What they did for prose these “Classic” writers did even more exactly—­and less happily—­for verse.  Fashions often become exaggerated before their disappearance, and the decadence of Elizabethan romanticism had produced poetry the wildness and extravagance of whose images was well-nigh unbounded.  The passion for intricate and far-sought metaphor which had possessed Donne was accompanied in his work and even more in that of his followers with a passion for what was elusive and recondite in thought and emotion and with an increasing habit of rudeness and wilful difficultness in language and versification.  Against these ultimate licences of a great artistic period, the classical writers invoked the qualities of smoothness and lucidity, in the same way, so they fancied, as Vergil might have invoked them against Lucretius.  In the treatment of thought and feeling they wanted clearness, they wanted ideas which the mass of men would readily apprehend and assent to, and they wanted not hints or half-spoken suggestions but complete statement.  In the place of the logical subtleties which Donne and his school had sought in the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, they brought back the typically Renaissance study of rhetoric; the characteristic of all the poetry of the period is that it has a rhetorical quality.  It is never intimate and never profound, but it has point and wit, and it appeals with confidence to the balanced judgment which men who distrust emotion and have no patience with subtleties intellectual, emotional, or merely verbal, have in common.  Alongside of this lucidity, this air of complete statement in substance they strove for and achieved smoothness in form.  To the poet Waller, the immediate predecessor of Dryden, the classical writers themselves ascribed the honour of the innovation.  In fact Waller was only carrying out the ideals counselled and followed by Ben Jonson.  It was in the school of Waller and Dryden and not in that of the minor writers who called themselves his followers that he came to his own.

What then are the main differences between classicism of the best period—­the classicism whose characteristics we have been describing—­and the Romanticism which came before and after?  In the first place we must put the quality we have described as that of complete statement.  Classical poetry is, so to speak, “all there.”  Its meaning is all of it on the surface; it conveys nothing but what it says, and what it says, it says completely.  It is always vigorous and direct, often pointed and aphoristic, never merely suggestive, never given to half statement, and never obscure.  You feel that as an instrument of expression it is sharp and polished and shining; it is always bright and defined in detail.  The Great Romantics go to work in other ways.  Their poetry is a thing of half lights and half spoken suggestions, of hints that imagination will piece together, of words that are charged with an added meaning of sound over sense, a thing that stirs the vague and impalpable restlessness of memory or terror or desire that lies down beneath in the minds of men.  It rouses what a philosopher has called the “Transcendental feeling,” the solemn sense of the immediate presence of “that which was and is and ever shall be,” to induce which is the property of the highest poetry.  You will find nothing in classical poetry so poignant or highly wrought as Webster’s