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PARTISAN REYIEW
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, Milton, in an alien
political environment, addressed himself severely to the "fit though
few" and his whole style and manner were evidently bulwarked to
endure the absence of immediate audience and abide the justification
of the future; but Milton's actual relationship with the learned
world of his time gave him confidence in this future . Dryden, writing
in a very different style, had a quick sense for his contemporary
audience and his lines and literary types are cut to fit the tastes of an
actual public whose more limited sympathies he knew as well, perhaps,
as Shakespeare knew the deeper interests which could hold together
at one play the London court and crowd. In the eighteenth century
a similar understanding of an actual audience is evident in Pope,
whose language with its dressed and lively snobbism is closer to the
"real language of men" than Wordsworth's beautiful, reminiscent
abstractions. At the turn of the century Wordsworth's reaction against
Pope is part of his reaction against a society with which he had no
sympathy and which appeared to him grossly superficial; he no
longer really wanted to communicate with it. But for Pope, on the
contrary, the actual audience is direct incentive; in his letter on the
Rape of the Lock
to Mrs. Arabella Fermor he says : "Yet you will
bear me witness, it was intended to divert a few young ladies, who
have good sense and good humour enough to laugh not only at their
sex's little unguarded follies, but at their own. But as it was communi–
cated with the air of a secret, it soon found its way into the world."
Thert" is nothing vague in the composition of this "world"; it bears
no relation to Shelley's; and among the important Romantic poets
it was only Byron who addressed himself to so clearly defined an au–
dience; and in this respect Byron is being consciously unromantic; but
he did actually find an audience
In the world,-which, being interpreted,
M eaneth the west or worst end of a city,
And about twice two thousand people bred
By no means to be very wise or witty,
But to sit up while others lie in bed,
And look down on the universe with pity.
Shelley, on the other hand, had almost no actual audience, but
