The Classic School.—­The literary lawgivers of this age held that a rigid adherence to certain narrow rules was the prime condition of producing a masterpiece.  Indeed, the belief was common that a knowledge of rules was more important than genius.

The men of this school are called classicists because they held that a study of the best works of the ancients would disclose the necessary guiding rules.  No style that did not closely follow these rules was considered good.  Horace, seen through French spectacles, was the classical author most copied by this school.  His Epistles and Satires were considered models.

The motto of the classicists was polished regularity.  Pope struck the keynote of the age when he said:—­

  “True wit is nature to advantage dress’d,
  What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d."[1]

These two lines show the form of the “riming couplet,” which the classical poets adopted.  There is generally a pause at the end of each line; and each couplet, when detached from the context, will usually make complete sense.

Edmund Waller (1606-1687), remembered today for his single couplet:—­

  “The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
  Lets in new light through chinks that time has made,”

had used this form of verse before 1630; but it was reserved for Dryden, and especially for Pope, to bring the couplet to a high degree of perfection.  A French critic advised poets to compose the second line of the couplet first.  No better rule could have been devised for dwarfing poetic power and for making poetry artificial.

Voltaire, a French classicist, said, “I do not like the monstrous irregularities of Shakespeare.”  An eighteenth-century classicist actually endeavored to improve Hamlet’s soliloquy by putting it in riming couplets.  These lines from Macbeth show that Shakespeare will not tolerate such leading strings nor allow the ending of the lines to interfere with his sense:—­

“...Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against The deep damnation of his taking-off.”

A later romantic poet called the riming couplet “rocking-horse meter”; and said that the reading of many couplets reminded him of round trips on a rocking-horse.

Advances are usually made by overstressing some one point.  The classicists taught the saving grace of style, the need of restraint, balance, clearness, common sense.  We should therefore not despise the necessary lesson which English literature learned from such teaching,—­a lesson which has never been forgotten.

The Drama.—­The theaters were reopened at the time of the Restoration.  It is interesting to read in the vivacious Diary of Samuel Pepys how he went in 1661 to see Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, “a play of itself the worst that I ever heard.”  The next year he characterizes A Midsummer Night’s Dream as “the most ridiculous play that I ever saw.”  He liked the variety in Macbeth, and calls The Tempest “the most innocent play that I ever saw.”