246 The Prosody of the Eighteenth Century [CH«
fly-boats that complete the squadron, this flag of syllabic and
accentual regularity floats—only one or two privateer or picaroon
small craft daring to disregard it.
The heroic couplet of Dryden, already sufficiently discussed,
underwent, in the earliest years after Dryden's death, changes
which, considering the natural tendencies of humanity, may be
called inevitable. By his own almost inimitable combination
of skill and strength, and by the mechanical devices of triplet
and Alexandrine, Dryden himself had kept off the monotony
which the regular stopped couplet invites. But the invitation
was sure to be accepted by others ; indeed, they might plead that
they were only realising the ideal of the form. As Waller and
others before Dryden, wittingly or unwittingly, had hit upon the
other devices of sententious balance and a split in the individual
lines, and of pendulum repetition in the couplets: so, after
Dryden, first Garth and then Pope, no doubt with their eyes
open, rediscovered these ; and the extraordinary craftsmanship
of Pope carried the form to its highest possible perfection. If
—and it is difficult to see how the assertion can be denied—the
doctrine expressed in various ways but best formulated by De
Quincey that 'nothing can go wrong by conforming to its own
ideal' be true, the couplet of Pope, in and by itself, is invulnerable
and imperishable.
But it very soon appeared that a third adjective of the same
class, which indicates almost a necessary quality of the highest
poetic forms, could not be applied to it. It was not inimitable.
The admitted difficulty, if not impossibility, of deciding, on internal
evidence, as to the authorship of the books of The Odyssey trans-
lated by Pope himself, as compared with those done by Fenton
and Broome, showed the danger ; and the work of the rest of the
century emphasised it Men like Savage, Churchill and Cowper went
back to Dryden, or tried a blend of Dryden and Pope; men like
Johnson and Goldsmith new-minted the Popian couplet, in the ore
case by massive strength, in the other by easy grace of thought
and phrase and form. But the dangers of monotony and of
convention remained; and, towards the end of the period, they
were fatally illustrated in the dull insignificance of Hoole and the
glittering frigidity of Darwin.
From one point of view, it is not fanciful or illogical to regard
all other serious, and most other light, measures of this time as
escapes from, or covert rebellions against, this supremacy of a
single form of heroic; but, as has been pointed out above, one