ion, but as
deliberate contrivances intended to convey moral truth in allegorical
fables, and probably devised by sages for the good of the vulgar.

The old gods, then, were made into stiff mechanical figures, as dreary
as Justice with her scales, or Fame blowing a trumpet on a monument.
They belonged to that family of dismal personifications which it was
customary to mark with the help of capital letters. Certainly they are a
dismal and frigid set of beings, though they still lead a shivering
existence on the tops of public monuments, and hold an occasional wreath
over the head of a British grenadier. To identify the Homeric gods with
these wearisome constructions was to have a more serious
disqualification for fully entering into Homer's spirit than even an
imperfect acquaintance with Greek, and Pope is greatly exercised in his
mind by their eating and drinking and fighting, and uncompromising
anthropomorphism. He apologizes for his author, and tries to excuse him
for unwilling compliance with popular prejudices. The Homeric theology
he urges was still substantially sound, and Homer had always a distinct
moral and political purpose. The Iliad, for example, was meant to show
the wickedness of quarrelling, and the evil results of an insatiable
thirst for glory, though shallow persons have thought that Homer only
thought to please.

The artificial diction about which so much has been said is the natural
vehicle of this treatment. The set of phrases and the peculiar mould
into which his sentences were cast, was already the accepted type for
poetry which aimed at dignity. He was following Dryden as his own
performance became the law for the next generation. The style in which a
woman is called a nymph--and women generally are "the fair"--in which
shepherds are conscious swains, and a poet invokes the muses and strikes
a lyre, and breathes on a reed, and a nightingale singing becomes
Philomel "pouring her throat," represents a fashion as worn out as hoops
and wigs. By the time of Wordsworth it was a mere survival--a dead form
remaining after its true function had entirely vanished. The proposal to
return to the language of common life was the natural revolt of one who
desired poetry to be above all things the genuine expression of real
emotion. Yet it is, I think, impossible to maintain that the diction of
poetry should be simply that of common life.

The true principle would rather seem to be that any style becomes bad