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MODERN HISTORY LIBRARY |
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CHAPTER VI.
THE
LITERATURE OF THE ENGLISH RESTORATION, INCLUDING MILTON.
The Renaissance
did not bear its perfect fruit in England till late. Long after in Italy it had
been defeated in its protracted struggle with the reactionary element in the
Church, it continued in England to find fuller expression not only in the minds
but in the characters of men. In the Florence of Milton’s day the spirit of the
Renaissance lingered only in the intellectual pastimes of the Academies. In
England, where the study of the classics continued hand in hand with that of
the Bible, the freedom won refused to stop short at the acquirement of mental
elegance. It embraced the whole man, raising before him an ideal of life and
conduct largely Hebraic in its consciousness of duty to a Deity who had
selected a nation (and, according to some, here and there a person) for favour.
At the same time, the chivalric ideals were not dead. The memory of Sir Philip
Sidney, the Elizabethan perfect knight, was still active; Dante and Petrarch, “lofty
fables and romances,” and The Faerie Queene, were still consulted for moral
guidance as well as for pleasure. And the study of the classics had encouraged
certain notions of the Stoic philosophy, which were assimilated into the ideal.
Of this ideal, the result of the joint action of Reformation and Renaissance,
John Milton in his early years was the supreme example. That there were others,
Mrs Hutchinson’s record of the youth of her husband, who was bom seven years
after Milton, helps to show. There was little in it of what we now imply by the
name Puritan. The arts were freely practised. Milton, who inherited a love of
music from his father, preserved it to the end of his life and formed a
friendship with Hemy Lawes, a Court musician. And the great heritage—as it had
already come to be—of Elizabethan imagination as lavished in the Elizabethan
drama was in his youth still a matter of glory, not, as it became later, of
shame. If Milton hissed academical comedies at Cambridge, he hissed them not
because they were stage-plays, but because they were silly. If he wrote nothing
for a theatre which had already begun to show signs of decadence and
immorality, he wrote (and that not long after the publication of Histriomastix)
two masques for performance, meditated
1630-7] Milton's early poems. The humanist
and the Puritan are often spoken of as two elements at war in Milton. Rightly
regarded, they would rather seem to be interdependent, forming together the
peculiar and beautiful result of the interaction of Reformation and
Renaissance. So early as 1630 we find the two wrought into perfect harmony in
the poem, At a solemn musick. The time was to come when they would be forced
into opposition. Meanwhile, the youthful Milton is almost, if not entirely,
such a man as he has been declared to have been—one who would not unnaturally
have sided with the Cavaliers against the Puritans. His disinclination to take
Orders may have been due partly to his inherited Calvinism, and his dislike of
the growing Arminianism which followed Laud’s elevation to the archbishopric;
the final motive seems to have been his desire to reserve himself for something
higher. He retired to his father’s house at Horton, and there, while preparing
for a greater task, he wrote, among other things, two poems, L'Allegro and Il
Penseroso (1633 c.), which bring back into a world of decadence and barren
conceits (conceits which his manuscripts prove him to have been at pains to
avoid) something of the freshness of the Spenserian time, but chastened,
scholarly, and informed with the constant suggestiveness of classical allusion.
The poems paint nature as seen through two moods in the mind of a young
scholar; they foreshadow, too, the coming conflict between those moods as
expressed in Cavalier and Roundhead. To the same years of preparation belong
the two masques, Arcades (1633 c.) and Comus (1634). The former is a work of
the Jonsonian type: the latter is more interesting, not only for its superior
poetry, but for the vision of the age that shows through it. Comus has been
described as a double allegory. If it represents the conflict between virtue
and vice, it represents also the conflict, now growing yearly sharper, between
the two parties in religion and politics. In Lycidas (1637) we have a still
stronger sign of the cleavage. Here, into the perfect pastoral, the last
expression of the Spenserian influence, comes the first genuine note of the
sublime passion for order in liberty which inflamed the remainder of Milton’s
life. Laud’s insistence on uniformity was filling the pulpits with obsequious
and greedy hirelings. The “sacred office of speaking” was “bought and begun
with servitude and forswearing”; and the prophet, who formed so large a part
of the poet as Milton conceived him, speaks for the first time in direct
reference to national affairs. This was before the final separation. There were
many afterwards to be found upon the other side who must have agreed with the
passage in Lycidas concerning St Peter; and the two voices are still one.
Milton’s enthusiasm
for freedom in religious matters was probably
Milton
reached home in August, 1639. He had intended to include Sicily and Greece in
his travels, but was recalled, as he himself records, by a sense of duty to his
country, where lovers of liberty were preparing to strike a blow. His journey
bore no immediate fruit; it was not till two years later that he put forth the
first of his pamphlets.
The resolve
to lay aside poetry to a more fitting time was not yet definitely formed; but
the publication of the first pamphlet, Of Reformation touching Church
discipline in England (1641) raises the question how far Milton deserted his
first ambition in order to write his controversial prose works. More than any
other man of his time, he had, the consciousness of being dedicated. In his
view, all men were dedicated to the service of the great Taskmaster; himself in
particular was chosen for “the accomplishment of greatest things.” He abstained
It is not
within the province of this chapter to discuss the pamphlets in detail. It will
be enough to refer briefly to one or two general characteristics of Milton’s
prose works. His argument is not clearly conducted, nor is it truly
philosophic. A constant discrepancy is to be noticed between the aspiration that
possesses him and the theorem that he has to advance. The Areopagitica,
for instance, shows no special knowledge and advances no practical schemes; in
the Tractate on Education there is a deep fall from the principle to the
scheme proposed. Of rhetoric there is plenty, sometimes magnificent, at
others merely tinkling, at others tawdry. To read Milton’s prose is to find
frequent cause for wonder how the poet who chastened and solidified English
blank verse after it had fallen into decay, could run so wild in working
without the restrictions of metre. The want of arrangement, of, construction,
and of order, is almost as remarkable in the uncontroversial as in the
controversial works. And the grossness, the malignity of the vituperation in
which he occasionally indulged cannot be wholly excused even by a remembrance
of the age in which he wrote, the enemies he was attacking, or the life and
death struggle in which he engaged them.
1641-61] Milton's prose works. In Milton’s
prose we find, it has been said, the poet in the politician. If the arguments
are weak and the practical value small, the prose works are aglow with the
highest purposes of the greatest mind of his time. The vision of the poet
breaks through the question of the moment to the expression of a vast idealism
inherited from the less hampered aspirations of the Elizabethans. However much
this enthusiasm may be superficially affected in Milton’s case by party spirit
or the need of the moment, personal or political, it renders his prose more
passionate and, at its best, more lofty than any other prose in the language.
In arrangement and style we must mark a decline from the ordered dignity of
Hooker; it s not so rich as Jeremy Taylor; for tempestuous passion, striving to
force expression from an insufficiently developed medium, it has no equal. The
passion at the root of it is the passion of liberty— liberty always conditioned
by the Divine Law as revealed in the “double Scripture” of the Bible and the
Spirit that is given to each man as a
If it is
impossible to read Milton’s prose without as much pain and disappointment as
pleasure, it is also impossible not to realise that its whole effect was
greatly for the good of English prose. His lowest vituperation, hardly less
than his loftiest flights, helped to stretch the capacity of the tongue; and
the application of Milton’s scholarship to his own language resulted in the
fortifying and enriching of it for the benefit of those that came after.
In the twenty
years of battle, almost the only poetry produced by him consists of a few
sonnets; not founded, like those of the Elizabethans, on accepted conceits and
fashionable ardours, but struck out from the poet’s heart. Perhaps for the
first time in English literature we find the sonnet used for an expression of
genuine personal feeling which owed nothing to Italian or French originals;
Milton’s sonnets were written not because the poet would, but because he must;
and no more passionate or truly lyrical sonnets are to be found in the
language. And, when the battle was over and the cause practically lost, the
poet returned, old, blind and unhappy, to the work to which he believed himself
dedicated.
The twenty
years had left their mark. If there is much of the poet in the politician and
theologian, there is a great deal of the theologian in the poet. It is a
useless but fascinating task to speculate what the great epic or drama would
have been like, had Milton produced it ten years earlier, after years of peace
and retirement. One thing is certain: that the poem would have lacked certain
priceless touches of self-revelation. The best-known passage in Paradise Lost is that in which the poet speaks directly of his own blindness (IIi. 1-55). On the other hand, it is
easy to imagine that the poem, whether epical or dramatic, historical or
sacred, would have been a more human poem. Aristocratic and aloof, “nice of
nature, honestly haughty and self-esteeming” as Milton had always been, he
found himself between 1658 and 1663 more out of sympathy with the world about
him than he had been before. The principles that were the passion of his life
were denied; he was blind, poor, surrounded by enemies and, during part of the
time, in
1667] Paradise Lost. Though
today, therefore, the poem is read mainly by scholars, who admire its
learning, its technical beauties, and the constant stream of classical allusion
which gives a deeper meaning to every line, and by such classes as the Russian
peasants, to whom its story is still literally true and capable of being
illustrated by flaming woodcuts, it is possible to regard Paradise Lost as more
remote from the concerns of common humanity than it was. It contains no human
sweetness, no charity, no love. Whatever of those elements there may have been
in a man austere and sublime from youth, twenty years of pamphleteering,
together with his private sorrows and the rejection of his ideals, had killed
in him. The world of chivalry had passed for ever. Woman was no longer the
lodestar, but the source of error; and man no longer the lord of the world, but
a traitor to his own greatness. The voice is the voice of a man defeated. But
to Milton, his contemporaries, and his successors for some generations, it
seemed that Paradise Lost stood not only for an expression of the eternal
truth, of matters of supreme and eternal moment to mankind, but for a story of
the warfare between combatants, all of whom were perfectly familiar and
personally existent beings. That the story should be presented with all the learning
at the poet’s command was in accordance not only with Milton’s exalted idea of
the office of poetry, but with the constant humanist element in him. Aspiring
to the expression of thoughts and truths vaster than any that poetry had yet
dealt with, he lavished on his poem all the knowledge,
Paradise Lost is the last and belated voice of a
great age that was gone. It gathers up all the idealism, all the poetic
labours, all and far more than all the learning of the Elizabethans; it takes
the instrument which from the days of Surrey onwards had grown;
slowly towards perfection, and rescues it from misuse in order to employ it on
greater themes than it had ever known. If the debt of the poem to the Renaissance
is great, its debt to the Reformation is hardly less great, though it contains
in it the seeds of decay. The spiritual scope of the poem could only be
commanded by the choicest of the minds which were able to understand and
assimilate all that was vital in the Genevan doctrine— the realisation of the
justice and might of God and His direct concern with the affairs of man; the
malignity and persistence of the Powers of Evil; the vastness of the scheme in
which man is a minute, but responsible and therefore important, element. Of
the world into which the poem was bom, it shows no impress, though here and
there a bitter reference recalls it. The nature of that world will be seen
shortly; it was a world in which Calvinism was, except for an inarticulate
remnant, as dead as the tradition of the English Renaissance. That the poem was
read, we know; and it is to Dryden’s honour that he saw its merit. But, so far
as actual effect went, it fell on deaf ears. For its public appreciation, Paradise Lost had to wait not only till the Revolution but even later, till
Addison, the mouthpiece of the greatly changed party of the Whigs, expounded
such of its beauties as he and his age could grasp.
1671] Samson Agonistes. Paradise Lost, if Milton’s greatest, was not his
last message to the faithful remnant and the host of foes that surrounded them. Paradise Regained, his own favourite, and Samson Agonistes, published together
in one volume, followed. And it is difficult not to see in these two very
different works a kind of alternative suggested to the losing side. Paradise
Regained, a “poets’ poem,” has been even less widely read, but more
enthusiastically admired by a few, than Paradie Lost. Its severity is greater,
its display of imagination, learning, and poetic adornment less; its nakedness
being partly perhaps a protest against the false poetry, as Milton considered
it, in fashion during his later years, and partly due to a feeling that the
word of truth was sufficient of itself, Paradise Regained has, however, a unity
and a closeness of form that have induced Wordsworth and Coleridge, among
others, to rank it higher than any
other of Milton’s poems. Its message is one of humility and hope, of a peaceful
expectation of release from the bondage of evil. The message of Samson
Agonistes is very different. In adopting the dramatic form and modelling his
tragedy on Greek lines, Milton was only carrying into execution an idea that
had possessed him from his earliest days. Since his return from Italy, the
views of the author of the Sonnet on Shakespeare, of Arcades and of Comus, with
regard to the acted drama had undergone a change, an approximation to the views
of Histriomastix, which may be noticed in the reference to Shakespeare in Eikonoklastes (1649) and even earlier. He had rejected the dramatic form for Paradise Lost, influenced, no doubt, to some extent by the discredit into which
the theatre had fallen, as well as by his sense of poetic fitness. But he had
retained his admiration of the dramatic form of tragedy as “the gravest,
moralest and most profitable.” Had the play been written in his youth, there
would have been, perhaps, no need for an apology. To Samson Agonistes he
prefixed an essay Of that sort of Dramatic Poetry called Tragedy, partly in
order to justify his choice of form to those remaining Puritans who might not
grasp the distinction between the acted and the unactable drama; and partly to
protest against what he held to be the lower kind, which intermixed “comic
stuff with tragic sadness and gravity... corruptly to gratify the people.” If
the simplicity of Paradise Regained is a rejection of the Restoration ideal and
practice of poetry, it is also perhaps a rejection of the Spenserian. It is
impossible not to see in Samson Agonistes a complete rejection of Elizabethan
tragedy.
The play,
then, is a tragedy on the Greek lines; it has been accused of lacking strength
of design and vigour of handling. Read in the light of Milton’s life and times,
it becomes the most passionately personal expression he has left. Of direct
symbolism the play contains much. The Philistines have triumphed over the
chosen people; Samson is blind and at the mercy of his foes. Moreover, his
chief fault is his marriage with a Philistine woman; and there can be no doubt
that to some extent Dalila stands for Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell, and
that Samson’s self-reproaches addressed to the Chorus and to Manoah and his
scene with Dalila represent a recrudescence of the old wound. The Chorus,
indeed, that follows the scene between Samson and Dalila is taken almost
literally from the pamphlets on divorce.
In spite of
the final words of the Chorus, the burden of the play is no message of
resignation or patience. The prophet once more lifts up his voice to denounce,
not only the victorious enemy but the half-hearted of his own side; to draw a
picture of the doom awaiting the oppressor; almost to advise a last desperate
struggle. The play and poem issued in one volume represent what may be supposed
to have been Milton’s two main moods during the last years of his life: violent
indignation, reaching almost to despair, and a withdrawal from the memories of
the past,
The age succeeding Milton. [1660-1680 The tragedy
that was then occupying the theatres was of a very different kind; but before
it is examined the characteristics of the age as a whole may be briefly noted.
In the age of Milton men had first fought with sword and pen for their ideals,
and afterwards tried in many ways to find practical expression for them; in the
age of Dryden, the men of ideals were silent, and the defeated party had
returned to prominence, some of them weary of exile and poverty, others of an
order of things which had discouraged the decoration of life. Between the two
periods comes one of the sharpest divisions in the history of arts and manners.
It was natural that there should be among the Royalists a reaction in favour of
pleasure too strong for moderation and fine taste. The ideals, again, that had
sought for expression in revolt had sought for it unsuccessfully, and the
failure disposed men against ideals of any kind and in favour, rather, of ease
and security. And, in the third place, the years of Puritan rule had effected
so sharp and complete a cleavage between what we may call the age of the
English Renaissance and the age succeeding them, that the nation found itself,
in matters of art and literature, beginning afresh, with no living or
continuous standard of taste for reference. We have seen the significant change
of Milton’s attitude to Shakespeare; by the time of the Restoration the spirit
of the Elizabethan world was completely dead, and the only use of the Elizabethans
which we find amounts practically to parody. The period, then, was one of low
ideals; it was one in which the mind, starting anew, set to work to learn over
again the world in which it found itself; it was one in which material aims and
pleasures, things of certain if small return, were placed in the foreground;
and it was one which, feeling the necessity of a new technique for the
expression of its thoughts and desires, chose its own models and developed them
according to its own needs. We have passed into a prosaic, a curious, a
materialist, and an experimental period. For something of the temper of the
times, no doubt, Charles II in person was responsible. Charles was a man, as
the epitaph ascribed to Rochester, and the information given by Pepys, Hamilton
and others imply, of sound sense, low ideals, and shrewd taste, imbued with
French feeling in matters of literature, and preferring wit to aspiration. His
age is the age of the heroic drama—an attempt to nationalise an exotic; of the
comedy of wit and manners and the death of romantic comedy; of the foundation
of the Royal Society, of curiosity about natural phenomena, and of such
curiosity about the arts as may be found in Evelyn’s Sculptura, that strange
book which not only deals with the minutiae of processes, but attempts to link
up the arts and sciences in a “philosophy” which was the prominent need of
the age. Later come the philosophy of Locke, a patient investigation of the
actual facts of
The great
representative of his age, the man who, like a journalist of genius, knew what
his public wanted before they wanted it, and gave it them in the best possible
form, was John Dryden. Instead of the remoteness and exaltation of Milton, we
have the lower aims, the strong sense, the strange lapses of taste, and the
frequent experiments of Dryden. Milton may be held, on the whole, to give the
best expression to the best minds of his time; Dryden to give the best
expression to the reigning fashions of his. Neither spoke, as Shakespeare had
spoken, for the nation. Milton was the voice of one of two opposed ideals,
Dryden the voice of the Court and of what we should now call society.
The theatre,
falling lower and lower since the early years of the reign of James I, was
revived at the Restoration, to be no longer a national institution, but the toy
of the Court and the town. Sir William D’Avenant, in his tentative productions
at Rutland House and elsewhere in and after 1658, had been led, partly by the
necessity of a disguise, and largely by the influence of what he had seen in
France and Italy, to introduce a form that lay between the heroic drama of
France and the opera. The Restoration brought back to England a large body of
men whose notions were French in character and origin. Lacking a tradition, and
knowing enough of the Elizabethan drama only to misunderstand its form and aim,
they turned to French models for guidance. It was not long before they
introduced, mainly by the aid of Dryden, a form of tragedy which, though
expressive in its native country of national ideas and aims, was in England an
exotic. It is true that English heroic drama is far from strictly French or
“classical” in form. The “unities” are a bondage which the English have never
borne complacently. The Restoration dramatists studied Corneille and Racine
only to dilute them, as it were, with something of the complexity of plot
formerly learned of Spain and the freedom of movement characteristically
English. The attempt to transplant the spirit of the French tragedy was more
thorough in intention, but even less successful in result. The French Court of
Louis XIV had at least an unbroken tradition of chivalry expressed in the
typically French form of gallantry, an heroic past and a stately present. In
France, Corneille’s drama of the great problems of human life, Racine’s drama
of the ethical problems of a
Dryden's heroic plays. Charles and
his Court demanded heroic tragedy, and Dryden, who was not a dramatist of
internal compulsion, gave it them, and gave it them, all things considered,
very good. If he helped to turn The Tempest into an opera, he wrote All for
Love on the basis of Antony and Cleopatra, and it is scarcely too much to say
that All for Love is as good a play of its order as Antony and Cleopatra is.
And, though there is a wide difference between The Conquest of Granada and the
Scudéry romance on which it is founded, we cannot deny to it that “kind of
generous and noble spirit” which has been claimed for it. How the “refined”
age, which, in Evelyn’s phrase, was “disgusted” with the “old plays”, could
have tolerated the lapses of taste to be found in these heroic plays would be
hard to understand, were it not clear that, lacking its own tradition and
standard, it took from another nation a standard which it misinterpreted. That
there were some who deplored the resultant excesses, The Rehearsal (1671) is
there to prove; but it is easy to overestimate the significance and effect of
that burlesque. Aimed originally, not at Dryden but at D’Avenant, the character
of its “hero” was a piece of patchwork. It has even been supposed that Sprat,
Butler, and Clifford, three of the authors of the play, were not above making
sly hits at the fourth, Buckingham. Dryden’s first heroic drama, The Indian
Emperor, had appeared in 1665; it was not till Aurengzebe (1675) that he
announced his intention of deserting the heroic metre which was only one of the
distinctive features of the heroic play, and so late as 1698 we find Crowne
still employing that form. Dryden, with his unerring
Of the other
writers of tragedy, Crowne is chiefly remarkable for the lyrics introduced into
his plays. In Nathaniel Lee we find the popular bombast carried to extremes,
though combined with “infinite fire.” Otway, lacking Dryden’s humour, has a
more poignant tenderness than Dryden, quite as good a sense of character, and a
greater sense of the theatre. The Orphan and Venice Preserved outlived all
Dryden’s plays on the stage, and showed what tragedy could achieve in this age,
when it had cast off the heroic influence.
In the comedy
of the period we find the reverse of the picture. Having exchanged, as it has
been said, the telescope of the Elizabethans for the microscope, the
Restoration authors used the microscope nowhere to better effect than in their
comedy Romantic and poetic comedy were dead. The opera and the ballet had come
to take their places. Jonsonian comedy, the comedy of “humours”, or
single characteristics carried to the point of eccentricity, survived in the
wholesome but extravagant comedies of Shadwell, whose Epsom Wells, and the
comedies of which it is an example, are valuable pictures of contemporary
manners. To some extent the Jonsonian principle of letting a characteristic
stand for a character survives in the Restoration drama, at least as far
It was not
till the Sentimental Comedy of Steele, who followed up a
Sir George Etherege. The pioneer
in this new comedy was Sir George Etherege. The date of Etherege’s return to
England is, like many other facts in his life, uncertain, but there is reason
to believe that he lingered in Paris long enough to see the production of some
of Moliere’s plays. On his return he wrote The Comical Revenge (1664), a
tragi-comedy in which the serious portions are written in rhymed heroics. To
Etherege, therefore, belongs the honour of writing the earliest regular play in
which the use of rhyme was adopted. But his significance does not end there. He
was the first to introduce to England the new comedy, which forsook
eccentricities and moral castigation, and simply attempted to transfer to the
stage the life of the time. A witty man himself, Etherege made the mistake of
endowing all his characters with his own wit; and the fault persisted
throughout most of the Restoration comedy; nevertheless his characters are
portraits. Of them, as of the characters of Restoration comedy in general, it
may be said that, so far from being abstractions, they represent the attempt to
be as exact and realistic as possible. The few chances enjoyed by modem
playgoers of seeing Restoration comedies acted are quite enough to prove these
men and women very much alive indeed. In She Would if she Could (1668) Etherege
developed the idea of the new comedy, and produced the brightest and gayest of
his pictures of contemporary life. In the underplot of his only other play, The Man of Mode (1676)—the play which contains the first of a long line of
fops—Etherege, says Gosse, virtually founded English comedy as it was
understood by Congreve, Goldsmith, and Sheridan.
Dryden’s
first essay in comedy, The Wild Gallant (1663) is, in effect,
With Congreve
we reach the summit of this form of expression. His output was very small, being
checked partly by Collier’s Short View and partly by the social ambitions of
the playwright, whom offices and rewards had relieved of the necessity of work. The Old Bachelor (acted in 1693) had been highly praised and adapted for
representation by Dryden. The Double-Dealer (1693) we have mentioned before.
The skill and vigour with which the single plot is kept alive and full of
interest to the end are masterly. With Love for Love (1695) he opened the
theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields after the secession of Betterton and others
from Drury Lane; and in 1700, after the attack of Collier, appeared his finest
play, The Way of the World. It was his aim in this play to substitute the folly
of affectation for the folly of grossness, and the result is a severe satire on
the world of fashion and foppery. Congreve cannot be acquitted of the charges
of frivolity, cynicism, and indecency. On the other hand, he is never, like
Wycherley, Vanbrugh, or Otway in his comedies, offensive, and Millamant, in his
last play, is a woman so entirely fascinating in her wit and her wilfulness as
to prove him aware of something higher than the gross attractions dwelt on by
his fellows. It may be pointed out, too, that in The Double-Dealer virtue is
rewarded; and, on the whole, it may be said that the faults of Congreve are
largely the faults of his age, while his merits are of his own contriving. In
him the characteristic “wit” of the age finds its most perfect expression. Like
Etherege, he suffers from too much of
It was in
this age that the drama, especially the tragic drama, began to be used for
political ends, if not with the virulence shown by Henry Fielding and others in
the next century, at any rate with almost unabashed openness. In Dryden’s own
case we have, notably, Amboyna (1673), which raked up an old story for the
purpose of inflaming public opinion against the Dutch, and The Spanish Friar, a
“Protestant play” (1681); and The Duke of Guise (1682), written by Lee with
Dryden’s aid, drew a parallel between Guise and Monmouth, and practically foretold
for the latter—in spite of the disclaimer in the epilogue and the subsequent
Vindication—an end similar to that of the former. Otway’s shameful caricature
of Shaftesbury as Antonio in Venice Preserved, though personal rather than
political, is another instance. Even more frequently than the play itself the
prologue and epilogue were used as political weapons. The curious custom by
which the playwright spoke personally to the public through the mouth of an
actor or actress was at its height during this period. The result was almost
always inartistic, in some cases disgusting, as in the famous epilogue to Tyrannic Love or in the first version of that to The Duke of Guise; the
language was often indelicate, and the sentiments highly objectionable. At the
same time, in the hands of Dryden the prologue and epilogue reached a very high
level of epigrammatic point, and were admirably adapted in their freedom to
inflame political passions by sneers, innuendos, or open attack or defence.
Lyrical poetry. In the plays
of the period, too, may be found embedded—to its disadvantage and neglect by
posterity—most of the lyrical poetry of the time. In a self-conscious age, when
feeling was at a low ebb and the passion of love debased by the prevailing
mode, good lyrical poetry was rare. Marvell and Waller carried on the
characteristics of the former age; for the rest, the lyrics of Dryden, Crowne,
Congreve, Pordage, Rochester and others are both small in quantity and
deficient in genuine lyrical quality. Rochester, indeed, is often worthy of
comparison with Catullus; but his lyrics, like those of his contemporaries, are
rather neatly finished than spontaneous, and their harmony is a matter of rule
more than of essence. A favourite form was the ode, and here, as elsewhere,
Dryden outstripped his fellows. The Pindariques of Cowley were freely imitated
by Sprat, and to Congreve belongs the honour of pointing out that a Pindaric
ode proper was not of irregular structure. Dryden’s odes are irregular in
structure, but almost faultless in accomplishment. If Alexander's Feast (1697)
is not poetry of the highest sort, it has been justly called “the best thing of
its kind”; and the first portion of the Ode to the Memory of Mrs Anne Killigrew (1685-6) is famous as one of the most superb pieces of verbal organ-music in
the language.
The age,
however, was not an age of song-birds, but of enquirers, critics,
prose-writers; and the best prose of the time was the work of the critics. The
men of “science” exercised an influence of their own, for it was one of the
merits of the new Royal Society to exact from its members a “close, naked,
natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses, a native
easiness.” From the turbulent splendours of Milton we pass to the ordered,
clarified prose, which is the work of men who use it for the purpose of saying
what they have to say, of communicating their discoveries, thoughts, and
arguments, as clearly as possible. It is, as befits its purpose, for the most
part a plain and useful means of expression; yet in the hands of Dryden, that
great man of letters, it rises, with no professed aim at ornament, into a thing
of dignity and beauty. Dryden used prose for many purposes: the Epistle to the
Whigs that precedes The Medal is a piece of political argument so clear,
forcible, and ordered that it is difficult to believe it a work not forty years
younger than the Areopagitica. But his most important prose-works are in
literary criticism, a new branch of activity introduced into England from
France, partly by Charles and his Court, partly by a French exile,
Saint-Évremond, who exercised a very important influence on the criticism of
his time. Modern French writers find him too much dependent on prejudice imbibed
in the France of his youth, on personal fancy and taste, and lacking in reason
and conviction. To modern England, accustomed to an even more thoroughly
“impressionist” style of criticism, such a verdict seems strange.
Saint-Évremond’s letters (for they are little more) on the English, French, and
classical drama seem full of principle and reason, however little
Literary criticism.—Satire. Such an age
as this makes fruitful ground for satire—a form of literature that looks not
so much at the ideal itself as at the faults of those who depart from it. And
it is due to Dryden that the satire of this period at its best is of supreme
merit. The Hudibras of Samuel Butler, much of which was written before the
Restoration, is in some respects a voice from the age that had passed. Its
versification has all and more than all the ruggedness of Donne or Marston at
their worst: the author chooses deliberately to make his effects by jocular antics
of diction, which his shrewd humour and close observation of detail carry off
successfully. But we look in vain for elevation, dignity, or strong purpose.
Butler shows to the full some of the worst characteristics of the age which
laughed at Hudibras; its easy ridicule of externals, its want of conviction
and of taste, its vulgarity and its scepticism. It is not Puritanism but
Puritans that he attacks, and he attacks them rather with caricature than with
satire. Neither Royalist nor Churchman, but sceptic and opportunist, he
writes less from belief in a cause than from the desire to make fun of the
external extravagances of its opponents, and there is as little principle in
his message as there is plan or cohesion in the poem he took up and dropped and
took up again. Reverence was not a characteristic of the man who could so use
his models, Don Quixote and The Faerie Queene, as to debase them in Butler’s
manner. It might be objected that there was as little conviction at the bottom
of Dryden’s satires as of Butler’s; and, allowing for all reasonable change of
opinion, consistency can hardly be claimed for the man who wrote Amboyna with
its prologue and epilogue in 1673, and eight years later attacked in Absalom
and Achitophel and The Medal the policy which he
supposed to be Shaftesbury’s. But here Dryden’s genius, the dignity of his
mind, the actual superiority conferred on him, not by lofty purpose but by mere
ability, came to his rescue. He took to satire late in life, and then,
probably, rather on suggestion than from any ardent interest in politics; and
the qualities of his mind and the nature of his training for the work were such
that in his hands political satire reached its highest point.
Absalom and Achitophel, the first and greatest of
these poems, was published in November, 1681. The “Popish
Plot” and the
rejection of the Exclusion Bill by the Lords had wrought
popular feeling to a
height not reached in any preceding period of Charles’ reign.
The Parliament at
Oxford had been dissolved; Shaftesbury was on his trial for
high treason; and
it is said that Charles himself suggested to Dryden that he
should strike a
blow in the fight. Dryden’s blow was this satire, which,
though it failed of
its main object on the acquittal of Shaftesbury a few days
after its
publication, was one of the most powerful aids to the King in
his resistance to
the Exclusionists. The story of Absalom and David fitted aptly
enough the
circumstances of Monmouth and his father: Achitophel,
considerably changed,
became Shaftesbury, whom Dryden affected to regard as part
inventor of the “Popish Plot” and the leader in the decision to make war
on the Dutch. The
Biblical story could not, of course, be closely followed, and
the conduct of
the fable, which ends with a speech from the King, is its
weakest part. Its
strength lies in its masterly characterisation, the finest in
an age which
Clarendon and Saint-Évremond had helped to educate in a
favourite field of
literature, and in Dryden’s ability in presenting a case. To
celebrate the
acquittal of Shaftesbury, a medal was struck, which formed the
text of Dryden’s
next satire, The Medal, A Satire against Sedition (March, 1682), also suggested
to him, as report declared, by Charles II. In the introductory Epistle to the
Whigs and in the satire itself Dryden makes fun of the medal and attacks the
party; he returns to his invective on Shaftesbury, and explains in a passage of
great didactic force, sound sense and strong fancy, the ansu tability of
republican institutions to the climate and temper of England. The Medal, like
its predecessors, was not allowed to go unanswered by the Whigs, and among the
answers was Shadwell’s The Medal of John Bayes, a savage piece of scurrility.
Dryden, for once, used his satire for personal ends, and replied to Shadwell in
October, 1682, with Mac Flecknoe, or, a Satire on the True Blue Protestant
poet. In this he fathers Shadwell on Flecknoe, an Irish priest and an
indifferent poet, who had died not long before, and represents the sire handing
on his mantle of dulness to his duller son. In the following month, he returned
to the attack with some 200 lines on Shadwell, Settle and others included in
the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, the rest of which was composed by Nahum
Tate, possibly (for the verse is above Tate’s level) under Dryden’s revision.
And in the same month with this, his last satire and the most
violent attack he ever wrote, he put forth a remarkable piece, the Religio
Laici, an examination of the credibility of the Christian religion and the
claims of the Church of England against the Catholic Church and the Deists. The
surprise that has been expressed at Dryden’s sudden excursion into theology is
ungrounded. Theological thought must have been called forth in all who had
dwelt on the double question, religious and political, raised by the “Popish
Plot” and the Exclusion Bill. Still less is there reason for suspecting
Dryden’s sincerity. The poem could not serve his turn with Charles, of whose
secret leanings to Catholicism he must have been aware, or with the Duke of
York. It forms a sober and sincere expression of the opinions of a man of
fifty-one who was passing through the process of thought which led him four years
later to join the Catholic Church. The conversion was followed by the
publication of The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which, with even more
argumentative skill than was shown in the Religio Laici, he supports the claims
of the Church, commending at the same time the policy of James II. The
sincerity, again, of Dryden’s conversion has been questioned; and even
Saintsbury admits that it may have been helped on to some extent by the
prospect of being on the winning side, by the “journalist spirit” and by his
dislike of the unliterary character of the Protestant Whigs. Dryden indeed was
always abreast or a little in advance of the public opinion of his party. But
it is from the Whig party and its descendants that this charge of insincerity,
together with that of personal profligacy, proceeded, and neither rests on good
foundation. Sincere or not, Dryden held to his path. Except for the Britannia
Rediviva, an ode celebrating the birth of a son to James II, The Hind and the
Panther was his last word on matters of state and religion. The Revolution
found him on the losing side; he was deprived of his laureateship; his
authority, save in matters of literature, was at an end.
We have only to compare the work of Oldham, who published his Satires upon the Jesuits the year before the appearance of Absalom and Achitophel, with the poems mentioned above, to see what Dryden did for satire and didactic poetry. Oldham, student of Marvell though he was, is a rugged writer. His hits are shrewd; but he has none of the “science” of Dryden in the art of attack, and none of his dignity and intellectual supremacy. He maintains throughout the tone to which Dryden descends in the regrettable attack on the son of Shaftesbury in Absalom and Achitophel. For the most part, only on the greatest provocation does Dryden stoop to personalities. He strikes from above, and condescends as he strikes. In most cases, though the individual sufferer is unmistakable, Dryden succeeds in treating him as the embodiment of a principle. He writes not as a moral reformer but as a man of sense, and hits hardest when apparently most cool. There is no calculating exactly the effect of such a weapon as this of Dryden’s in the victory of Charles over the Exclusionists. Besides the direct satire of Absalom and Achitophel, its severe and logical expression of the political thought of the King’s party, its scorn of popular rule and of such abstractions as “that golden calf—a state,” and its glorification of monarchy and of Charles, account must be taken of the skill with which, by its very tone of ease and superiority, it contrives to put a social stigma on those whom it attacks in an age which was socially ambitious and socially sensitive The place of these poems as pure literature has been almost universally acknowledged to be supreme in their kind. Poetry and argument go hand in hand in a manner never before achieved, and the management of the couplet—for which Dryden had been trained by years of work in the drama—is perfect. These didactic poems and the Fables from Chaucer and Boccaccio to which he turned after the Revolution may be regarded as the best poetry of a prosaic age. If skill in stating a case or telling a story does not constitute the highest form of poetry, it is to Dryden’s honour that he gathered up all the reasoning power, the wit, and the polish of his age and gave them expression with the best of the taste that his labours had helped to form. The novel and the Characters. 1643-1712 A last word must be added concerning another form of literary expression, which the following century brought to perfection—the novel. During the closing of the theatres after 1642, the heroic romances of France made their way into England and were translated and imitated freely by Orrery, Crowne, and others, while D’Avenant’s Gondilert and Chamberlayne’s Pharonnida are heroic romances in verse. The renascence of the drama affected the demand for romances; but in Mrs Behn we find an attempt to bring romance into touch with contemporary life. Her prose novel Oroonoko is a strange mixture of the romantic and the realistic; a mixture even more strangely marked in The Fair Jilt. This attempt was to bear little fruit. A more important work is Congreve’s novel, Incognita, which reveals him as a humorist in prose fiction, and a parodist of the heroic style. On the other hand, we have the allegories of Bunyan, which have no parentage but the Bible and the vivid imagination of an untutored man. The voice of Bunyan is not the voice of his age. He has no affinities with Milton save his knowledge of the Bible; he owes nothing to the other Writers of his day. His imagination and sincerity made him forcible and arresting; the Bible made him lucid and direct. His immediate influence was nothing, and the temptation to dwell on his genius must be resisted. Despite the attempt of Mrs Behn and such close interest in the common facts of life as Bunyan shows in Mr Badman, the origin of the novel must be looked for not in the fiction of this age, but in its history and in its “characters.” Clarendon and Burnet with their powers of characterisation and anecdote, Butler with his Theophrastian Characters, Halifax, Saint-Évremond, and the letter-writers and diarists, sowed the seeds of such work as the Spectator papers on Sir Roger de Coverley, and their development into the English novel.
Further reading
Richard Garnett - The Life of John Milton.
Benjamin Henry Weathley - Samuel Pepys and the world he lived in
Edward Hyde Clarendon - The history of the rebellion and civil wars in England, to which is added, An historical view of the affairs of Ireland VOLUMES : ONE // TWO // THREE // FOUR // FIVE // SIX // SEVEN
Courthope, William John - A history of English poetry
Ward, Adolphus William - A history of English dramatic literature to the death of Queen Ann VOLUME ONE // VOLUME TWO
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