THE AGE OF MILTON.
1608-1674.
The Elizabethan age proper closed with the death of the queen, and the
accession of James I., in 1603, but the literature of the fifty years
following was quite as rich as that of the half-century that had passed
since she came to the throne, in 1557. The same qualities of thought and
style which had marked the writers of her reign prolonged themselves in
their successors, through the reigns of the first two Stuart kings and
the Commonwealth. Yet there was a change in spirit. Literature is only
one of the many forms in which the national mind expresses itself. In
periods of political revolution, literature, leaving the serene air of
fine art, partakes the violent agitation of the times. There were seeds
of civil and religious discord in Elizabethan England. As between the
two parties in the Church there was a compromise and a truce rather than
a final settlement. The Anglican doctrine was partly Calvinistic and
partly Arminian. The form of government was Episcopal, but there was a
large body of Presbyterians in the Church who desired a change. In the
ritual and ceremonies many "rags of popery" had been retained, which the
extreme reformers wished to tear away. But Elizabeth was a
worldly-minded woman, impatient of theological disputes. Though
circumstances had made her the champion of Protestantism in Europe she
kept many Catholic notions; disapproved, for example, of the marriage of
priests, and hated sermons. She was jealous of her prerogative in the
State, and in the Church she enforced uniformity. The authors of the
_Martin Marprelate_ pamphlets against the bishops were punished by
death or imprisonment. While the queen lived things were kept well
together and England was at one in face of the common foe. Admiral
Howard, who commanded the English naval forces against the Armada, was a
Catholic.
But during the reign of James I. (1603-1625) and Charles I. (1625-1649)
Puritanism grew stronger through repression. "England," says the
historian Green, "became the people of a book, and that book the Bible."
The power of the king was used to impose the power of the bishops upon
the English and Scotch Churches until religious discontent became also
political discontent, and finally overthrew the throne. The writers of
this period divided more and more into two hostile camps. On the side of
Church and king was the bulk of the learning and genius of the time. But
on the side of free religion and the Parliament were the stern
conviction, the fiery zeal, the exalted imagination of English
Puritanism. The spokesman of this movement was Milton, whose great
figure dominates the literary history of his generation, as Shakspere
does of the generation preceding.
The drama went on in the course marked out for it by Shakspere's example
until the theaters were closed by Parliament, in 1642. Of the Stuart
dramatists the most important were Beaumont and Fletcher, all of whose
plays were produced during the reign of James I. These were fifty-three
in number, but only thirteen of them were joint productions. Francis
Beaumont was twenty years younger than Shakspere, and died a few years
before him. He was the son of a judge of the Common Pleas. His
collaborator, John Fletcher, a son of the bishop of London, was five
years older than Beaumont, and survived him nine years. He was much the
more prolific of the two and wrote alone some forty plays. Although the
life of one of these partners was conterminous with Shakspere's, their
works exhibit a later phase of the dramatic art. The Stuart dramatists
followed the lead of Shakspere rather than of Ben Jonson. Their plays,
like the former's, belong to the romantic drama. They present a poetic
and idealized version of life, deal with the highest passions and the
wildest buffoonery, and introduce a great variety of those daring
situations and incidents which we agree to call romantic. But, while
Shakspere seldom or never overstepped the modesty of nature, his
successors ran into every license. They sought to stimulate the jaded
appetite of their audience by exhibiting monstrosities of character,
unnatural lusts, subtleties of crime, virtues and vices both in excess.
Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are much easier and more agreeable reading
than Ben Jonson's. Though often loose in their plots and without that
consistency in the development of their characters which distinguished
Jonson's more conscientious workmanship, they are full of graceful
dialogue and beautiful poetry. Dryden said that after the Restoration
two of their plays were acted for one of Shakspere's or Jonson's
throughout the year, and he added that they "understood and imitated the
conversation of gentlemen much better, whose wild debaucheries and
quickness of wit in repartees no poet can ever paint as they have done."
Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a gentleman in Shakspere,
nor was it altogether so in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their gentlemen are
gallant and passionate lovers, gay cavaliers, generous, courageous,
courteous--according to the fashion of their times--and sensitive on the
point of honor. They are far superior to the cold-blooded rakes of
Dryden and the Restoration comedy. Still the manners and language in
Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are extremely licentious, and it is not
hard to sympathize with the objections to the theater expressed by the
Puritan writer, William Prynne, who, after denouncing the long hair of
the cavaliers in his tract, _The Unloveliness of Lovelocks_, attacked
the stage, in 1633, with _Histrio-mastix: the Player's Scourge_; an
offense for which he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears
cropped. Coleridge said that Shakspere was coarse, but never gross. He
had the healthy coarseness of nature herself. But Beaumont and
Fletcher's pages are corrupt. Even their chaste women are immodest in
language and thought. They use not merely that frankness of speech which
was a fashion of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which
could not proceed from a pure mind. Chastity with them is rather a
bodily accident than a virtue of the heart, says Coleridge.
Among the best of their light comedies are _The Chances, The Scornful
Lady, The Spanish Curate_, and _Rule a Wife and Have a Wife_. But far
superior to these are their tragedies and tragi-comedies, _The Maid's
Tragedy, Philaster, A King and No King_--all written jointly--and
_Valentinian_ and _Thierry and Theodoret_, written by Fletcher alone,
but perhaps, in part, sketched out by Beaumont. The tragic masterpiece
of Beaumont and Fletcher is _The Maid's Tragedy_, a powerful but
repulsive play, which sheds a singular light not only upon its authors'
dramatic methods, but also upon the attitude toward royalty favored by
the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which grew up under the
Stuarts. The heroine, Evadne, has been in secret a mistress of the king,
who marries her to Amintor, a gentleman of his court, because, as she
explains to her bridegroom, on the wedding night,
I must have one
To father children, and to bear the name
Of husband to me, that my sin may be
More honorable.
This scene is, perhaps, the most affecting and impressive in the whole
range of Beaumont and Fletcher's drama. Yet when Evadne names the king
as her paramour, Amintor exclaims:
O thou hast named a word that wipes away
All thoughts revengeful. In that sacred name
"The king" there lies a terror. What frail man
Dares lift his hand against it? Let the gods
Speak to him when they please; till when, let us
Suffer and wait.
And the play ends with the words
On lustful kings,
Unlooked-for sudden deaths from heaven are sent,
But cursed is he that is their instrument.
Aspatia, in this tragedy, is a good instance of Beaumont and Fletcher's
pathetic characters. She is troth-plight wife to Amintor, and after he,
by the king's command, has forsaken her for Evadne, she disguises
herself as a man, provokes her unfaithful lover to a duel, and dies
under his sword, blessing the hand that killed her. This is a common
type in Beaumont and Fletcher, and was drawn originally from Shakspere's
Ophelia. All their good women have the instinctive fidelity of a dog,
and a superhuman patience and devotion, a "gentle forlornness" under
wrongs, which is painted with an almost feminine tenderness. In
_Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding_, Euphrasia, conceiving a hopeless
passion for Philaster--who is in love with Arethusa--puts on the dress
of a page and enters his service. He employs her to carry messages to
his lady-love, just as Viola, in _Twelfth Night_, is sent by the duke to
Olivia. Philaster is persuaded by slanderers that his page and his lady
have been unfaithful to him, and in his jealous fury he wounds Euphrasia
with his sword. Afterward, convinced of the boy's fidelity, he asks
forgiveness, whereto Euphrasia replies,
Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing
Worthy your noble thoughts. 'Tis not a life,
'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.
Beaumont and Fletcher's love-lorn maids wear the willow very sweetly,
but in all their piteous passages there is nothing equal to the natural
pathos--the pathos which arises from the deep springs of character--of
that one brief question and answer in _King Lear_.
_Lear_. So young and so untender?
_Cordelia_. So young, my lord, and true.
The disguise of a woman in man's apparel is a common incident in the
romantic drama; and the fact that on the Elizabethan stage the female
parts were taken by boys made the deception easier. Viola's situation in
_Twelfth Night_ is precisely similiar to Euphrasia's, but there is a
difference in the handling of the device which is characteristic of a
distinction between Shakspere's art and that of his contemporaries. The
audience in _Twelfth Night_ is taken into confidence and made aware of
Viola's real nature from the start, while Euphrasia's _incognito_ is
preserved till the fifth act, and then disclosed by an accident. This
kind of mystification and surprise was a trick below Shakspere. In this
instance, moreover, it involved a departure from dramatic probability.
Euphrasia could, at any moment, by revealing her identity, have averted
the greatest sufferings and dangers from Philaster, Arethusa, and
herself, and the only motive for her keeping silence is represented to
have been a feeling of maidenly shame at her position. Such strained and
fantastic motives are too often made the pivot of the action in Beaumont
and Fletcher's tragi-comedies. Their characters have not the depth and
truth of Shakspere's, nor are they drawn so sharply. One reads their
plays with pleasure, and remembers here and there a passage of fine
poetry, or a noble or lovely trait, but their characters, as wholes,
leave a fading impression. Who, even after a single reading or
representation, ever forgets Falstaff, or Shylock, or King Lear?
The moral inferiority of Beaumont and Fletcher is well seen in such a
play as _A King and No King_. Here Arbaces falls in love with his
sister, and, after a furious conflict in his own mind, finally succumbs
to his guilty passion. He is rescued from the consequences of his
weakness by the discovery that Panthea is not, in fact, his sister. But
this is to cut the knot and not to untie it. It leaves the denouement to
chance, and not to those moral forces through which Shakspere always
wrought his conclusions. Arbaces has failed, and the piece of luck which
keeps his failure innocent is rejected by every right-feeling spectator.
In one of John Ford's tragedies the situation which in _A King and No
King_ is only apparent becomes real, and incest is boldly made the
subject of the play. Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in character
and passion into even wilder extremes than Beaumont and Fletcher. His
best play, the _Broken Heart_, is a prolonged and unrelieved torture of
the feelings.
Fletcher's _Faithful Shepherdess_ is the best English pastoral drama
with the exception of Jonson's fragment, the _Sad Shepherd_. Its choral
songs are richly and sweetly modulated, and the influence of the whole
poem upon Milton is very apparent in his _Comus_. The _Knight of the
Burning Pestle,_ written by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, was the first
burlesque comedy in the language, and is excellent fooling. Beaumont and
Fletcher's blank verse is musical, but less masculine than Marlowe's or
Shakspere's, by reason of their excessive use of extra syllables and
feminine endings.
In John Webster the fondness for abnormal and sensational themes, which
beset the Stuart stage, showed itself in the exaggeration of the
terrible into the horrible. Fear, in Shakspere--as in the great murder
scene in _Macbeth_--is a pure passion; but in Webster it is mingled with
something physically repulsive. Thus his _Duchess of Malfi_ is presented
in the dark with a dead man's hand, and is told that it is the hand of
her murdered husband. She is shown a dance of mad-men and, "behind a
traverse, the artificial figures of her children, appearing as if
dead." Treated in this elaborate fashion, that "terror," which Aristotle
said it was one of the objects of tragedy to move, loses half its
dignity. Webster's images have the smell of the charnel house about
them:
She would not after the report keep fresh
As long as flowers on graves.
We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves,
That, ruined, yield no echo.
O this gloomy world I
In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!
Webster had an intense and somber genius. In diction he was the most
Shaksperian of the Elizabethan dramatists, and there are sudden gleams
of beauty among his dark horrors which light up a whole scene with some
abrupt touch of feeling.
Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young,
says the brother of the Duchess, when he has procured her murder and
stands before the corpse. _Vittoria Corombona_ is described in the old
editions as "a night-piece," and it should, indeed, be acted by the
shuddering light of torches, and with the cry of the screech-owl to
punctuate the speeches. The scene of Webster's two best tragedies was
laid, like many of Ford's, Cyril Tourneur's, and Beaumont and
Fletcher's, in Italy--the wicked and splendid Italy of the Renaissance,
which had such a fascination for the Elizabethan imagination. It was to
them the land of the Borgias and the Cenci; of families of proud nobles,
luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenge and ferocious cunning; subtle
poisoners, who killed with a perfumed glove or fan; parricides,
atheists, committers of unnamable crimes, and inventors of strange and
delicate varieties of sin.
But a very few have here been mentioned of the great host of dramatists
who kept the theaters busy through the reigns of Elizabeth, James I.,
and Charles I. The last of the race was James Shirley, who died in 1666,
and whose thirty-eight plays were written during the reign of Charles I.
and the Commonwealth.
In the miscellaneous prose and poetry of this period there is lacking
the free, exulting, creative impulse of the elder generation, but there
are a soberer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness which commend
themselves to readers of bookish tastes. Even that quaintness of thought
which is a mark of the Commonwealth writers is not without its
attraction for a nice literary palate. Prose became now of greater
relative importance than ever before. Almost every distinguished writer
lent his pen to one or the other party in the great theological and
political controversy of the time. There were famous theologians, like
Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter; historians and antiquaries, like
Selden, Knolles, and Cotton; philosophers, such as Hobbes, Lord Herbert
of Cherbury, and More, the Platonist; and writers in natural
science--which now entered upon its modern, experimental phase, under
the stimulus of Bacon's writings--among whom may be mentioned Wallis,
the mathematician; Boyle, the chemist; and Harvey, the discoverer of the
circulation of the blood. These are outside of our subject, but in the
strictly literary prose of the time, the same spirit of roused inquiry
is manifest, and the same disposition to a thorough and exhaustive
treatment of a subject, which is proper to the scientific attitude of
mind. The line between true and false science, however, had not yet been
drawn. The age was pedantic, and appealed too much to the authority of
antiquity. Hence we have such monuments of perverse and curious
erudition as Robert Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, 1621; and Sir
Thomas Browne's _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_, or _Inquiries into Vulgar and
Common Errors_, 1646. The former of these was the work of an Oxford
scholar, an astrologer, who cast his own horoscope, and a victim
himself of the atrabilious humor, from which he sought relief in
listening to the ribaldry of bargemen, and in compiling this _Anatomy_,
in which the causes, symptoms, prognostics, and cures of melancholy are
considered in numerous partitions, sections, members, and subsections.
The work is a mosaic of quotations. All literature is ransacked for
anecdotes and instances, and the book has thus become a mine of
out-of-the-way learning in which later writers have dug. Lawrence Sterne
helped himself freely to Burton's treasures, and Dr. Johnson said that
the _Anatomy_ was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours
sooner than he wished to rise.
The vulgar and common errors which Sir Thomas Browne set himself to
refute were such as these: That dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink,
that a man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes's army drank up
rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal split
Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching Pope
Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or tenth wave, the blackness of
negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. Another book in which great
learning and ingenuity were applied to trifling ends was the same
author's _Garden of Cyrus; or, the Quincuncial Lozenge or Network
Plantations of the Ancients_, in which a mystical meaning is sought in
the occurrence throughout nature and art of the figure of the quincunx
or lozenge. Browne was a physician of Norwich, where his library,
museum, aviary, and botanic garden were thought worthy of a special
visit by the Royal Society. He was an antiquary and a naturalist, and
deeply read in the school-men and the Christian Fathers. He was a
mystic, and a writer of a rich and peculiar imagination, whose thoughts
have impressed themselves upon many kindred minds, like Coleridge, De
Quincey, and Emerson. Two of his books belong to literature, _Religio
Medici_, published in 1642, and _Hydriotaphia; or, Urn Burial_, 1658, a
discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman
funeral urns dug up in Norfolk. Browne's style, though too highly
latinized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose; that stately,
cumbrous, brocaded prose which had something of the flow and measure of
verse, rather than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern writing.
Browne stood aloof from the disputes of his time, and in his very
subjects there is a calm and meditative remoteness from the daily
interests of men. His _Religio Medici_ is full of a wise tolerance and a
singular elevation of feeling. "At the sight of a cross, or crucifix, I
can dispense with my hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my
Saviour." "They only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith who
lived before his coming." "They go the fairest way to heaven that would
serve God without a hell." "All things are artificial, for nature is the
art of God." The last chapter of the _Urn Burial_ is an almost
rhythmical descant on mortality and oblivion. The style kindles slowly
into a somber eloquence. It is the most impressive and extraordinary
passage in the prose literature of the time. Browne, like Hamlet, loved
to "consider too curiously." His subtlety led him to "pose his
apprehension with those involved enigmas and riddles of the
Trinity--with incarnation and resurrection;" and to start odd inquiries:
"what song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid
himself among women;" or whether, after Lazarus was raised from the
dead, "his heir might lawfully detain his inheritance." The quaintness
of his phrase appears at every turn. "Charles the Fifth can never hope
to live within two Methuselahs of Hector." "Generations pass while some
trees stand, and old families survive not three oaks." "Mummy is become
merchandise; Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams."
One of the pleasantest of old English humorists is Thomas Fuller, who
was a chaplain in the royal army during the civil war, and wrote, among
other things, a _Church History of Britain;_ a book of religious
meditations, _Good Thoughts in Bad Times_; and a "character" book, _The
Holy and Profane State._ His most important work, the _Worthies of
England,_ was published in 1662, the year after his death. This was a
description of every English county; its natural commodities,
manufactures, wonders, proverbs, etc., with brief biographies of its
memorable persons. Fuller had a well-stored memory, sound piety, and
excellent common sense. Wit was his leading intellectual trait, and the
quaintness which he shared with his contemporaries appears in his
writings in a fondness for puns, droll turns of expression and bits of
eccentric suggestion. His prose, unlike Browne's, Milton's, and Jeremy
Taylor's, is brief, simple, and pithy. His dry vein of humor was
imitated by the American Cotton Mather, in his _Magnolia_, and by many
of the English and New England divines of the 17th century.
Jeremy Taylor was also a chaplain in the king's army, was several times
imprisoned for his opinions, and was afterward made, by Charles II.,
bishop of Down and Connor. He is a devotional rather than a theological
writer, and his _Holy Living_ and _Holy Dying_ are religious classics.
Taylor, like Sidney was a "warbler of poetic prose." He has been called
the prose Spenser, and his English has the opulence, the gentle
elaboration, the "linked sweetness long drawn out" of the poet of the
_Faerie Queene_. In fullness and resonance Taylor's diction resembles
that of the great orators, though it lacks their nervous energy. His
pathos is exquisitely tender, and his numerous similes have Spenser's
pictorial amplitude. Some of them have become commonplaces for
admiration, notably his description of the flight of the skylark, and
the sentence in which he compares the gradual awakening of the human
faculties to the sunrise, which "first opens a little eye of heaven, and
sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls
up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and
peeps over the eastern hills." Perhaps the most impressive single
passage of Taylor's is the opening chapter in _Holy Dying_. From the
midst of the sickening paraphernalia of death which he there accumulates
rises that delicate image of the fading rose, one of the most perfect
things in its wording in all our prose literature. "But so have I seen a
rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was as
fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece;
but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and
dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on
darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it
bowed the head and broke its stock; and at night, having lost some of
its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and
outworn faces."
With the progress of knowledge and discussion many kinds of prose
literature, which were not absolutely new, now began to receive wider
extension. Of this sort are the _Letters from Italy_, and other
miscellanies included in the _Reliquiæ Wottonianæ_, or remains of Sir
Henry Wotton, English embassador at Venice in the reign of James I., and
subsequently Provost of Eton College. Also the _Table Talk_--full of
incisive remarks--left by John Selden, whom Milton pronounced the first
scholar of his age, and who was a distinguished authority in legal
antiquities and international law, furnished notes to Drayton's
_Polyolbion_, and wrote upon Eastern religions, and upon the Arundel
marbles. Literary biography was represented by the charming little
_Lives_ of good old Izaak Walton, the first edition of whose _Compleat
Angler_ was printed in 1653. The lives were five in number; of Hooker,
Wotton, Donne, Herbert, and Sanderson. Several of these were personal
friends of the author, and Sir Henry Wotton was a brother of the angle.
The _Compleat Angler_, though not the first piece of sporting literature
in English, is unquestionably the most popular, and still remains a
favorite with "all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in
Providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling." As in Ascham's
_Toxophilus_, the instruction is conveyed in dialogue form, but the
technical part of the book is relieved by many delightful digressions.
Piscator and his friend Venator pursue their talk under a honeysuckle
hedge or a sycamore-tree during a passing shower. They repair, after the
day's fishing, to some honest ale-house, with lavender in the window and
a score of ballads stuck about the wall, where they sing
catches--"old-fashioned poetry but choicely good"--composed by the
author or his friends, drink barley wine, and eat their trout or chub.
They encounter milkmaids, who sing to them and give them a draft of the
red cow's milk and they never cease their praises of the angler's life,
of rural contentment among the cowslip meadows, and the quiet streams of
Thames, or Lea, or Shawford Brook.
The decay of a great literary school is usually signalized by the
exaggeration of its characteristic traits. The manner of the Elizabethan
poets was pushed into mannerism by their successors. That manner, at its
best, was hardly a simple one, but in the Stuart and Commonwealth
writers it became mere extravagance. Thus Phineas Fletcher--a cousin
of the dramatist--composed a long Spenserian allegory, the _Purple
Island_, descriptive of the human body. George Herbert and others made
anagrams, and verses shaped like an altar, a cross, or a pair of Easter
wings. This group of poets was named, by Dr. Johnson, in his life of
Cowley, the metaphysical school. Other critics have preferred to call
them the fantastic or conceited school, the later Euphuists or the
English Marinists and Gongorists, after the poets Marino and Gongora,
who brought this fashion to its extreme in Italy and in Spain. The
English _conceptistas_ were mainly clergymen of the established church:
Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Quarles, and Herrick. But Crashaw was a Roman
Catholic, and Cowley--the latest of them--a layman.
The one who set the fashion was Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, whom
Dryden pronounced a great wit, but not a great poet, and whom Ben Jonson
esteemed the best poet in the world for some things, but likely to be
forgotten for want of being understood. Besides satires and epistles in
verse, he composed amatory poems in his youth, and divine poems in his
age, both kinds distinguished by such subtle obscurity, and far-fetched
ingenuities, that they read like a series of puzzles. When this poet has
occasion to write a valediction to his mistress upon going into France,
he compares their temporary separation to that of a pair of compasses:
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
If he would persuade her to marriage he calls her attention to a flea--
Me it sucked first and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
He says that the flea is their marriage-temple, and bids her forbear to
kill it lest she thereby commit murder, suicide and sacrilege all in
one. Donne's figures are scholastic and smell of the lamp. He ransacked
cosmography, astrology, alchemy, optics, the canon law, and the divinity
of the school-men for ink-horn terms and similes. He was in verse what
Browne was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions, hyperboles,
parodoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love or devotion.
Thou canst not every day give me my heart:
If thou canst give it then thou never gav'st it:
Love's riddles are that though thy heart depart
It stays at home, and thou with losing sav'st it.
Donne's verse is usually as uncouth as his thought. But there is a real
passion slumbering under these ashy heaps of conceit, and occasionally a
pure flame darts up, as in the justly admired lines:
Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheek, and so divinely wrought
That one might almost say her body thought.
This description of Donne is true, with modifications, of all the
metaphysical poets. They had the same forced and unnatural style. The
ordinary laws of the association of ideas were reversed with them. It
was not the nearest, but the remotest, association that was called up.
"Their attempts," said Johnson, "were always analytic: they broke every
image into fragments." The finest spirit among them was "holy George
Herbert," whose _Temple_ was published in 1633. The titles in this
volume were such as the following: Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, Holy
Baptism, The Cross, The Church Porch, Church Music, The Holy Scriptures,
Redemption, Faith, Doomsday. Never since, except, perhaps, in Keble's
_Christian Year_, have the ecclesiastic ideals of the Anglican
Church--the "beauty of holiness"--found such sweet expression in
poetry. The verses entitled _Virtue_--
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
are known to most readers, as well as the line,
Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine.
The quaintly named pieces, the _Elixir_, the _Collar_, and the _Pulley_,
are full of deep thought and spiritual feeling. But Herbert's poetry is
constantly disfigured by bad taste. Take this passage from _Whitsunday_,
Listen, sweet dove, unto my song,
And spread thy golden wings on me,
Hatching my tender heart so long,
Till it get wing and fly away with thee,
which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph written by his
contemporary, Carew, on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth, whose soul
...grew so fast within
It broke the outward shell of sin,
And so was hatched a cherubin.
Another of these church poets was Henry Vaughan, "the Silurist," or
Welshman, whose fine piece, the _Retreat_, has been often compared with
Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_. Frances Quarles's
_Divine Emblems_ long remained a favorite book with religious readers
both in old and New England. Emblem books, in which engravings of a
figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in
verse, were a popular class of literature in the 17th century. The most
famous of them all were Jacob Catt's Dutch emblems.
One of the most delightful of the English lyric poets is Robert Herrick,
whose _Hesperides_, 1648, has lately received such sympathetic
illustration from the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E.A. Abbey.
Herrick was a clergyman of the English Church and was expelled by the
Puritans from his living, the vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devonshire. The
most quoted of his religious poems is, _How to Keep a True Lent._ But it
may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly clerical; his poetry
certainly was not. He was a disciple of Ben Jonson, and his boon
companion at
...those lyric feasts
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun;
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad.
And yet each verse of thine,
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.
Herrick's _Noble Numbers_ seldom rises above the expression of a
cheerful gratitude and contentment. He had not the subtlety and
elevation of Herbert, but he surpassed him in the grace, melody,
sensuous beauty, and fresh lyrical impulse of his verse. The conceits of
the metaphysical school appear in Herrick only in the form of an
occasional pretty quaintness. He is the poet of English parish festivals
and of English flowers, the primrose, the whitethorn, the daffodil. He
sang the praises of the country life, love songs to "Julia," and hymns
of thanksgiving for simple blessings. He has been called the English
Catullus, but he strikes rather the Horatian note of _Carpe diem_ and
regret at the shortness of life and youth in many of his best-known
poems, such as _Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may_, and _To Corinna, To
Go a Maying._
Richard Crashaw was a Cambridge scholar who was turned out of his
fellowship at Peterhouse by the Puritans in 1644, for refusing to
subscribe the Solemn League and Covenant; became a Roman Catholic, and
died in 1650 as a canon of the Virgin's Chapel at Loretto. He is best
known to the general reader by his _Wishes for his Unknown Mistress_,
That not impossible she
which is included in most of the anthologies. His religious poetry
expresses a rapt and mystical piety, fed on the ecstatic visions of St.
Theresa, "undaunted daughter of desires," who is the subject of a
splendid apostrophe in his poem, _The Flaming Heart_. Crashaw is, in
fact, a poet of passages and of single lines, his work being exceedingly
uneven and disfigured by tasteless conceits. In one of his Latin
epigrams occurs the celebrated line upon the miracle at Cana:
Vidit et erubuit nympha pudica Deum:
as englished by Dryden,
The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed.
Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his
pleasant volume of essays, published after the Restoration; but he was
thought in his own time a better poet than Milton. His collection of
love songs--the _Mistress_--is a mass of cold conceits, in the
metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much
dignity and natural feeling. He introduced the Pindaric ode into
English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject--the
_Davideis_--now quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist, and followed
the exiled court to France.
Side by side with the church poets were the cavaliers--Carew, Waller,
Lovelace, Suckling, L'Estrange, and others--gallant courtiers and
officers in the royal army, who mingled love and loyalty in their
strains. Colonel Richard Lovelace, who lost every thing in the king's
service, and was several times imprisoned, wrote two famous songs--_To
Lucasta on going to the Wars_--in which occur the lines,
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more--
and to _Althæa from Prison_, in which he sings "the sweetness, mercy,
majesty, and glories" of his king, and declares that "stone-walls do not
a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Another of the cavaliers was Sir
John Suckling, who formed a plot to rescue the Earl of Strafford, raised
a troop of horse for Charles I., was impeached by the Parliament and
fled to France. He was a man of wit and pleasure, who penned a number of
gay trifles, but has been saved from oblivion chiefly by his exquisite
_Ballad upon a Wedding_. Thomas Carew and Edmund Waller were poets of
the same stamp--graceful and easy, but shallow in feeling. Carew,
however, showed a nicer sense of form than most of the fantastic school.
Some of his love songs are written with delicate art. There are noble
lines in his elegy on Donne and in one passage of his masque _Coelum
Britannicum_. In his poem entitled _The Rapture_ great splendor of
language and imagery is devoted to the service of an unbridled
sensuality. Waller, who followed the court to Paris, was the author of
two songs, which are still favorites, _Go, Lovely Rose_, and _On a
Girdle_, and he first introduced the smooth, correct manner of writing
in couplets, which Dryden and Pope carried to perfection. Gallantly
rather than love was the inspiration of these courtly singers. In such
verses as Carew's _Encouragements to a Lover_, and George Wither's _The
Manly Heart_,
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?--
we see the revolt against the high, passionate, Sidneian love of the
Elizabethan sonneteers, and the note of _persiflage_ that was to mark
the lyrical verse of the Restoration. But the poetry of the cavaliers
reached its high-water mark in one fiery-hearted song by the noble and
unfortunate James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, who invaded Scotland in
the interest of Charles II., and was taken prisoner and put to death at
Edinburgh in 1650.
My dear and only love, I pray
That little world of thee
Be governed by no other sway
Than purest monarchy.
In language borrowed from the politics of the time, he cautions his
mistress against _synods_ or _committees_ in her heart; swears to make
her glorious by his pen and famous by his sword; and, with that fine
recklessness which distinguished the dashing troopers of Prince Rupert,
he adds, in words that have been often quoted,
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.
John Milton, the greatest English poet except Shakspere, was born in
London in 1608. His father was a scrivener, an educated man, and a
musical composer of some merit. At his home Milton was surrounded with
all the inflences of a refined and well-ordered Puritan household of
the better class. He inherited his father's musical tastes, and during
the latter part of his life he spent a part of every afternoon in
playing the organ. No poet has written more beautifully of music than
Milton. One of his sonnets was addressed to Henry Lawes, the composer,
who wrote the airs to the songs in _Comus_. Milton's education was most
careful and thorough. He spent seven years at Cambridge, where, from his
personal beauty and fastidious habits, he was called "The lady of
Christ's." At Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a country
seat, he passed five years more, perfecting himself in his studies, and
then traveled for fifteen months, mainly in Italy, visiting Naples and
Rome, but residing at Florence. Here he saw Galileo, a prisoner of the
Inquisition "for thinking otherwise in astronomy than his Dominican and
Franciscan licensers thought." Milton was the most scholarly and the
most truly classical of English poets. His Latin verse, for elegance and
correctness, ranks with Addison's; and his Italian poems were the
admiration of the Tuscan scholars. But his learning appears in his
poetry only in the form of a fine and chastened result, and not in
laborious allusion and pedantic citation, as too often in Ben Jonson,
for instance. "My father," he wrote, "destined me, while yet a little
child, for the study of humane letters." He was also destined for the
ministry, but, "coming to some maturity of years and perceiving what
tyrany had invaded the Church,...I thought it better to prefer a
blameless silence, before the sacred office of speaking, bought and
begun with servitude and forswearing." Other hands than a bishop's were
laid upon his head. "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write
well hereafter," he says, "ought himself to be a true poem." And he adds
that his "natural haughtiness" saved him from all impurity of living.
Milton had a sublime self-respect. The dignity and earnestness of the
Puritan gentleman blended in his training with the culture of the
Renaissance. Born into an age of spiritual conflict, he dedicated his
gift to the service of Heaven, and he became, like Heine, a valiant
soldier in the war for liberation. He was the poet of a cause, and his
song was keyed to
the Dorian mood
Of flutes and soft recorders such as raised
To height of noblest temper, heroes old
Arming to battle.
On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and
receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in
intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English
poetry: the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity.
Milton's was an heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than
dramatic; its singer must be in the fight and of it.
Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge the most important was his
splendid ode _On the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. At Horton he wrote,
among other things, the companion pieces, _L'Allegro_ and _Il
Penseroso_, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an
expression in harmony with the two contrasted moods. _Comus_, which
belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elizabethan court
masque, and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, on the occasion of
the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales.
Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of Circe,
with her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song in praise of chastity
and temperance. _Lycidas_, in like manner, was the perfection of the
Elizabethan pastoral elegy. It was contributed to a volume of memorial
verses on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge friend of Milton's, who
was drowned in the Irish Channel in 1637. In one stern strain, which is
put into the mouth of St. Peter, the author "foretells the ruin of our
corrupted clergy, then at their height."
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.
This was Milton's last utterance in English verse before the outbreak
of the civil war, and it sounds the alarm of the impending struggle. In
technical quality _Lycidas_ is the most wonderful of all Milton's poems.
The cunningly intricate harmony of the verse, the pressed and packed
language, with its fullness of meaning and allusion, make it worthy of
the minutest study. In these early poems, Milton, merely as a poet, is
at his best. Something of the Elizabethan style still clings to them;
but their grave sweetness, their choice wording, their originality in
epithet, name, and phrase, were novelties of Milton's own. His English
masters were Spenser, Fletcher, and Sylvester, the translator of Du
Bartas's _La Semaine_, but nothing of Spenser's prolixity, or Fletcher's
effeminacy, or Sylvester's quaintness is found in Milton's pure,
energetic diction. He inherited their beauties, but his taste had been
tempered to a finer edge by his studies in Greek and Hebrew poetry. He
was the last of the Elizabethans, and his style was at once the crown of
the old and a departure into the new. In masque, elegy, and sonnet he
set the seal to the Elizabethan poetry, said the last word, and closed
one great literary era.
In 1639 the breach between Charles I. and his Parliament brought Milton
back from Italy. "I thought it base to be traveling at my ease for
amusement, while my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for
liberty." For the next twenty years he threw himself into the contest,
and poured forth a succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the
various public questions at issue. As a political thinker, Milton had
what Bacon calls "the humor of a scholar." In a country of endowed
grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a mediæval
discipline and curriculum, he wanted to set up Greek gymnasia and
philosophical schools, after the fashion of the Porch and the Academy.
He would have imposed an Athenian democracy upon a people trained in the
traditions of monarchy and episcopacy. At the very moment when England
had grown tired of the Protectorate and was preparing to welcome back
the Stuarts, he was writing _An Easy and Ready Way to Establish a Free
Commonwealth_. Milton acknowledged that in prose he had the use of his
left hand only. There are passages of fervid eloquence, where the style
swells into a kind of lofty chant, with a rhythmical rise and fall to
it, as in parts of the English Book of Common Prayer. But in general his
sentences are long and involved, full of inversions and latinized
constructions. Controversy at that day was conducted on scholastic
lines. Each disputant, instead of appealing at once to the arguments of
expediency and common sense, began with a formidable display of
learning, ransacking Greek and Latin authors and the Fathers of the
Church for opinions in support of his own position. These authorities he
deployed at tedious length, and followed them up with heavy scurrilities
and "excusations," by way of attack and defense. The dispute between
Milton and Salmasius over the execution of Charles I. was like a duel
between two knights in full armor striking at each other with ponderous
maces. The very titles of these pamphlets are enough to frighten off a
modern reader: _A Confutation of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a
Humble Remonstrance against a Treatise, entitled Of Reformation_. The
most interesting of Milton's prose tracts is his _Areopagitica: A Speech
for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_, 1644. The arguments in this are
of permanent force; but if the reader will compare it, or Jeremy
Taylor's _Liberty of Prophesying_, with Locke's _Letters on Toleration_,
he will see how much clearer and more convincing is the modern method of
discussion, introduced by writers like Hobbes and Locke and Dryden.
Under the Protectorate Milton was appointed Latin Secretary to the
Council of State. In the diplomatic correspondence which was his
official duty, and in the composition of his tract, _Defensio pro
Popululo Anglicano_, he overtaxed his eyes, and in 1654 became totally
blind. The only poetry of Milton's belonging to the years 1640-1660 are
a few sonnets of the pure Italian form, mainly called forth by public
occasions. By the Elizabethans the sonnets had been used mainly in love
poetry. In Milton's hands, said Wordsworth, "the thing became a
trumpet." Some of his were addressed to political leaders, like Fairfax,
Cromwell, and Sir Henry Vane; and of these the best is, perhaps, the
sonnet written on the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants--"a collect in
verse," it has been called--which has the fire of a Hebrew prophet
invoking the divine wrath upon the oppressors of Israel. Two were on his
own blindness, and in these there is not one selfish repining, but only
a regret that the value of his service is impaired--
Will God exact day labor, light denied?
After the restoration of the Stuarts, in 1660, Milton was for a while in
peril, by reason of the part that he had taken against the king. But
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness and with dangers compassed round
And solitude,
he bated no jot of heart or hope. Henceforth he becomes the most heroic
and affecting figure in English literary history. Years before he had
planned an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur, and again a sacred
tragedy on man's fall and redemption. These experiments finally took
shape in _Paradise Lost_, which was given to the world in 1667. This is
the epic of English Puritanism and of Protestant Christianity. It was
Milton's purpose to
assert eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to men,
or, in other words, to embody his theological system in verse. This
gives a doctrinal rigidity and even dryness to parts of the _Paradise
Lost_, which injure its effect as a poem. His "God the father turns a
school divine:" his Christ, as has been wittily said, is "God's good
boy:" the discourses of Raphael to Adam are scholastic lectures: Adam
himself is too sophisticated for the state of innocence, and Eve is
somewhat insipid. The real protagonist of the poem is Satan, upon whose
mighty figure Milton unconsciously bestowed something of his own nature,
and whose words of defiance might almost have come from some Republican
leader when the Good Old Cause went down.
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield.
But when all has been said that can be said in disparagement or
qualification, _Paradise Lost_ remains the foremost of English poems and
the sublimest of all epics. Even in those parts where theology
encroaches most upon poetry, the diction, though often heavy, is never
languid. Milton's blank verse in itself is enough to bear up the most
prosaic theme, and so is his epic English, a style more massive and
splendid than Shakspere's, and comparable, like Tertullian's Latin, to a
river of molten gold. Of the countless single beauties that sow his page
Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks
In Valombrosa,
there is no room to speak, nor of the astonishing fullness of substance
and multitude of thoughts which have caused the _Paradise Lost_ to be
called the book of universal knowledge. "The heat of Milton's mind,"
said Dr. Johnson, "might be said to sublimate his learning and throw off
into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts."
The truth of this remark is clearly seen upon a comparison of Milton's
description of the creation, for example, with corresponding passages in
Sylvester's _Divine Weeks and Works_ (translated from the Huguenot
poet, Du Bartas), which was, in some sense, his original. But the most
heroic thing in Milton's heroic poem is Milton. There are no strains in
_Paradise Lost_ so absorbing as those in which the poet breaks the
strict epic bounds and speaks directly of himself, as in the majestic
lament over his own blindness, and in the invocation to Urania, which
open the third and seventh books. Every-where, too, one reads between
the lines. We think of the dissolute cavaliers, as Milton himself
undoubtedly was thinking of them, when we read of "the sons of Belial
flown with insolence and wine," or when the Puritan turns among the
sweet landscapes of Eden, to denounce
court amours
Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenade which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.
And we think of Milton among the triumphant royalists when we read of
the Seraph Abdiel "faithful found among the faithless."
Nor number nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth or change his constant mind,
Though single. From amidst them forth he passed,
Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained
Superior, nor of violence feared aught:
And with retorted scorn his back he turned
On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.
_Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_ were published in 1671. The
first of these treated in four books Christ's temptation in the
wilderness, a subject that had already been handled in the Spenserian
allegorical manner by Giles Fletcher, a brother of the Purple Islander,
in his _Christ's Victory and Triumph_, 1610. The superiority of
_Paradise Lost_ to its sequel is not without significance. The Puritans
were Old Testament men. Their God was the Hebrew Jehovah, whose single
divinity the Catholic mythology had overlaid with the figures of the
Son, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. They identified themselves in
thought with his chosen people, with the militant theocracy of the Jews.
Their sword was the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. "To your tents, O
Israel," was the cry of the London mob when the bishops were committed
to the Tower. And when the fog lifted, on the morning of the battle of
Dunbar, Cromwell exclaimed, "Let God arise and let his enemies be
scattered: like as the sun riseth, so shalt thou drive them away."
_Samson Agonistes_, though Hebrew in theme and spirit, was in form a
Greek tragedy. It has chorus and semi-chorus, and preserved the
so-called dramatic unities; that is, the scene was unchanged, and there
were no intervals of time between the acts. In accordance with the rules
of the Greek theater, but two speakers appeared upon the stage at once,
and there was no violent action. The death of Samson is related by a
messenger. Milton's reason for the choice of this subject is obvious. He
himself was Samson, shorn of his strength, blind, and alone among
enemies; given over
to the unjust tribunals, under change of times,
And condemnation of the ungrateful multitude.
As Milton grew older he discarded more and more the graces of poetry,
and relied purely upon the structure and the thought. In _Paradise
Lost_, although there is little resemblance to Elizabethan work--such as
one notices in _Comus_ and the Christmas hymn--yet the style is rich,
especially in the earlier books. But in _Paradise Regained_ it is severe
to bareness, and in _Samson_, even to ruggedness. Like Michelangelo,
with whose genius he had much in common, Milton became impatient of
finish or of mere beauty. He blocked out his work in masses, left rough
places and surfaces not filled in, and inclined to express his meaning
by a symbol, rather than work it out in detail. It was a part of his
austerity, his increasing preference for structural over decorative
methods, to give up rime for blank verse. His latest poem, _Samson
Agonistes_, is a metrical study of the highest interest.
Milton was not quite alone among the poets of his time in espousing the
popular cause. Andrew Marvell, who was his assistant in the Latin
secretaryship and sat in Parliament for Hull, after the Restoration, was
a good Republican, and wrote a fine _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return
from Ireland_. There is also a rare imaginative quality in his _Song of
the Exiles in Bermuda_, _Thoughts in a Garden_, and _The Girl Describes
her Fawn_. George Wither, who was imprisoned for his satires, also took
the side of the Parliament, but there is little that is distinctively
Puritan in his poetry.
* * * * *
1. Milton's Poetical Works. Edited by David Masson.
London: Macmillan & Co., 1882. 3 vols.
2. Selections from Milton's Prose. Edited by F.D. Myers.
New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883. (Parchment Series.)
3. England's Antiphon. By George Macdonald. London:
Macmillan & Co., 1868.
4. Robert Herrick's Hesperides. London: George Routledge
& Sons, 1885. (Morley's Universal Library).
5. Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Hydriotaphia.
Edited by Willis Bund. Sampson Low & Co., 1873.
6. Thomas Fuller's Good Thoughts in Bad Times. Boston:
Ticknor & Fields, 1863.
7. Walton's Complete Angler. Edited by Sir Harris
Nicolas. London: Chatto & Windus, 1875.