Bright clear common sense was for once having
its own way, and tyrannizing over the faculties from which it too often
suffers violence. The favoured faculty never doubted its own
qualification for supremacy in every department. In metaphysics it was
triumphing with Hobbes and Locke over the remnants of scholasticism;
under Tillotson, it was expelling mystery from religion; and in art it
was declaring war against the extravagant, the romantic, the mystic, and
the Gothic,--a word then used as a simple term of abuse. Wit and sense
are but different avatars of the same spirit; wit was the form in which
it showed itself in coffee-houses, and sense that in which it appeared
in the pulpit or parliament. When Walsh told Pope to be correct, he was
virtually advising him to carry the same spirit into poetry. The
classicism of the time was the natural corollary; for the classical
models were the historical symbols of the movement which Pope
represented. He states his view very tersely in the essay. Classical
culture had been overwhelmed by the barbarians, and the monks "finished
what the Goths began." Letters revived when the study of classical
models again gave an impulse and supplied a guidance.
At length Erasmus, that great injured name,
The glory of the priesthood and their shame,
Stemm'd the wild torrent of a barbarous age,
And drove these holy Vandals off the stage.
The classicalism of Pope's time was no doubt very different from that of
the period of Erasmus; but in his view it differed only because the
contemporaries of Dryden had more thoroughly dispersed the mists of the
barbarism which still obscured the Shakspearean age, and from which even
Milton or Cowley had not completely escaped.
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