PREFACE THIS book is intended for the use of students of English poetry and criticism. Its principal aims are (1) to exhibit in selected documents the historical development of the general theory of poetry from the middle of the sixteenth century to the close of the nineteenth century; (2) to determine from authoritative sources the theoretical principles of the several schools of poetry and criticism; and (3) to present the arguments that have been advanced for or against controverted principles or doctrines. Doctrines and criticisms of doctrines are generally arranged chronologically in sections and sub-sections corresponding to logical or other convenient divisions of the subject. In this way an attempt has been made to correlate doctrines in reference to the general principles from which they have been deduced. The book may be said in the main to present two conflicting views or theories of poetry, the Romantic and the Neo-Classical; the former having its source in Platonism, the latter proceeding from Aristotle's definition of poetry as a mimetic art. With the science of criticism itself, both theories, in V 271995 germ at least, arrived in England from Italy in the sixteenth century, and our early tentative criticism confounded or sought to harmonise the two theories of poetry. Gradually, however, the principles of Neo-Classicism disengaged themselves, and developed under the influence of the seventeenth-century French School of poetry into the complex theory which dominated poetry and criticism for more than a century. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century a reaction set in, and the next half-century witnessed the decline of Neo-Classicism and the triumph of Romanticism. 4 In the latter half of the nineteenth century the principles of Classical poetry, clarified by Romantic criticism of Neo-Classicism, were restated and reinterpreted by Matthew Arnold, whose exposition of æsthetic principles was based upon a wider and deeper culture than had been available in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Briefly, the Neo-Classical view of poetry current at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries may be stated as follows: Poetry is an imitative art with "Nature" as the object of its imitation; the rules of the art are to be deduced from the practice of the ancients who followed "Nature" closely and invented the "kinds" of poetry (viz. epic, tragedy, etc.); the examples they have left in these kinds are the models to be imitated by modern poets. The Neo-Classical School, rejecting the early Romantic theories of inspiration and imaginative creation, referred poetic creation to purely intellectual powers and processes briefly and comprehensively designated Wit. The criticism of the school is a "criticism of rules," i.e. a criticism of "faults" and "beauties." E Th Although English critics of the period were content to take their doctrines from the French Classical School, they interpreted these doctrines or adapted them to the genius of English poetry with native independence and common sense. They paid but a qualified respect to authority. They reserved the right to improve upon the instruction of the ancients by a direct study of Nature and by experience. They interpreted doctrines and rules with considerable latitude, and they challenged or rejected such rules as did not command the assent of their reason. Even flagrant violations of accepted rules, if justified by the event, they generally condoned. Criticism distinguished, in the interest of freedom, between mechanical rules that might be dispensed with and fundamental indispensable laws. Nevertheless, the multiplicity of rules-however laxly or indulgently interpreted-was felt by the more independent of the critics to subject poetry to excessive constraint and to detract from its spirit and grace. The doctrine of the "kinds" and its corollary the doctrine of imitation of the ancients were early sapped by no less orthodox an adherent of Neo-Classicism than Dryden. Rymer had advocated the restoration of ancient tragedy to the modern stage, and Dryden in combating Rymer's proposal qualified Rymer's postulate that Nature is the same in all places with the important and subversive rider that "the climate, the age, the disposition of the people, to whom a poet writes, may be so different that what pleased the Greeks would not satisfy an English audience." Even the cardinal Neo-Classical principle which defines poetry as an imitation of "Nature" is interpreted with generous concessions to the genius and traditions of English Romantic poetry. Poetry," writes Dryden, "is not only a true imitation of Nature, but of the best Nature, of that which is wrought up to a nobler pitch. . . . It presents us with the scattered beauties of Nature united by a happy chemistry, without its deformities or faults." The poet, we are told, is not tied to truth, i.e. to an exact imitation of "Nature." He delivers things like truth or probable-i.e. natural fiction-or things merely within the conceived possibility of Nature or founded on popular belief-i.e. supernatural fiction. "The poetic world," says Granville, "is nothing but fiction." It is "a system universally agreed on," and "all that shall be contrived or invented upon this foundation according to Nature shall be reputed as truth." There could be no more significant symptom of the inadequacy of Neo-Classical theory to elucidate the nature and laws of poetry than the attempts of Neo-Classical critics to widen the definition of the term "Nature." Wolseley seems to make a conscious effort to generalize the term (p. 70); and Dennis has recourse to a purely formal definition. "Nature," he says, is nothing but the order and rule and harmony in the visible and invisible Creation. In this sense, the precept "Follow Nature" is commended by Dennis and other eighteenth-century writers. Dennis's conception of the rôle of order and rule and harmony in poetry is of historical interest, and has its analogue in a locus classicus of Romanticism: "The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must |