THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
Page: 17

not so much that their inspiration was in bad taste, as that no
reader of taste could suffer them. A better opinion on that
company of poets is that they had a taste extraordinarily liberal,
generous, and elastic, but not essentially lax: taste that gave
now and then too much room to play, but anon closed with the purest
and exactest laws of temperance and measure. The extravagance of
Crashaw is a far more lawful thing than the extravagance of
Addison, whom some believe to have committed none; moreover, Pope
and all the politer poets nursed something they were pleased to
call a "rage," and this expatiated (to use another word of their
own) beyond all bounds. Of sheer voluntary extremes it is not in
the seventeenth century conceit that we should seek examples, but
in an eighteenth century "rage." A "noble rage," properly
provoked, could be backed to write more trash than fancy ever
tempted the half-incredulous sweet poet of the older time to run
upon. He was fancy's child, and the bard of the eighteenth century
was the child of common sense with straws in his hair--vainly
arranged there. The eighteenth century was never content with a
moderate mind; it invented "rage"; it matched rage with a flagrant
diction mingled of Latin words and simple English words made vacant
and ridiculous, and these were the worst; it was resolved to be
behind no century in passion--nay, to show the way, to fire the
nations. Addison taught himself, as his hero taught the battle,
"where to rage"; and in the later years of the same literary age,
Johnson summoned the lapsed and absent fury, with no kind of
misgiving as to the resulting verse. Take such a phrase as "the
madded land"; there, indeed, is a word coined by the noble rage as
the last century evoked it. "The madded land" is a phrase intended
to prove that the law-giver of taste, Johnson himself, could lodge
the fury in his breast when opportunity occurred. "And dubious
title shakes the madded land." It would be hard to find anything,
even in Addison, more flagrant and less fair.

Take The Weeper of Crashaw--his most flagrant poem. Its follies
are all sweet-humoured, they smile. Its beauties are a quick and