too thin a stream, though it may
indulge the rhetorical turn too consistently to achieve utterly the
highest heights of speech, yet it has ideas and a strong or delicate
power, a true nobility of character in Corneille, a fine grace of
poetic sentiment and a supreme delicacy and fine passion in
Racine. But the verse of these pseudo-Augustan writers does not
call in these greater gifts: it is occupied with expressing thought,
but its thought has most often little or none of the greater values.
This Muse is all brain of facile reasoning, but has no heart, no
depth or sweetness of character, no high nobility of will, no fine
appeal or charm of the joy and sorrow of life. In this flood of
brilliant and forcefully phrased commonplace, even ideas which
have depths behind them tend to become shallow and external
by the way of their expression. The mind of these writers has no
great seeing eye on life. Its satire is the part of their work which is
still most alive; for here the Anglo-Saxon spirit gets back to itself,