The Rhetorical Pattern of Neo-Classical Wit

Abstract

THE creation patent of the neo-classical couplet offers as many difficulties as Charles II presented Dugdale in the Baronage of England. Where the seventeenth century settled upon Waller and his second, Denham, we have wavered from Waller to Sandys, Jonson, Drayton, Sir John Beaumont, and others. If we cannot determine the author of this invention, then our indecision itself may be significant, for it suggests that the urges of the neo-classical couplet were in the air, and manifested themselves occasionally in various poets, being most persistent in Waller. To explain the coming of age of the neo-classical couplet, perhaps the most significant fact is that when the earlier writers approached this couplet they betrayed the literary and rational impulses which were to command the future, and so indicated the verse form in which the Restoration could explore its own mind. Waller became the focal point at which these impulses were concentrated rather than the poet in whom they were born. The development of poetry still led from Jonson to Dryden, though by way of Waller; and the connecting link was less the couplet itself than the informing force of the couplet, which was a manner of saying things ultimately derived from Latin rhetoric. It is common to describe the neo-classical decasyllabic verse as couplets of a thoroughly distichic character, almost uniformly endstopped both in rhythm and in sense, or what we may call serried verse. Of these couplets there are two varieties to be found in Dryden and Pope: the balanced, antithetic sort, employing a strong medial caesura, which divides the line into balancing parts; and the less patterned sort, with a weaker caesura (or even none at all), which moves more freely within the line and accompanies a slight concession to overflow. Although there is no strict division of labor, the highly patterned sort, with its oscillating movement, is more suitable to reflective verse; while the less patterned sort, with its freer design, admits the forward movement which narrative verse requires.' But 1 On the metric of heroic couplets see Egerton Smith's Principles of Engliah metre (Oxford, 1923), chaps. iv, xii, xx. [MODERN PmLOLOGTy, August, 1935] 55