THE CENTURY OF MODERATION


After a long literary revolt--one of the recurrences of imperishable
Romance--against the eighteenth-century authors, a reaction was due, and
it has come about roundly. We are guided back to admiration of the
measure and moderation and shapeliness of the Augustan age. And indeed
it is well enough that we should compare--not necessarily check--some of
our habits of thought and verse by the mediocrity of thought and perfect
propriety of diction of Pope's best contemporaries. If this were all!
But the eighteenth century was not content with its sure and certain
genius. Suddenly and repeatedly it aspired to a "noble rage." It is not
to the wild light hearts of the seventeenth century that we must look for
extreme conceits and for extravagance, but to the later age, to the
faultless, to the frigid, dissatisfied with their own propriety. There
were straws, I confess, in the hair of the older poets; the eighteenth-
century men stuck straws in their periwigs.

That time--surpassing and correcting the century then just past in
"taste"--was resolved to make a low leg to no age, antique or modern, in
the chapter of the passions--nay, to show the way, to fire the nations.
Addison taught himself, as his hero "taught the doubtful battle," "where
to rage." And in the later years of the same literary century Johnson
himself summoned the lapsed and alien and reluctant fury. Take such a
word as "madded"--"the madded land"; there indeed is a word created for
the noble rage, as the eighteenth century understood it. Look you,
Johnson himself could lodge the fury in his responsible breast:

And dubious title shakes the madded land.