other, to infinity. They throw flower on flower, tinsel on tinsel; everything that glitters gives them pleasure; they gild and embroider and plume their language as they do their clothes. Of clearness, of order, of good sense, they have no thought; it is a festival and it is a riot: absurdity pleases them."[1]
Allowing for differences of time and culture and class, this holds more or less true of preciosity always. It is a wilful play of bias. In an age in which culture is mainly scholarly and imaginative, and science and criticism are only nascent, the tendency will go far to colour all literature ; and, as innovation goes on in form with little or no deepening of thought, the licence of expression goes from bad to worse, poetry giving place to pedantry and technicality and verbal metaphysic, till the test of skill has come to be strangeness of expression, and polite literature in general is become a masquerade, remote from all actuality of feeling and conduct. This occurred in England during the seventeenth century, in which we pass from Shakspere and Spenser to Donne and Cowley; and in which the admirable new art of the young Milton, a brain of supreme artistic faculty nourished on a long study of antiquity and vitalised by new and intense living interests, is still neighboured by the perfectly vicious art of the young Dryden, whose culture is so much slighter and whose interests are so much shallower, and whose first verses are masterpieces of bad taste. Milton shows us the long sway of the fantastic verbalist ideal in scattered phrases which partly mar his strong art though not more than do some of his plunges into a crude simplicity, such as the famous "No fear lest dinner cool." The weaker Dryden shows it at his outset, in his complete acceptance of the fantastic ideal.
- ↑ Histoire de la Litterature Anglaise, i. 276-279.
