t it could
thoroughly comprehend.[13] Thereby it escaped obscurity. The writings
of the Augustans in both verse and prose are distinguished by a perfect
clearness, but it is a clearness without subtlety or depth. They never
try to express a thought, or to utter a feeling, that is not easily
intelligible. The mysticism of Wordsworth, the incoherence of Shelley,
the darkness of Browning--to take only modern instances--proceed,
however, not from inferior art, but from the greater difficulty of
finding expression for a very different order of ideas.

Again the literature of the Restoration and Queen Anne periods--which may
be regarded as one, for present purposes--was classical, or at least
unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of
curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of
feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect
sense of beauty. It was a literature not simply of this world, but of
_the_ world, of the _beau monde_, high life, fashion, society, the court
and the town, the salons, clubs, coffee-houses, assemblies,
ombre-parties. It was social, urban, gregarious, intensely though not
broadly human. It cared little for the country or outward nature, and
nothing for the life of remote times and places. Its interest was
centered upon civilization and upon that peculiarly artificial type of
civilization which it found prevailing. It was as indifferent to Venice,
Switzerland, the Alhambra, the Nile, the American forests, and the
islands of the South Sea as it was to the Middle Ages and the manners of
Scotch Highlanders. The sensitiveness to the picturesque, the liking for
local color and for whatever is striking, characteristic, and peculiarly
national in foreign ways is a romantic note. The eighteenth century
disliked "strangeness added to beauty"; it disapproved of anything
original, exotic, tropical, bizarre for the same reason that it
disapproved of mountains and Gothic architecture.

Professor Gates says that the work of English literature during the first
quarter of the present century was "the rediscovery and vindication of
the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century had been to
order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods had been
analysis and generalization. It asked for no new experience. . . The
abstract, the typical, the general--these were everywhere exalted at the
expense of the image, the s