PERIOD V. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, 1603-1660. PROSE AND POETRY
(_For political and social facts and conditions, see above, page 141._
[Footnote: One of the best works of fiction dealing with the period is J.
H. Shorthouse's 'John Inglesant.'])
The first half of the seventeenth century as a whole, compared with the
Elizabethan age, was a period of relaxing vigor. The Renaissance enthusiasm
had spent itself, and in place of the danger and glory which had long
united the nation there followed increasing dissension in religion and
politics and uncertainty as to the future of England and, indeed, as to the
whole purpose of life. Through increased experience men were certainly
wiser and more sophisticated than before, but they were also more
self-conscious and sadder or more pensive. The output of literature did not
diminish, but it spread itself over wider fields, in general fields of
somewhat recondite scholarship rather than of creation. Nevertheless this
period includes in prose one writer greater than any prose writer of the
previous century, namely Francis Bacon, and, further, the book which
unquestionably occupies the highest place in English literature, that is
the King James version of the Bible; and in poetry it includes one of the
very greatest figures, John Milton, together with a varied and highly
interesting assemblage of lesser lyrists.
FRANCIS BACON, VISCOUNT ST. ALBANS, 1561-1626. [Footnote: Macaulay's
well-known essay on Bacon is marred by Macaulay's besetting faults of
superficiality and dogmatism and is best left unread.] Francis Bacon,
intellectually one of the most eminent Englishmen of all times, and chief
formulator of the methods of modern science, was born in 1561 (three years
before Shakspere), the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great
Seal under Queen Elizabeth and one of her most trusted earlier advisers.
The boy's precocity led the queen to call him her 'little Lord Keeper.' At
the age of twelve he, like Wyatt, was sent to Cambridge, where his chief
impression was of disgust at the unfruitful scholastic application of
Aristotle's ideas, still supreme in spite of a century of Renaissance
enlightenment. A very much more satisfactory three years' residence in
France in the household of the English ambassador was terminated in 1579
(the year of Spenser's 'Shepherd's Calendar') by the death of Sir Nicholas.
Bacon was now ready to enter on the great career for which his talents
fitted him, but his uncle by marriage, Lord Burghley, though all-powerful
with the queen, systematically thwarted his progress, from jealous
consciousness of his superiority to his own son. Bacon therefore studied
law, and was soon chosen a member of Parliament, where he quickly became a
leader. He continued, however, throughout his life to devote much of his
time to study and scholarly scientific writing.
On the interpretation of Bacon's public actions depends the answer to the
complex and much-debated question of his character. The most reasonable
conclusions seem to be: that Bacon was sincerely devoted to the public good
and in his earlier life was sometimes ready to risk his own interests in
its behalf; that he had a perfectly clear theoretical insight into the
principles of moral conduct; that he lacked the moral force of character to
live on the level of his convictions, so that after the first, at least,
his personal ambition was often stronger than his conscience; that he
believed that public success could be gained only by conformity to the low
standards of the age; that he fell into the fatal error of supposing that
his own preëminent endowments and the services which they might enable him
to render justified him in the use of unworthy means; that his sense of
real as distinguished from apparent personal dignity was distressingly
inadequate; and that, in general, like many men of great intellect, he was
deficient in greatness of character, emotion, fine feeling, sympathy, and
even in comprehension of the highest spiritual principles. He certainly
shared to the full in the usual courtier's ambition for great place and
wealth, and in the worldling's inclination to ostentatious display.
Having offended Queen Elizabeth by his boldness in successfully opposing an
encroachment on the rights of the House of Commons, Bacon connected himself
with the Earl of Essex and received from him many favors; but when Essex
attempted a treasonable insurrection in 1601, Bacon, as one of the Queen's
lawyers, displayed against him a subservient zeal which on theoretical
grounds of patriotism might appear praiseworthy, but which in view of his
personal obligations was grossly indecent. For the worldly prosperity which
he sought, however, Bacon was obliged to wait until the accession of King
James, after which his rise was rapid. The King appreciated his ability and
often consulted him, and he frequently gave the wisest advice, whose
acceptance might perhaps have averted the worst national disasters of the
next fifty years. The advice was above the courage of both the King and the
age; but Bacon was advanced through various legal offices, until in 1613 he
was made Attorney-General and in 1618 (two years after Shakspere's death)
Lord High Chancellor of England, at the same time being raised to the
peerage as Baron Verulam. During all this period, in spite of his better
knowledge, he truckled with sorry servility to the King and his unworthy
favorites and lent himself as an agent in their most arbitrary acts.
Retribution overtook him in 1621, within a few days after his elevation to
the dignity of Viscount St. Albans. The House of Commons, balked in an
attack on the King and the Duke of Buckingham, suddenly turned on Bacon and
impeached him for having received bribes in connection with his legal
decisions as Lord Chancellor. Bacon admitted the taking of presents
(against which in one of his essays he had directly cautioned judges), and
threw himself on the mercy of the House of Lords, with whom the sentence
lay. He appears to have been sincere in protesting later that the presents
had not influenced his decisions and that he was the justest judge whom
England had had for fifty years; it seems that the giving of presents by
the parties to a suit was a customary abuse. But he had technically laid
himself open to the malice of his enemies and was condemned to very heavy
penalties, of which two were enforced, namely, perpetual incapacitation
from holding public office, and banishment from Court. Even after this he
continued, with an astonishing lack of good taste, to live extravagantly
and beyond his means (again in disregard of his own precepts), so that
Prince Charles observed that he 'scorned to go out in a snuff.' He died in
1626 from a cold caught in the prosecution of his scientific researches,
namely in an experiment on the power of snow to preserve meat.
Bacon's splendid mind and unique intellectual vision produced, perhaps
inevitably, considering his public activity, only fragmentary concrete
achievements. The only one of his books still commonly read is the series
of 'Essays,' which consist of brief and comparatively informal jottings on
various subjects. In their earliest form, in 1597, the essays were ten in
number, but by additions from time to time they had increased at last in
1625 to fifty-eight. They deal with a great variety of topics, whatever
Bacon happened to be interested in, from friendship to the arrangement of a
house, and in their condensation they are more like bare synopses than
complete discussions. But their comprehensiveness of view, sureness of
ideas and phrasing, suggestiveness, and apt illustrations reveal the
pregnancy and practical force of Bacon's thought (though, on the other
hand, he is not altogether free from the superstitions of his time and
after the lapse of three hundred years sometimes seems commonplace). The
whole general tone of the essays, also, shows the man, keen and worldly,
not at all a poet or idealist. How to succeed and make the most of
prosperity might be called the pervading theme of the essays, and subjects
which in themselves suggest spiritual treatment are actually considered in
accordance with a coldly intellectual calculation of worldly advantage.
The essays are scarcely less notable for style than for ideas. With
characteristic intellectual independence Bacon strikes out for himself an
extremely terse and clear manner of expression, doubtless influenced by
such Latin authors as Tacitus, which stands in marked contrast to the
formless diffuseness or artificial elaborateness of most Elizabethan and
Jacobean prose. His unit of structure is always a short clause. The
sentences are sometimes short, sometimes consist of a number of connected
clauses; but they are always essentially loose rather than periodic; so
that the thought is perfectly simple and its movement clear and systematic.
The very numerous allusions to classical history and life are not the
result of affectation, but merely indicate the natural furnishing of the
mind of the educated Renaissance gentleman. The essays, it should be added,
were evidently suggested and more or less influenced by those of the great
French thinker, Montaigne, an earlier contemporary of Bacon. The hold of
medieval scholarly tradition, it is further interesting to note, was still
so strong that in order to insure their permanent preservation Bacon
translated them into Latin--he took for granted that the English in which
he first composed them and in which they will always be known was only a
temporary vulgar tongue.
But Bacon's most important work, as we have already implied, was not in the
field of pure literature but in the general advancement of knowledge,
particularly knowledge of natural science; and of this great service we
must speak briefly. His avowal to Burghley, made as early as 1592, is
famous: 'I have taken all knowledge to be my province.' Briefly stated, his
purposes, constituting an absorbing and noble ambition, were to survey all
the learning of his time, in all lines of thought, natural science, morals,
politics, and the rest, to overthrow the current method of _a priori_
deduction, deduction resting, moreover, on very insufficient and
long-antiquated bases of observation, and to substitute for it as the
method of the future, unlimited fresh observation and experiment and
inductive reasoning. This enormous task was to be mapped out and its
results summarized in a Latin work called 'Magna Instauratio Scientiarum'
(The Great Renewal of Knowledge); but parts of this survey were necessarily
to be left for posterity to formulate, and of the rest Bacon actually
composed only a fraction. What may be called the first part appeared
originally in English in 1605 and is known by the abbreviated title, 'The
Advancement of Learning'; the expanded Latin form has the title, 'De
Augmentis Scientiarum.' Its exhaustive enumeration of the branches of
thought and knowledge, what has been accomplished in each and what may be
hoped for it in the future, is thoroughly fascinating, though even here
Bacon was not capable of passionate enthusiasm. However, the second part of
the work, 'Novum Organum' (The New Method), written in Latin and published
in 1620, is the most important. Most interesting here, perhaps, is the
classification (contrasting with Plato's doctrine of divinely perfect
controlling ideas) of the 'idols' (phantoms) which mislead the human mind.
Of these Bacon finds four sorts: idols of the tribe, which are inherent in
human nature; idols of the cave, the errors of the individual; idols of the
market-place, due to mistaken reliance on words; and idols of the theater
(that is, of the schools), resulting from false reasoning.
In the details of all his scholarly work Bacon's knowledge and point of
view were inevitably imperfect. Even in natural science he was not
altogether abreast of his time--he refused to accept Harvey's discovery of
the manner of the circulation of the blood and the Copernican system of
astronomy. Neither was he, as is sometimes supposed, the _inventor_ of
the inductive method of observation and reasoning, which in some degree is
fundamental in all study. But he did, much more fully and clearly than any
one before him, demonstrate the importance and possibilities of that
method; modern experimental science and thought have proceeded directly in
the path which he pointed out; and he is fully entitled to the great honor
of being called their father, which certainly places him high among the
great figures in the history of human thought.
THE KING JAMES BIBLE, 1611. It was during the reign of James I that the
long series of sixteenth century translations of the Bible reached its
culmination in what we have already called the greatest of all English
books (or rather, collections of books), the King James ('Authorized')
version. In 1604 an ecclesiastical conference accepted a suggestion,
approved by the king, that a new and more accurate rendering of the Bible
should be made. The work was entrusted to a body of about fifty scholars,
who divided themselves into six groups, among which the various books of
the Bible were apportioned. The resulting translation, proceeding with the
inevitable slowness, was completed in 1611, and then rather rapidly
superseded all other English versions for both public and private use. This
King James Bible is universally accepted as the chief masterpiece of
English prose style. The translators followed previous versions so far as
possible, checking them by comparison with the original Hebrew and Greek,
so that while attaining the greater correctness at which they aimed they
preserved the accumulated stylistic excellences of three generations of
their predecessors; and their language, properly varying according to the
nature of the different books, possesses an imaginative grandeur and rhythm
not unworthy--and no higher praise could be awarded--of the themes which it
expresses. The still more accurate scholarship of a later century demanded
the Revised Version of 1881, but the superior literary quality of the King
James version remains undisputed. Its style, by the nature of the case, was
somewhat archaic from the outset, and of course has become much more so
with the passage of time. This entails the practical disadvantage of making
the Bible--events, characters, and ideas--seem less real and living; but on
the other hand it helps inestimably to create the finer imaginative
atmosphere which is so essential for the genuine religious spirit.
MINOR PROSE WRITERS. Among the prose authors of the period who hold an
assured secondary position in the history of English literature three or
four may be mentioned: Robert Burton, Oxford scholar, minister, and
recluse, whose 'Anatomy of Melancholy' (1621), a vast and quaint compendium
of information both scientific and literary, has largely influenced
numerous later writers; Jeremy Taylor, royalist clergyman and bishop, one
of the most eloquent and spiritual of English preachers, author of 'Holy
Living' (1650) and 'Holy Dying' (1651); Izaak Walton, London tradesman and
student, best known for his 'Compleat Angler' (1653), but author also of
charming brief lives of Donne, George Herbert, and others of his
contemporaries; and Sir Thomas Browne, a scholarly physician of Norwich,
who elaborated a fastidiously poetic Latinized prose style for his
pensively delightful 'Religio Medici' (A Physician's Religion--1643) and
other works.
LYRIC POETRY. Apart from the drama and the King James Bible, the most
enduring literary achievement of the period was in poetry.
Milton--distinctly, after Shakspere, the greatest writer of the
century--must receive separate consideration; the more purely lyric poets
may be grouped together.
The absence of any sharp line of separation between the literature of the
reign of Elizabeth and of those of James I and Charles I is no less marked
in the case of the lyric poetry than of the drama. Some of the poets whom
we have already discussed in Chapter V continued writing until the second
decade of the seventeenth century, or later, and some of those whom we
shall here name had commenced their career well before 1600. Just as in the
drama, therefore, something of the Elizabethan spirit remains in the lyric
poetry; yet here also before many years there is a perceptible change; the
Elizabethan spontaneous joyousness largely vanishes and is replaced by more
self-conscious artistry or thought.
The Elizabethan note is perhaps most unmodified in certain anonymous songs
and other poems of the early years of James I, such as the exquisite 'Weep
you no more, sad fountains.' It is clear also in the charming songs of
Thomas Campion, a physician who composed both words and music for several
song-books, and in Michael Drayton, a voluminous poet and dramatist who is
known to most readers only for his finely rugged patriotic ballad on the
battle of Agincourt. Sir Henry Wotton, [Footnote: The first _o_ is
pronounced as in _note_.] statesman and Provost (head) of Eton School,
displays the Elizabethan idealism in 'The Character of a Happy Life' and in
his stanzas in praise of Elizabeth, daughter of King James, wife of the
ill-starred Elector-Palatine and King of Bohemia, and ancestress of the
present English royal family. The Elizabethan spirit is present but mingled
with seventeenth century melancholy in the sonnets and other poems of the
Scotch gentleman William Drummond of Hawthornden (the name of his estate
near Edinburgh), who in quiet life-long retirement lamented the untimely
death of the lady to whom he had been betrothed or meditated on heavenly
things.
In Drummond appears the influence of Spenser, which was strong on many
poets of the period, especially on some, like William Browne, who continued
the pastoral form. Another of the main forces, in lyric poetry as in the
drama, was the beginning of the revival of the classical spirit, and in
lyric poetry also this was largely due to Ben Jonson. As we have already
said, the greater part of Jonson's non-dramatic poetry, like his dramas,
expresses chiefly the downright strength of his mind and character. It is
terse and unadorned, dealing often with commonplace things in the manner of
the Epistles and Satires of Horace, and it generally has more of the
quality of intellectual prose than of real emotional poetry. A very
favorable representative of it is the admirable, eulogy on Shakspere
included in the first folio edition of Shakspere's works. In a few
instances, however, Jonson strikes the true lyric note delightfully. Every
one knows and sings his two stanzas 'To Celia'--'Drink to me only with
thine eyes,' which would still be famous without the exquisitely
appropriate music that has come down to us from Jonson's own time, and
which are no less beautiful because they consist largely of ideas culled
from the Greek philosopher Theophrastus. In all his poems, however, Jonson
aims consistently at the classical virtues of clearness, brevity,
proportion, finish, and elimination of all excess.
These latter qualities appear also in the lyrics which abound in the plays
of John Fletcher, and yet it cannot be said that Fletcher's sweet melody is
more classical than Elizabethan. His other distinctive quality is the tone
of somewhat artificial courtliness which was soon to mark the lyrics of the
other poets of the Cavalier party. An avowed disciple of Jonson and his
classicism and a greater poet than Fletcher is Robert Herrick, who, indeed,
after Shakspere and Milton, is the finest lyric poet of these two
centuries.
Herrick, the nephew of a wealthy goldsmith, seems, after a late graduation
from Cambridge, to have spent some years about the Court and in the band of
Jonson's 'sons.' Entering the Church when he was nearly forty, he received
the small country parish of Dean Prior in the southwest (Devonshire), which
he held for nearly twenty years, until 1647, when he was dispossessed by
the victorious Puritans. After the Restoration he was reinstated, and he
continued to hold the place until his death in old age in 1674. He
published his poems (all lyrics) in 1648 in a collection which he called
'Hesperides and Noble Numbers.' The 'Hesperides' (named from the golden
apples of the classical Garden of the Daughters of the Sun) are twelve
hundred little secular pieces, the 'Noble Numbers' a much less extensive
series of religious lyrics. Both sorts are written in a great variety of
stanza forms, all equally skilful and musical. Few of the poems extend
beyond fifteen or twenty lines in length, and many are mere epigrams of
four lines or even two. The chief secular subjects are: Herrick's devotion
to various ladies, Julia, Anthea, Perilla, and sundry more, all presumably
more or less imaginary; the joy and uncertainty of life; the charming
beauty of Nature; country life, folk lore, and festivals; and similar light
or familiar themes. Herrick's characteristic quality, so far as it can be
described, is a blend of Elizabethan joyousness with classical perfection
of finish. The finish, however, really the result of painstaking labor,
such as Herrick had observed in his uncle's shop and as Jonson had
enjoined, is perfectly unobtrusive; so apparently natural are the poems
that they seem the irrepressible unmeditated outpourings of happy and idle
moments. In care-free lyric charm Herrick can certainly never be surpassed;
he is certainly one of the most captivating of all the poets of the world.
Some of the 'Noble Numbers' are almost as pleasing as the 'Hesperides,' but
not because of real religious significance. For of anything that can be
called spiritual religion Herrick was absolutely incapable; his nature was
far too deficient in depth. He himself and his philosophy of life were
purely Epicurean, Hedonistic, or pagan, in the sense in which we use those
terms to-day. His forever controlling sentiment is that to which he gives
perfect expression in his best-known song, 'Gather ye rosebuds,' namely the
Horatian 'Carpe diem'--'Snatch all possible pleasure from the
rapidly-fleeting hours and from this gloriously delightful world.' He is
said to have performed his religious duties with regularity; though
sometimes in an outburst of disgust at the stupidity of his rustic
parishioners he would throw his sermon in their faces and rush out of the
church. Put his religion is altogether conventional. He thanks God for
material blessings, prays for their continuance, and as the conclusion of
everything, in compensation for a formally orthodox life, or rather creed,
expects when he dies to be admitted to Heaven. The simple naïveté with
which he expresses this skin-deep and primitive faith is, indeed, one of
the chief sources of charm in the 'Noble Numbers.'
Herrick belongs in part to a group of poets who, being attached to the
Court, and devoting some, at least, of their verses to conventional
love-making, are called the Cavalier Poets. Among the others Thomas Carew
follows the classical principles of Jonson in lyrics which are facile,
smooth, and sometimes a little frigid. Sir John Suckling, a handsome and
capricious representative of all the extravagances of the Court set, with
whom he was enormously popular, tossed off with affected carelessness a
mass of slovenly lyrics of which a few audaciously impudent ones are worthy
to survive. From the equally chaotic product of Colonel Richard Lovelace
stand out the two well-known bits of noble idealism, 'To Lucasta, Going to
the Wars,' and 'To Althea, from Prison.' George Wither (1588-1667), a much
older man than Suckling and Lovelace, may be mentioned with them as the
writer in his youth of light-hearted love-poems. But in the Civil War he
took the side of Parliament and under Cromwell he rose to the rank of
major-general. In his later life he wrote a great quantity of Puritan
religious verse, largely prosy in spite of his fluency.
The last important group among these lyrists is that of the more distinctly
religious poets. The chief of these, George Herbert (1593-1633), the
subject of one of the most delightful of the short biographies of Izaak
Walton, belonged to a distinguished family of the Welsh Border, one branch
of which held the earldom of Pembroke, so that the poet was related to the
young noble who may have been Shakspere's patron. He was also younger
brother of Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury, an inveterate duellist and the
father of English Deism. [Footnote: See below, p. 212.] Destined by his
mother to peaceful pursuits, he wavered from the outset between two forces,
religious devotion and a passion for worldly comfort and distinction. For a
long period the latter had the upper hand, and his life has been described
by his best editor, Professor George Herbert Palmer, as twenty-seven years
of vacillation and three of consecrated service. Appointed Public Orator,
or showman, of his university, Cambridge, he spent some years in enjoying
the somewhat trifling elegancies of life and in truckling to the great.
Then, on the death of his patrons, he passed through a period of intense
crisis from which he emerged wholly spiritualized. The three remaining
years of his life he spent in the little country parish of Bemerton, just
outside of Salisbury, as a fervent High Church minister, or as he preferred
to name himself, priest, in the strictest devotion to his professional
duties and to the practices of an ascetic piety which to the usual American
mind must seem about equally admirable and conventional. His religious
poems, published after his death in a volume called 'The Temple,' show
mainly two things, first his intense and beautiful consecration to his
personal God and Saviour, which, in its earnest sincerity, renders him
distinctly the most representative poet of the Church of England, and
second the influence of Donne, who was a close friend of his mother. The
titles of most of the poems, often consisting of a single word, are
commonly fantastic and symbolical--for example, 'The Collar,' meaning the
yoke of submission to God; and his use of conceits, though not so pervasive
as with Donne, is equally contorted. To a present-day reader the apparent
affectations may seem at first to throw doubt on Herbert's genuineness; but
in reality he was aiming to dedicate to religious purposes what appeared to
him the highest style of poetry. Without question he is, in a true if
special sense, a really great poet.
The second of these religious poets, Richard Crashaw, [Footnote: The first
vowel is pronounced as in the noun _crash_.] whose life (1612-1649)
was not quite so short as Herbert's, combined an ascetic devotion with a
glowingly sensuous esthetic nature that seems rather Spanish than English.
Born into an extreme Protestant family, but outraged by the wanton
iconoclasm of the triumphant Puritans, and deprived by them of his
fellowship, at Cambridge, he became a Catholic and died a canon in the
church of the miracle-working Lady (Virgin Mary) of Loretto in Italy. His
most characteristic poetry is marked by extravagant conceits and by
ecstatic outbursts of emotion that have been called more ardent than
anything else in English; though he sometimes writes also in a vein of calm
and limpid beauty. He was a poetic disciple of Herbert, as he avowed by
humbly entitling his volume 'Steps to the Temple.'
The life of Henry Vaughan [Footnote: The second _a_ is not now
sounded.] (1621-1695) stands in contrast to those of Herbert and Crashaw
both by its length and by its quietness. Vaughan himself emphasized his
Welsh race by designating himself 'The Silurist' (native of South Wales).
After an incomplete university course at Jesus College (the Welsh college),
Oxford, and some apparently idle years in London among Jonson's disciples,
perhaps also after serving the king in the war, he settled down in his
native mountains to the self-denying life of a country physician. His
important poems were mostly published at this time, in 1650 and 1655, in
the collection which he named 'Silex Scintillans' (The Flaming Flint), a
title explained by the frontispiece, which represents a flinty heart
glowing under the lightning stroke of God's call. Vaughan's chief traits
are a very fine and calm philosophic-religious spirit and a carefully
observant love of external Nature, in which he sees mystic revelations of
God. In both respects he is closely akin to the later and greater
Wordsworth, and his 'Retreat' has the same theme as Wordsworth's famous
'Ode on Intimations of Immortality,' the idea namely that children have a
greater spiritual sensitiveness than older persons, because they have come
to earth directly from a former life in Heaven.
The contrast between the chief Anglican and Catholic religious poets of
this period has been thus expressed by a discerning critic: 'Herrick's
religious emotions are only as ripples on a shallow lake when compared to
the crested waves of Crashaw, the storm-tides of Herbert, and the deep-sea
stirrings of Vaughan.'
We may give a further word of mention to the voluminous Francis Quarles,
who in his own day and long after enjoyed enormous popularity, especially
among members of the Church of England and especially for his 'Emblems,' a
book of a sort common in Europe for a century before his time, in which
fantastic woodcuts, like Vaughan's 'Silex Scintillans,' were illustrated
with short poems of religious emotion, chiefly dominated by fear. But
Quarles survives only as an interesting curiosity.
Three other poets whose lives belong to the middle of the century may be
said to complete this entire lyric group. Andrew Marvell, a very moderate
Puritan, joined with Milton in his office of Latin Secretary under
Cromwell, wrote much poetry of various sorts, some of it in the Elizabethan
octosyllabic couplet. He voices a genuine love of Nature, like Wither often
in the pastoral form; but his best-known poem is the 'Horatian Ode upon
Cromwell's Return from Ireland,' containing the famous eulogy of King
Charles' bearing at his execution. Abraham Cowley, a youthful prodigy and
always conspicuous for intellectual power, was secretary to Queen Henrietta
Maria after her flight to France and later was a royalist spy in England.
His most conspicuous poems are his so-called 'Pindaric Odes,' in which he
supposed that he was imitating the structure of the Greek Pindar but really
originated the pseudo-Pindaric Ode, a poem in irregular, non-correspondent
stanzas. He is the last important representative of the 'Metaphysical'
style. In his own day he was acclaimed as the greatest poet of all time,
but as is usual in such cases his reputation very rapidly waned. Edmund
Waller (1606-1687), a very wealthy gentleman in public life who played a
flatly discreditable part in the Civil War, is most important for his share
in shaping the riming pentameter couplet into the smooth pseudo-classical
form rendered famous by Dryden and Pope; but his only notable single poems
are two Cavalier love-lyrics in stanzas, 'On a Girdle' and 'Go, Lovely
Rose.'
JOHN MILTON, 1608-1674. Conspicuous above all his contemporaries as the
representative poet of Puritanism, and, by almost equally general consent,
distinctly the greatest of English poets except Shakspere, stands John
Milton. His life falls naturally into three periods: 1. Youth and
preparation, 1608-1639, when he wrote his shorter poems. 2. Public life,
1639-1660, when he wrote, or at least published, in poetry, only a few
sonnets. 3. Later years, 1660-1674, of outer defeat, but of chief poetic
achievement, the period of 'Paradise Lost,' 'Paradise Regained,' and
'Samson Agonistes.'
Milton was born in London in December, 1608. His father was a prosperous
scrivener, or lawyer of the humbler sort, and a Puritan, but broad-minded,
and his children were brought up in the love of music, beauty, and
learning. At the age of twelve the future poet was sent to St. Paul's
School, and he tells us that from this time on his devotion to study seldom
allowed him to leave his books earlier than midnight. At sixteen, in 1625,
he entered Cambridge, where he remained during the seven years required for
the M. A. degree, and where he was known as 'the lady of Christ's'
[College], perhaps for his beauty, of which all his life he continued
proud, perhaps for his moral scrupulousness. Milton was never, however, a
conventional prig, and a quarrel with a self-important tutor led at one
time to his informal suspension from the University. His nature, indeed,
had many elements quite inconsistent with the usual vague popular
conception of him. He was always not only inflexible in his devotion to
principle, but--partly, no doubt, from consciousness of his intellectual
superiority--haughty as well as reserved, self-confident, and little
respectful of opinions and feelings that clashed with his own. Nevertheless
in his youth he had plenty of animal spirits and always for his friends
warm human sympathies.
To his college years belong two important poems. His Christmas hymn, the
'Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity,' shows the influence of his early
poetical master, Spenser, and of contemporary pastoral poets, though it
also contains some conceits--truly poetic conceits, however, not exercises
in intellectual cleverness like many of those of Donne and his followers.
With whatever qualifications, it is certainly one of the great English
lyrics, and its union of Renaissance sensuousness with grandeur of
conception and sureness of expression foretell clearly enough at twenty the
poet of 'Paradise Lost.' The sonnet on his twenty-third birthday, further,
is known to almost every reader of poetry as the best short expression in
literature of the dedication of one's life and powers to God.
Milton had planned to enter the ministry, but the growing predominance of
the High-Church party made this impossible for him, and on leaving the
University in 1632 he retired to the country estate which his parents now
occupied at Horton, twenty miles west of London. Here, for nearly six
years, amid surroundings which nourished his poet's love for Nature, he
devoted his time chiefly to further mastery of the whole range of approved
literature, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. His poems of these
years also are few, but they too are of the very highest quality.
'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' are idealized visions, in the tripping
Elizabethan octosyllabic couplet, of the pleasures of suburban life viewed
in moods respectively of light-hearted happiness and of reflection.
'Comus,' the last of the Elizabethan and Jacobean masks, combines an
exquisite poetic beauty and a real dramatic action more substantial than
that of any other mask with a serious moral theme (the security of Virtue)
in a fashion that renders it unique. 'Lycidas' is one of the supreme
English elegies; though the grief which helps to create its power sprang
more from the recent death of the poet's mother than from that of the
nominal subject, his college acquaintance, Edward King, and though in the
hands of a lesser artist the solemn denunciation of the false leaders of
the English Church might not have been wrought into so fine a harmony with
the pastoral form.
Milton's first period ends with an experience designed to complete his
preparation for his career, a fifteen months' tour in France and Italy,
where the highest literary circles received him cordially. From this trip
he returned in 1639, sooner than he had planned, because, he said, the
public troubles at home, foreshadowing the approaching war, seemed to him a
call to service; though in fact some time intervened before his entrance on
public life.
The twenty years which follow, the second period of Milton's career,
developed and modified his nature and ideas in an unusual degree and
fashion. Outwardly the occupations which they brought him appear chiefly as
an unfortunate waste of his great poetic powers. The sixteen sonnets which
belong here show how nobly this form could be adapted to the varied
expression of the most serious thought, but otherwise Milton abandoned
poetry, at least the publication of it, for prose, and for prose which was
mostly ephemeral. Taking up his residence in London, for some time he
carried on a small private school in his own house, where he much
overworked his boys in the mistaken effort to raise their intellectual
ambitions to the level of his own. Naturally unwilling to confine himself
to a private sphere, he soon engaged in a prose controversy supporting the
Puritan view against the Episcopal form of church government, that is
against the office of bishops. There shortly followed the most regrettable
incident in his whole career, which pathetically illustrates also the lack
of a sense of humor which was perhaps his greatest defect. At the age of
thirty-four, and apparently at first sight, he suddenly married Mary
Powell, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a royalist country gentleman
with whom his family had long maintained some business and social
relations. Evidently this daughter of the Cavaliers met a rude
disillusionment in Milton's Puritan household and in his Old Testament
theory of woman's inferiority and of a wife's duty of strict subjection to
her husband; a few weeks after the marriage she fled to her family and
refused to return. Thereupon, with characteristic egoism, Milton put forth
a series of pamphlets on divorce, arguing, contrary to English law, and
with great scandal to the public, that mere incompatibility of temper was
adequate ground for separation. He even proceeded so far as to make
proposals of marriage to another woman. But after two years and the ruin of
the royalist cause his wife made unconditional submission, which Milton
accepted, and he also received and supported her whole family in his house.
Meanwhile his divorce pamphlets had led to the best of his prose writings.
He had published the pamphlets without the license of Parliament, then
required for all books, and a suit was begun against him. He replied with
'Areopagitica,' an, eloquent and noble argument against the licensing
system and in favor of freedom of publication within the widest possible
limits. (The name is an allusion to the condemnation of the works of
Protagoras by the Athenian Areopagus.) In the stress of public affairs the
attack on him was dropped, but the book remains, a deathless plea for
individual liberty.
Now at last Milton was drawn into active public life. The execution of the
King by the extreme Puritan minority excited an outburst of indignation not
only in England but throughout Europe. Milton, rising to the occasion,
defended the act in a pamphlet, thereby beginning a paper controversy,
chiefly with the Dutch scholar Salmasius, which lasted for several years.
By 1652 it had resulted in the loss of Milton's eyesight, previously
over-strained by his studies--a sacrifice in which he gloried but which
lovers of poetry must always regret, especially since the controversy
largely consisted, according to the custom of the time, in a disgusting
exchange of personal scurrilities. Milton's championship of the existing
government, however, together with his scholarship, had at once secured for
him the position of Latin secretary, or conductor of the diplomatic
correspondence of the State with foreign countries. He held this office,
after the loss of his eyesight, with Marvell as a colleague, under both
Parliament and Cromwell, but it is an error to suppose that he exerted any
influence in the management of affairs or that he was on familiar terms
with the Protector. At the Restoration he necessarily lost both the
position and a considerable part of his property, and for a while he went
into hiding; but through the efforts of Marvell and others he was finally
included in the general amnesty.
In the remaining fourteen years which make the third period of his life
Milton stands out for subsequent ages as a noble figure. His very obstinacy
and egoism now enabled him, blind, comparatively poor, and the
representative of a lost cause, to maintain his proud and patient dignity
in the midst of the triumph of all that was most hateful to him, and, as he
believed, to God. His isolation, indeed, was in many respects extreme,
though now as always he found the few sympathetic friends on whom his
nature was quite dependent. His religious beliefs had become what would at
present be called Unitarian, and he did not associate with any of the
existing denominations; in private theory he had even come to believe in
polygamy. At home he is said to have suffered from the coldness or more
active antipathy of his three daughters, which is no great cause for wonder
if we must credit the report that he compelled them to read aloud to him in
foreign languages of which he had taught them the pronunciation but not the
meaning. Their mother had died some years before, and he had soon lost the
second wife who is the subject of one of his finest sonnets. In 1663, at
the age of fifty-four, he was united in a third marriage to Elizabeth
Minshull, a woman of twenty-four, who was to survive him for more than
fifty years.
The important fact of this last period, however, is that Milton now had the
leisure to write, or to complete, 'Paradise Lost.' For a quarter of a
century he had avowedly cherished the ambition to produce 'such a work as
the world would not willingly let die' and had had in mind, among others,
the story of Man's Fall. Outlines for a treatment of it not in epic but in
dramatic form are preserved in a list of a hundred possible subjects for a
great work which he drew up as early as 1640, and during the Commonwealth
period he seems not only to have been slowly maturing the plan but to have
composed parts of the existing poem; nevertheless the actual work of
composition belongs chiefly to the years following 1660. The story as told
in Genesis had received much elaboration in Christian tradition from a very
early period and Milton drew largely from this general tradition and no
doubt to some extent from various previous treatments of the Bible
narrative in several languages which he might naturally have read and kept
in mind. But beyond the simple outline the poem, like every great work, is
essentially the product of his own genius. He aimed, specifically, to
produce a Christian epic which should rank with the great epics of
antiquity and with those of the Italian Renaissance.
In this purpose he was entirely successful. As a whole, by the consent of
all competent judges, 'Paradise Lost' is worthy of its theme, perhaps the
greatest that the mind of man can conceive, namely 'to justify the ways of
God.' Of course there are defects. The seventeenth century theology, like
every successive theological, philosophical, and scientific system, has
lost its hold on later generations, and it becomes dull indeed in the long
expository passages of the poem. The attempt to express spiritual ideas
through the medium of the secular epic, with its battles and councils and
all the forms of physical life, is of course rationally paradoxical. It was
early pointed out that in spite of himself Milton has in some sense made
Satan the hero of the poem--a reader can scarcely fail to sympathize with
the fallen archangel in his unconquerable Puritan-like resistance to the
arbitrary decrees of Milton's despotic Deity. Further, Milton's personal,
English, and Puritan prejudices sometimes intrude in various ways. But all
these things are on the surface. In sustained imaginative grandeur of
conception, expression, and imagery 'Paradise Lost' yields to no human
work, and the majestic and varied movement of the blank verse, here first
employed in a really great non-dramatic English poem, is as magnificent as
anything else in literature. It cannot be said that the later books always
sustain the greatness of the first two; but the profusely scattered
passages of sensuous description, at least, such as those of the Garden of
Eden and of the beauty of Eve, are in their own way equally fine. Stately
and more familiar passages alike show that however much his experience had
done to harden Milton's Puritanism, his youthful Renaissance love of beauty
for beauty's sake had lost none of its strength, though of course it could
no longer be expressed with youthful lightness of fancy and melody. The
poem is a magnificent example of classical art, in the best Greek spirit,
united with glowing romantic feeling. Lastly, the value of Milton's
scholarship should by no means be overlooked. All his poetry, from the
'Nativity Ode' onward, is like a rich mosaic of gems borrowed from a great
range of classical and modern authors, and in 'Paradise Lost' the allusions
to literature and history give half of the romantic charm and very much of
the dignity. The poem could have been written only by one who combined in a
very high degree intellectual power, poetic feeling, religious idealism,
profound scholarship and knowledge of literature, and also experienced
knowledge of the actual world of men.
'Paradise Lost' was published in 1677. It was followed in 1671 by 'Paradise
Regained,' only one-third as long and much less important; and by 'Samson
Agonistes' (Samson in his Death Struggle). In the latter Milton puts the
story of the fallen hero's last days into the majestic form of a Greek
drama, imparting to it the passionate but lofty feeling evoked by the close
similarity of Samson's situation to his own. This was his last work, and he
died in 1674. Whatever his faults, the moral, intellectual and poetic
greatness of his nature sets him apart as in a sense the grandest figure in
English literature.
JOHN BUNYAN. Seventeenth century Puritanism was to find a supreme spokesman
in prose fiction as well as in poetry; John Milton and John Bunyan,
standing at widely different angles of experience, make one of the most
interesting complementary pairs in all literature. By the mere chronology
of his works, Bunyan belongs in our next period, but in his case mere
chronology must be disregarded.
Bunyan was born in 1628 at the village of Elstow, just outside of Bedford,
in central England. After very slight schooling and some practice at his
father's trade of tinker, he was in 1644 drafted for two years and a half
into garrison service in the Parliamentary army. Released from this
occupation, he married a poor but excellent wife and worked at his trade;
but the important experiences of his life were the religious ones. Endowed
by nature with great moral sensitiveness, he was nevertheless a person of
violent impulses and had early fallen into profanity and laxity of conduct,
which he later described with great exaggeration as a condition of
abandoned wickedness. But from childhood his abnormally active dramatic
imagination had tormented him with dreams and fears of devils and
hell-fire, and now he entered on a long and agonizing struggle between his
religious instinct and his obstinate self-will. He has told the whole story
in his spiritual autobiography, 'Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners,'
which is one of the notable religious books of the world. A reader of it
must be filled about equally with admiration for the force of will and
perseverance that enabled Bunyan at last to win his battle, and pity for
the fantastic morbidness that created out of next to nothing most of his
well-nigh intolerable tortures. One Sunday, for example, fresh from a
sermon on Sabbath observance, he was engaged in a game of 'cat,' when he
suddenly heard within himself the question, 'Wilt thou leave thy sins and
go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?' Stupefied, he looked up to
the sky and seemed there to see the Lord Jesus gazing at him 'hotly
displeased' and threatening punishment. Again, one of his favorite
diversions was to watch bellmen ringing the chimes in the church steeples,
and though his Puritan conscience insisted that the pleasure was 'vain,'
still he would not forego it. Suddenly one day as he was indulging in it
the thought occurred to him that God might cause one of the bells to fall
and kill him, and he hastened to shield himself by standing under a beam.
But, he reflected, the bell might easily rebound from the wall and strike
him; so he shifted his position to the steeple-door. Then 'it came into his
head, "How if the steeple itself should fall?"' and with that he fled alike
from the controversy and the danger.
Relief came when at the age of twenty-four he joined a non-sectarian church
in Bedford (his own point of view being Baptist). A man of so energetic
spirit could not long remain inactive, and within two years he was
preaching in the surrounding villages. A dispute with the Friends had
already led to the beginning of his controversial writing when in 1660 the
Restoration rendered preaching by persons outside the communion of the
Church of England illegal, and he was arrested and imprisoned in Bedford
jail. Consistently refusing to give the promise of submission and
abstention from preaching which at any time would have secured his release,
he continued in prison for twelve years, not suffering particular
discomfort and working for the support of his family by fastening the ends
onto shoestrings. During this time he wrote and published several of the
most important of his sixty books and pamphlets. At last, in 1672, the
authorities abandoned the ineffective requirement of conformity, and he was
released and became pastor of his church. Three years later he was again
imprisoned for six months, and it was at that time that he composed the
first part of 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' which was published in 1678. During
the remaining ten years of his life his reputation and authority among the
Dissenters almost equalled his earnest devotion and kindness, and won for
him from his opponents the good-naturedly jocose title of 'the Baptist
bishop.' He died in 1688.
Several of Bunyan's books are strong, but none of the others is to be named
together with 'The Pilgrim's Progress.' This has been translated into
nearly or quite a hundred languages and dialects--a record never approached
by any other book of English authorship. The sources of its power are
obvious. It is the intensely sincere presentation by a man of tremendous
moral energy of what he believed to be the one subject of eternal and
incalculable importance to every human being, the subject namely of
personal salvation. Its language and style, further, are founded on the
noble and simple model of the English Bible, which was almost the only book
that Bunyan knew, and with which his whole being was saturated. His
triumphant and loving joy in his religion enables him often to attain the
poetic beauty and eloquence of his original; but both by instinct and of
set purpose he rendered his own style even more simple and direct, partly
by the use of homely vernacular expressions. What he had said in 'Grace
Abounding' is equally true here: 'I could have stepped into a style much
higher ... but I dare not. God did not play in convincing of me ...
wherefore I may not play in my relating of these experiences.' 'Pilgrim's
Progress' is perfectly intelligible to any child, and further, it is highly
dramatic and picturesque. It is, to be sure, an allegory, but one of those
allegories which seem inherent in the human mind and hence more natural
than the most direct narrative. For all men life is indeed a journey, and
the Slough of Despond, Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair, and the Valley of
Humiliation are places where in one sense or another every human soul has
often struggled and suffered; so that every reader goes hand in hand with
Christian and his friends, fears for them in their dangers and rejoices in
their escapes. The incidents, however, have all the further fascination of
supernatural romance; and the union of this element with the homely
sincerity of the style accounts for much of the peculiar quality of the
book. Universal in its appeal, absolutely direct and vivid in manner--such
a work might well become, as it speedily did, one of the most famous of
world classics. It is interesting to learn, therefore, that Bunyan had
expected its circulation to be confined to the common people; the early
editions are as cheap as possible in paper, printing, and illustrations.
Criticism, no doubt, easily discovers in 'Pilgrim's Progress' technical
faults. The story often lacks the full development and balance of incidents
and narration which a trained literary artist would have given it; the
allegory is inconsistent in a hundred ways and places; the characters are
only types; and Bunyan, always more preacher than artist, is distinctly
unfair to the bad ones among them. But these things are unimportant. Every
allegory is inconsistent, and Bunyan repeatedly takes pains to emphasize
that this is a dream; while the simplicity of character-treatment increases
the directness of the main effect. When all is said, the book remains the
greatest example in literature of what absolute earnestness may make
possible for a plain and untrained man. Nothing, of course, can alter the
fundamental distinctions. 'Paradise Lost' is certainly greater than
'Pilgrim's Progress,' because it is the work of a poet and a scholar as
well as a religious enthusiast. But 'Pilgrim's Progress,' let it be said
frankly, will always find a dozen readers where Milton has one by choice,
and no man can afford to think otherwise than respectfully of achievements
which speak powerfully and nobly to the underlying instincts and needs of
all mankind.
The naturalness of the allegory, it may be added, renders the resemblance
of 'Pilgrim's Progress' to many previous treatments of the same theme and
to less closely parallel works like 'The Faerie Queene' probably
accidental; in any significant sense Bunyan probably had no other source
than the Bible and his own imagination.