In this romantic revival, however, the revolution in form and style matters more than in most.  The classicism of the previous age had been so fixed and immutable; it had been enthroned in high places, enjoyed the esteem of society, arrogated to itself the acceptance which good breeding and good manners demanded.  Dryden had been a Court poet, careful to change his allegiance with the changing monarchy.  Pope had been the equal and intimate of the great people of his day, and his followers, if they did not enjoy the equality, enjoyed at any rate the patronage of many noble lords.  The effect of this was to give the prestige of social usage to the verse in which they wrote and the language they used.  “There was,” said Dr. Johnson, “before the time of Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts.  Words too familiar or too remote to defeat the purpose of a poet.”  This poetic diction, refined from the grossness of domestic use, was the standard poetic speech of the eighteenth century.  The heroic couplet in which it was cast was the standard metre.  So that the first object of the revolt of the romantics was the purely literary object of getting rid of the vice of an unreal and artificial manner of writing.  They desired simplicity of style.

When the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge were published in 1798, the preface which Wordsworth wrote as their manifesto hardly touched at all on the poetic imagination or the attitude of the poet to life and nature.  The only question is that of diction.  “The majority of the following poems,” he writes, “are to be considered as experiments.  They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.”  And in the longer preface to the second edition, in which the theories of the new school on the nature and methods of the poetic imagination are set forth at length, he returns to the same point.  “The language too, of these men (that is those in humble and rustic life) has been adopted ... because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived, and because from their rank in society, and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple unelaborated expressions.”  Social vanity—­the armour which we wear to conceal our deepest thoughts and feelings—­that was what Wordsworth wished to be rid of, and he chose the language of the common people, not because it fitted, as an earlier school of poets who used the common speech had asserted, the utterance of habitual feeling and common sense, but because it is the most sincere expression of the deepest and rarest passion.  His object was the object attained by Shakespeare in some of his supremest moments; the bare intolerable force of the speeches after the murder of Macbeth, or of King Lear’s