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
when it dies; when it is used merely as a tradition, and not as the best
mode of producing the desired impression; and when, therefore, it
represents a rule imposed from without, and is not an expression of the
spontaneous working of minds in which the corresponding impulse is
thoroughly incarnated.
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