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.
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