THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
(1)
With the seventeenth century the great school of imaginative writers
that made glorious the last years of Elizabeth's reign, had passed away.
Spenser was dead before 1600, Sir Philip Sidney a dozen years earlier,
and though Shakespeare and Drayton and many other men whom we class
roughly as Elizabethan lived on to work under James, their temper and
their ideals belong to the earlier day. The seventeenth century, not in
England only but in Europe, brought a new way of thinking with it, and
gave a new direction to human interest and to human affairs. It is not
perhaps easy to define nor is it visible in the greater writers of the
time. Milton, for instance, and Sir Thomas Browne are both of them too
big, and in their genius too far separated from their fellows to give us
much clue to altered conditions. It is commonly in the work of lesser
and forgotten writers that the spirit of an age has its fullest
expression. Genius is a law to itself; it moves in another dimension; it
is out of time. To define this seventeenth century spirit, then, one
must look at the literature of the age as a whole. What is there that
one finds in it which marks a change in temperament and outlook from the
Renaissance, and the time which immediately followed it?
Putting it very broadly one may say that literature in the seventeenth
century becomes for the first time essentially modern in spirit. We
began our survey of modern English literature at the Renaissance because
the discovery of the New World, and the widening of human experience and
knowledge, which that and the revival of classical learning implied,
mark a definite break from a way of thought which had been continuous
since the break up of the Roman Empire. The men of the Renaissance felt
themselves to be modern. They started afresh, owing nothing to their
immediate forbears, and when they talked, say, of Chaucer, they did so
in very much the same accent as we do to-day. He was mediaeval and
obsolete; the interest which he possessed was a purely literary
interest; his readers did not meet him easily on the same plane of
thought, or forget the lapse of time which separated him from them. And
in another way too, the Renaissance began modern writing. Inflections
had been dropped. The revival of the classics had enriched our
vocabulary, and the English language, after a gradual impoverishment
which followed the obsolescence one after another of the local dialects,
attained a fairly fixed form. There is more difference between the
language of the English writings of Sir Thomas More and that of the
prose of Chaucer than there is between that of More and of Ruskin. But
it is not till the seventeenth century that the modern spirit, in the
fullest sense of the word, comes into being. Defined it means a spirit
of observation, of preoccupation with detail, of stress laid on matter
of fact, of analysis of feelings and mental processes, of free argument
upon institutions and government. In relation to knowledge, it is the
spirit of science, and the study of science, which is the essential
intellectual fact in modern history, dates from just this time, from
Bacon and Newton and Descartes. In relation to literature, it is the
spirit of criticism, and criticism in England is the creation of the
seventeenth century. The positive temper, the attitude of realism, is
everywhere in the ascendant. The sixteenth century made voyages of
discovery; the seventeenth sat down to take stock of the riches it had
gathered. For the first time in English literature writing becomes a
vehicle for storing and conveying facts.
It would be easy to give instances: one must suffice here. Biography,
which is one of the most characteristic kinds of English writing, was
unknown to the moderns as late as the sixteenth century. Partly the
awakened interest in the careers of the ancient statesmen and soldiers
which the study of Plutarch had excited, and partly the general interest
in, and craving for, facts set men writing down the lives of their
fellows. The earliest English biographies date from this time. In the
beginning they were concerned, like Plutarch, with men of action, and
when Sir Fulke Greville wrote a brief account of his friend Sir Philip
Sidney it was the courtier and the soldier, and not the author, that he
designed to celebrate. But soon men of letters came within their scope,
and though the interest in the lives of authors came too late to give us
the contemporary life of Shakespeare we so much long for, it was early
enough to make possible those masterpieces of condensed biography in
which Isaak Walton celebrates Herbert and Donne. Fuller and Aubrey, to
name only two authors, spent lives of laborious industry in hunting down
and chronicling the smallest facts about the worthies of their day and
the time immediately before them. Autobiography followed where biography
led. Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, as well
as less reputable persons, followed the new mode. By the time of the
Restoration Pepys and Evelyn were keeping their diaries, and Fox his
journal. Just as in poetry the lyric, that is the expression of personal
feeling, became more widely practised, more subtle and more sincere, in
prose the letter, the journal, and the autobiography formed themselves
to meet the new and growing demand for analysis of the feelings and the
intimate thoughts and sensations of real men and women. A minor form of
literature which had a brief but popular vogue ministered less directly
to the same need. The "Character," a brief descriptive essay on a
contemporary type--a tobacco seller, an old college butler or the
like--was popular because in its own way it matched the newly awakened
taste for realism and fact. The drama which in the hands of Ben Jonson
had attacked folly and wickedness proper to no place or time, descended
to the drawing-rooms of the day, and Congreve occupied himself with the
portrayal of the social frauds and foolishnesses perpetrated by actual
living men and women of fashion in contemporary London. Satire ceased
to be a mere expression of a vague discontent, and became a weapon
against opposing men and policies. The new generation of readers were
nothing if not critical. They were for testing directly institutions
whether they were literary, social, or political. They wanted facts, and
they wanted to take a side.
In the distinct and separate realm of poetry a revolution no less
remarkable took place. Spenser had been both a poet and a Puritan: he
had designed to show by his great poem the training and fashioning of a
Puritan English gentleman. But the alliance between poetry and
Puritanism which he typified failed to survive his death. The
essentially pagan spirit of the Renaissance which caused him no doubts
nor difficulties proved too strong for his readers and his followers,
and the emancipated artistic enthusiasm in which it worked alienated
from secular poetry men with deep and strong religious convictions.
Religion and morality and poetry, which in Sidney and Spenser had gone
hand in hand, separated from each other. Poems like _Venus and Adonis_
or like Shakespeare's sonnets could hardly be squared with the sterner
temper which persecution began to breed. Even within orthodox
Anglicanism poetry and religion began to be deemed no fit company for
each other. When George Herbert left off courtier and took orders he
burnt his earlier love poetry, and only the persuasion of his friends
prevented Donne from following the same course. Pure poetry became more
and more an exotic. All Milton's belongs to his earlier youth; his
middle age was occupied with controversy and propaganda in prose; when
he returned to poetry in blindness and old age it was "to justify the
ways of God to man"--to use poetry, that is, for a spiritual and moral
rather than an artistic end.
Though the age was curious and inquiring, though poetry and prose tended
more and more to be enlisted in the service of non-artistic enthusiasms
and to be made the vehicle of deeper emotions and interests than perhaps
a northern people could ever find in art, pure and simple, it was not
like the time that followed it, a "prosaic" age. Enthusiasm burned
fierce and clear, displaying itself in the passionate polemic of Milton,
in the fanaticism of Bunyan and Fox, hardly more than in the gentle,
steadfast search for knowledge in Burton, and the wide and vigilant
curiousness of Bacon. Its eager experimentalism tried the impossible;
wrote poems and then gave them a weight of meaning they could not carry,
as when Fletcher in _The Purple Island_ designed to allegorize all that
the physiology of his day knew of the human body, or Donne sought to
convey abstruse scientific fact in a lyric. It gave men a passion for
pure learning, set Jonson to turn himself from a bricklayer into the
best equipped scholar of his day, and Fuller and Camden grubbing among
English records and gathering for the first time materials of scientific
value for English history. Enthusiasm gave us poetry that was at once
full of learning and of imagination, poetry that was harsh and brutal
in its roughness and at the same time impassioned. And it set up a
school of prose that combined colloquial readiness and fluency,
pregnancy and high sentiment with a cumbrous pedantry of learning which
was the fruit of its own excess.
The form in which enthusiasm manifested itself most fiercely was as we
have seen not favourable to literature. Puritanism drove itself like a
wedge into the art of the time, broadening as it went. Had there been no
more in it than the moral earnestness and religiousness of Sidney and
Spenser, Cavalier would not have differed from Roundhead, and there
might have been no civil war; each party was endowed deeply with the
religious sense and Charles I. was a sincerely pious man. But while
Spenser and Sidney held that life as a preparation for eternity must be
ordered and strenuous and devout but that care for the hereafter was not
incompatible with a frank and full enjoyment of life as it is lived,
Puritanism as it developed in the middle classes became a sterner and
darker creed. The doctrine of original sin, face to face with the fact
that art, like other pleasures, was naturally and readily entered into
and enjoyed, forced them to the plain conclusion that art was an evil
thing. As early as Shakespeare's youth they had been strong enough to
keep the theatres outside London walls; at the time of the Civil War
they closed them altogether, and the feud which had lasted for over a
generation between them and the dramatists ended in the destruction of
the literary drama. In the brief years of their ascendancy they produced
no literature, for Milton is much too large to be tied down to their
negative creed, and, indeed, in many of his qualities, his love of music
and his sensuousness for instance, he is antagonistic to the temper of
his day. With the Restoration their earnest and strenuous spirit fled to
America. It is noteworthy that it had no literary manifestation there
till two centuries after the time of its passage. Hawthorne's novels are
the fruit--the one ripe fruit in art--of the Puritan imagination.
(2)
If the reader adopts the seventeenth century habit himself and takes
stock of what the Elizabethans accomplished in poetry, he will recognize
speedily that their work reached various stages of completeness. They
perfected the poetic drama and its instrument, blank verse; they
perfected, though not in the severer Italian form, the sonnet; they
wrote with extraordinary delicacy and finish short lyrics in which a
simple and freer manner drawn from the classics took the place of the
mediaeval intricacies of the ballad and the rondeau. And in the forms
which they failed to bring to perfection they did beautiful and noble
work. The splendour of _The Fairy Queen_ is in separate passages; as a
whole it is over tortuous and slow; its affectations, its sensuousness,
the mere difficulty of reading it, makes us feel it a collection of
great passages, strung it is true on a large conception, rather than a
great work. The Elizabethans, that is, had not discovered the secret of
the long poem; the abstract idea of the "heroic" epic which was in all
their minds had to wait for embodiment till _Paradise Lost_. In a way
their treatment of the pastoral or eclogue form was imperfect too. They
used it well but not so well as their models, Vergil and Theocritus;
they had not quite mastered the convention on which it is built.
The seventeenth century, taking stock in some such fashion of its
artistic possessions, found some things it were vain to try to do. It
could add nothing to the accomplishment of the English sonnet, so it
hardly tried; with the exception of a few sonnets in the Italian form of
Milton, the century can show us nothing in this mode of verse. The
literary drama was brought to perfection in the early years of it by the
surviving Elizabethans; later decades could add nothing to it but
licence, and as we saw, the licences they added hastened its
destruction. But in other forms the poets of the new time experimented
eagerly, and in the stress of experiment, poetry which under Elizabeth
had been integral and coherent split into different schools. As the
period of the Renaissance was also that of the Reformation it was only
natural a determined effort should sooner or later be made to use poetry
for religious purposes. The earliest English hymn writing, our first
devotional verse in the vernacular, belongs to this time, and a Catholic
and religious school of lyricism grew and flourished beside the pagan
neo-classical writers. From the tumult of experiment three schools
disengage themselves, the school of Spenser, the school of Jonson, and
the school of Donne.
At the outset of the century Spenser's influence was triumphant and
predominant; his was the main stream with which the other poetic
influences of the time merely mingled. His popularity is referable to
qualities other than those which belonged peculiarly to his talent as a
poet. Puritans loved his religious ardour, and in those Puritan
households where the stricter conception of the diabolical nature of all
poetry had not penetrated, his works were read--standing on a shelf, may
be, between the new translation of the Bible and Sylvester's translation
of the French poet Du Bartas' work on the creation, that had a large
popularity at that time as family reading. Probably the Puritans were as
blind to the sensuousness of Spenser's language and imagery as they were
(and are) to the same qualities in the Bible itself. _The Fairy Queen_
would easily achieve innocuousness amongst those who can find nothing
but an allegory of the Church in the "Song of Songs." His followers made
their allegory a great deal plainer than he had done his. In his poem
called _The Purple Island_, Phineas Fletcher, a Puritan imitator of
Spenser in Cambridge, essayed to set forth the struggle of the soul at
grip with evil, a battle in which the body--the "Purple Island"--is the
field. To a modern reader it is a desolating and at times a mildly
amusing book, in which everything from the liver to the seven deadly
sins is personified; in which after four books of allegorized
contemporary anatomy and physiology, the will (Voletta) engages in a
struggle with Satan and conquers by the help of Christ and King James!
The allegory is clever--too clever--and the author can paint a pleasant
picture, but on the whole he was happier in his pastoral work. His
brother Giles made a better attempt at the Spenserian manner. His long
poem, _Christ's Victory and Death_, shows for all its carefully
Protestant tone high qualities of mysticism; across it Spenser and
Milton join hands.
It was, however, in pastoral poetry that Spenser's influence found its
pleasantest outlet. One might hesitate to advise a reader to embark on
either of the Fletchers. There is no reason why any modern should not
read and enjoy Browne or Wither, in whose softly flowing verse the
sweetness and contentment of the countryside, that "merry England" which
was the background of all sectarian and intellectual strife and labour,
finds as in a placid stream a calm reflection and picture of itself. The
seventeenth century gave birth to many things that only came to maturity
in the nineteenth; if you care for that kind of literary study which
searches out origins and digs for hints and models of accented styles,
you will find in Browne that which influenced more than any other single
thing the early work of Keats. Browne has another claim to immortality;
if it be true as is now thought that he was the author of the epitaph on
the Countess of Pembroke:
"Underneath this sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother.
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Fair and learned and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee."
then he achieved the miracle of a quintessential statement of the spirit
of the English Renaissance. For the breath of it stirs in these slow
quiet moving lines, and its few and simple words implicate the soul of a
period.
By the end of the first quarter of the century the influence of Spenser
and the school which worked under it had died out. Its place was taken
by the twin schools of Jonson and Donne. Jonson's poetic method is
something like his dramatic; he formed himself as exactly as possible on
classical models. Horace had written satires and elegies, and epistles
and complimentary verses, and Jonson quite consciously and deliberately
followed where Horace led. He wrote elegies on the great, letters and
courtly compliments and love-lyrics to his friends, satires with an air
of general censure. But though he was classical, his style was never
latinized. In all of them he strove to pour into an ancient form
language that was as intense and vigorous and as purely English as the
earliest trumpeters of the Renaissance in England could have wished. The
result is not entirely successful. He seldom fails to reproduce classic
dignity and good sense; on the other hand he seldom succeeds in
achieving classic grace and ease. Occasionally, as in his best known
lyric, he is perfect and achieves an air of spontaneity little short of
marvellous, when we know that his images and even his words in the song
are all plagiarized from other men. His expression is always clear and
vigorous and his sense good and noble. The native earnestness and
sincerity of the man shines through as it does in his dramas and his
prose. In an age of fantastic and meaningless eulogy--eulogy so amazing
in its unexpectedness and abstruseness that the wonder is not so much
that it should have been written as that it could have been thought
of--Jonson maintains his personal dignity and his good sense. You feel
his compliments are such as the best should be, not necessarily
understood and properly valued by the public, but of a discriminating
sort that by their very comprehending sincerity would be most warmly
appreciated by the people to whom they were addressed. His verses to
Shakespeare and his prose commentaries on him too, are models of what
self-respecting admiration should be, generous in its praise of
excellence, candid in its statement of defects. They are the kind of
compliments that Shakespeare himself, if he had grace enough, must have
loved to receive.
Very different from his direct and dignified manner is the closely
packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest English writer
of the century, though his obscurity has kept him out of general
reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning, is more difficult to
understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such
similar causes that they are worth examining together. In both, as in
the obscure passages in Shakespeare's later plays, obscurity arises not
because the poet says too little but because he attempts to say too
much. He huddles a new thought on the one before it, before the first
has had time to express itself; he sees things or analyses emotions so
swiftly and subtly himself that he forgets the slower comprehensions of
his readers; he is for analysing things far deeper than the ordinary
mind commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and
likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things from a
dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each separate vision
in a heap out on to the page; his restless intellect finds new and
subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible to other pairs of eyes,
and cannot, because speech is modelled on the average of our
intelligences, find words to express them; he is always trembling on the
brink of the inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning,
and the comparison could be pushed further still. Both draw the
knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the same
source, the bypaths of mediaevalism. Browning's _Sordello_ is obscure
because he knows too much about mediaeval Italian history; Donne's
_Anniversary_ because he is too deeply read in mediaeval scholasticism
and speculation. Both make themselves more difficult to the reader who
is familiar with the poetry of their contemporaries by the disconcerting
freshness of their point of view. Seventeenth century love poetry was
idyllic and idealist; Donne's is passionate and realistic to the point
of cynicism. To read him after reading Browne or Jonson is to have the
same shock as reading Browning after Tennyson. Both poets are salutary
in the strong and biting antidote they bring to sentimentalism in
thought and melodious facility in writing. They are the corrective of
lazy thinking and lazy composition.
Elizabethan love poetry was written on a convention which though it was
used with manliness and entire sincerity by Sidney did not escape the
fate of its kind. Dante's love for Beatrice, Petrarch's for Laura, the
gallant and passionate adoration of Sidney for his Stella became the
models for a dismal succession of imaginary woes. They were all figments
of the mind, perhaps hardly that; they all use the same terms and write
in fixed strains, epicurean and sensuous like Ronsard, ideal and
intellectualized like Dante, sentimental and adoring like Petrarch. Into
this enclosed garden of sentiment and illusion Donne burst passionately
and rudely, pulling up the gay-coloured tangled weeds that choked
thoughts, planting, as one of his followers said, the seeds of fresh
invention. Where his forerunners had been idealist, epicurean, or
adoring, he was brutal, cynical and immitigably realist. He could begin
a poem, "For God's sake hold your tongue and let me live"; he could be
as resolutely free from illusion as Shakespeare when he addressed his
Dark Lady--
"Hope not for mind in women; at their best,
Sweetness and wit they're but mummy possest."
And where the sonneteers pretended to a sincerity which was none of
theirs, he was, like Browning, unaffectedly a dramatic lyrist. "I did
best," he said, "when I had least truth for my subject."
His love poetry was written in his turbulent and brilliant youth, and
the poetic talent which made it turned in his later years to express
itself in hymns and religious poetry. But there is no essential
distinction between the two halves of his work. It is all of a piece.
The same swift and subtle spirit which analyses experiences of passion,
analyses, in his later poetry, those of religion. His devotional poems,
though they probe and question, are none the less never sermons, but
rather confessions or prayers. His intense individuality, eager always,
as his best critic has said, "to find a North-West passage of his
own,"[2] pressed its curious and sceptical questioning into every corner
of love and life and religion, explored unsuspected depths, exploited
new discovered paradoxes, and turned its discoveries always into poetry
of the closely-packed artificial style which was all its own. Simplicity
indeed would have been for him an affectation; his elaborateness is not
like that of his followers, constructed painfully in a vicious desire to
compass the unexpected, but the natural overflow of an amazingly fertile
and ingenious mind. The curiosity, the desire for truth, the search
after minute and detailed knowledge of his age is all in his verse. He
bears the spirit of his time not less markedly than Bacon does, or
Newton, or Descartes.
[Footnote 2: Prof. Grierson in _Cambridge History of English
Literature_.]
The work of the followers of Donne and Jonson leads straight to the new
school, Jonson's by giving that school a model on which to work, Donne's
by producing an era of extravagance and absurdity which made a literary
revolution imperative. The school of Donne--the "fantastics" as they
have been called (Dr. Johnson called them the metaphysical poets),
produced in Herbert and Vaughan, our two noblest writers of religious
verse, the flower of a mode of writing which ended in the somewhat
exotic religiousness of Crashaw. In the hands of Cowley the use of
far-sought and intricate imagery became a trick, and the fantastic
school, the soul of sincerity gone out of it, died when he died. To the
followers of Jonson we owe that delightful and simple lyric poetry which
fills our anthologies, their courtly lyricism receiving a new impulse in
the intenser loyalty of troubled times. The most finished of them is
perhaps Carew; the best, because of the freshness and varity of his
subject-matter and his easy grace, Herrick. At the end of them came
Waller and gave to the five-accented rhymed verse (the heroic couplet)
that trick of regularity and balance which gave us the classical school.
(3)
The prose literature of the seventeenth century is extraordinarily rich
and varied, and a study of it would cover a wide field of human
knowledge. The new and unsuspected harmonies discovered by the
Elizabethans were applied indeed to all the tasks of which prose is
capable, from telling stories to setting down the results of speculation
which was revolutionizing science and philosophy. For the first time
the vernacular and not Latin became the language of scientific research,
and though Bacon in his _Novum Organum_ adhered to the older mode its
disappearance was rapid. English was proving itself too flexible an
instrument for conveying ideas to be longer neglected. It was applied
too to preaching of a more formal and grandiose kind than the plain and
homely Latimer ever dreamed of. The preachers, though their
golden-mouthed oratory, which blended in its combination of vigour and
cadence the euphuistic and colloquial styles of the Elizabethans, is in
itself a glory of English literature, belong by their matter too
exclusively to the province of Church history to be dealt with here. The
men of science and philosophy, Newton, Hobbes, and Locke, are in a like
way outside our province. For the purpose of the literary student the
achievement of the seventeenth century can be judged in four separate
men or books--in the Bible, in Francis Bacon, and in Burton and Browne.
In a way the Bible, like the preachers, lies outside the domain of
literary study in the narrow sense; but its sheer literary magnitude,
the abiding significance of it in our subsequent history, social,
political, and artistic as well as religious, compel us to turn aside to
examine the causes that have produced such great results. The Authorized
Version is not, of course, a purely seventeenth century work. Though the
scholars[3] who wrote and compiled it had before them all the previous
vernacular texts and chose the best readings where they found them or
devised new ones in accordance with the original, the basis is
undoubtedly the Tudor version of Tindall. It has, none the less, the
qualities of the time of its publication. It could hardly have been done
earlier; had it been so, it would not have been done half so well. In it
English has lost both its roughness and its affectation and retained its
strength; the Bible is the supreme example of early English prose style.
The reason is not far to seek. Of all recipes for good or noble writing
that which enjoins the writer to be careful about the matter and never
mind the manner, is the most sure. The translators had the handling of
matter of the gravest dignity and momentousness, and their sense of
reverence kept them right in their treatment of it. They cared
passionately for the truth; they were virtually anonymous and not
ambitious of originality or literary fame; they had no desire to stand
between the book and its readers. It followed that they cultivated that
naked plainness and spareness which makes their work supreme. The
Authorized Version is the last and greatest of those English
translations which were the fruit of Renaissance scholarship and
pioneering. It is the first and greatest piece of English prose.
[Footnote 3: There is a graphic little pen-picture of their method in
Selden's "Table Talk."]
Its influence is one of those things on which it is profitless to
comment or enlarge simply because they are an understood part of every
man's experience. In its own time it helped to weld England, for where
before one Bible was read at home and another in churches, all now read
the new version. Its supremacy was instantaneous and unchallenged, and
it quickly coloured speech and literature; it could produce a Bunyan in
the century of its birth. To it belongs the native dignity and eloquence
of peasant speech. It runs like a golden thread through all our writing
subsequent to its coming; men so diverse as Huxley and Carlyle have paid
their tribute to its power; Ruskin counted it the one essential part of
its education. It will be a bad day for the mere quality of our language
when it ceases to be read.
At the time the translators were sitting, Francis Bacon was at the
height of his fame. By profession a lawyer--time-serving and
over-compliant to wealth and influence--he gives singularly little
evidence of it in the style of his books. Lawyers, from the necessity
they are under of exerting persuasion, of planting an unfamiliar
argument in the minds of hearers of whose favour they are doubtful, but
whose sympathy they must gain, are usually of purpose diffuse. They
cultivate the gift, possessed by Edmund Burke above all other English
authors, of putting the same thing freshly and in different forms a
great many times in succession. They value copiousness and fertility of
illustration. Nothing could be more unlike this normal legal manner than
the style of Bacon. "No man," says Ben Jonson, speaking in one of those
vivid little notes of his, of his oratorical method, "no man ever
coughed or turned aside from him without loss." He is a master of the
aphoristic style. He compresses his wisdom into the quintessential form
of an epigram; so complete and concentrated is his form of statement, so
shortly is everything put, that the mere transition from one thought to
another gives his prose a curious air of disjointedness as if he flitted
arbitrarily from one thing to another, and jotted down anything that
came into his head. His writing has clarity and lucidity, it abounds in
terseness of expression and in exact and discriminating phraseology, and
in the minor arts of composition--in the use of quotations for
instance--it can be extraordinarily felicitous. But it lacks
spaciousness and ease and rhythm; it makes too inexorable a demand on
the attention, and the harassed reader soon finds himself longing for
those breathing spaces which consideration or perhaps looseness of
thought has implanted in the prose of other writers.
His _Essays_, the work by which he is best known, were in their origin
merely jottings gradually cohered and enlarged into the series we know.
In them he had the advantage of a subject which he had studied closely
through life. He counted himself a master in the art of managing men,
and "Human Nature and how to manage it" would be a good title for his
book. Men are studied in the spirit of Machiavelli, whose philosophy of
government appealed so powerfully to the Elizabethan mind. Taken
together the essays which deal with public matters are in effect a kind
of manual for statesmen and princes, instructing them how to acquire
power and how to keep it, deliberating how far they may go safely in
the direction of self-interest, and to what degree the principle of
self-interest must be subordinated to the wider interests of the people
who are ruled. Democracy, which in England was to make its splendid
beginnings in the seventeenth century, finds little to foretell it in
the works of Bacon. Though he never advocates cruelty or oppression and
is wise enough to see that no statesman can entirely set aside moral
considerations, his ethical tone is hardly elevating; the moral
obliquity of his public life is to a certain extent explained, in all
but its grosser elements, in his published writings. The essays, of
course, contain much more than this; the spirit of curious and restless
enquiry which animated Bacon finds expression in those on "Health," or
"Gardens" and "Plantations" and others of the kind; and a deeper vein of
earnestness runs through some of them--those for instance on
"Friendship," or "Truth" and on "Death."
The _Essays_ sum up in a condensed form the intellectual interests which
find larger treatment in his other works. His _Henry VII._, the first
piece of scientific history in the English language (indeed in the
modern world) is concerned with a king whose practice was the outcome of
a political theory identical with Bacon's own. The _Advancement of
Learning_ is a brilliant popular exposition of the cause of scientific
enquiry and of the inductive or investigatory method of research. The
_New Atlantis_ is the picture of an ideal community whose common purpose
is scientific investigation. Bacon's name is not upon the roll of those
who have enlarged by brilliant conjectures or discoveries the store of
human knowledge; his own investigations so far as they are recorded are
all of a trivial nature. The truth about him is that he was a
brilliantly clever populariser of the cause of science, a kind of
seventeenth century Huxley, concerned rather to lay down large general
principles for the guidance of the work of others, than to be a serious
worker himself. The superstition of later times, acting on and
refracting his amazing intellectual gifts, has raised him to a godlike
eminence which is by right none of his; it has even credited him with
the authorship of Shakespeare, and in its wilder moments with the
composition of all that is of supreme worth in Elizabethan literature.
It is not necessary to take these delusions seriously. The ignorance of
mediaevalism was in the habit of crediting Vergil with the construction
of the Roman aqueducts and temples whose ruins are scattered over
Europe. The modern Baconians reach much the same intellectual level.
A similar enthusiasm for knowledge and at any rate a pretence to science
belong to the author of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Robert Burton. His
one book is surely the most amazing in English prose. Its professed
object was simple and comprehensive; it was to analyze human melancholy,
to describe its effects, and prescribe for its removal. But as his task
grew, melancholy came to mean to Burton all the ills that flesh is heir
to. He tracked it in obscure and unsuspected forms; drew illustrations
from a range of authors so much wider than the compass of the reading
of even the most learned since, that he is generally credited with the
invention of a large part of his quotations. Ancients and moderns, poets
and prose writers, schoolmen and dramatists are all drawn upon for the
copious store of his examples; they are always cited with an air of
quietly humorous shrewdness in the comments and enclosed in a prose that
is straightforward, simple and vigorous, and can on occasion command
both rhythm and beauty of phrase. It is a mistake to regard Burton from
the point of view (due largely to Charles Lamb) of tolerant or loving
delight in quaintness for quaintness' sake. His book is anything but
scientific in form, but it is far from being the work of a recluse or a
fool. Behind his lack of system, he takes a broad and psychologically an
essentially just view of human ills, and modern medicine has gone far in
its admiration of what is at bottom a most comprehensive and subtle
treatise in diagnosis.
A writer of a very different quality is Sir Thomas Browne. Of all the
men of his time, he is the only one of whom one can say for certain that
he held the manner of saying a thing more important than the thing said.
He is our first deliberate and conscious stylist, the forerunner of
Charles Lamb, of Stevenson (whose _Virginibus Puerisque_ is modelled on
his method of treatment) and of the stylistic school of our own day. His
eloquence is too studied to rise to the greatest heights, and his
speculation, though curious and discursive, never really results in deep
thinking. He is content to embroider his pattern out of the stray
fancies of an imaginative nature. His best known work, the _Religio
Medici_, is a random confession of belief and thoughts, full of the
inconsequent speculations of a man with some knowledge of science but
not deeply or earnestly interested about it, content rather to follow
the wayward imaginations of a mind naturally gifted with a certain
poetic quality, than to engage in serious intellectual exercise. Such
work could never maintain its hold on taste if it were not carefully
finished and constructed with elaborate care. Browne, if he was not a
great writer, was a literary artist of a high quality. He exploits a
quaint and lovable egoism with extraordinary skill; and though his
delicately figured and latinized sentences commonly sound platitudinous
and trivial when they are translated into rough Saxon prose, as they
stand they are rich and melodious enough.
(4)
In a century of surpassing richness in prose and poetry, one author
stands by himself. John Milton refuses to be classed with any of the
schools. Though Dryden tells us Milton confessed to him that Spenser was
his "original," he has no connection--other than a general similarity of
purpose, moral and religious--with Spenser's followers. To the
fantastics he paid in his youth the doubtful compliment of one or two
half-contemptuous imitations and never touched them again. He had no
turn for the love lyrics or the courtliness of the school of Jonson. In
everything he did he was himself and his own master; he devised his own
subjects and wrote his own style. He stands alone and must be judged
alone.
No author, however, can ever escape from the influences of his time,
and, just as much as his lesser contemporaries, Milton has his place in
literary history and derives from the great original impulse which set
in motion all the enterprises of the century. He is the last and
greatest figure in the English Renaissance. The new passion for art and
letters which in its earnest fumbling beginnings gave us the prose of
Cheke and Ascham and the poetry of Surrey and Sackville, comes to a full
and splendid and perfect end in his work. In it the Renaissance and the
Reformation, imperfectly fused by Sidney and Spenser, blend in their
just proportions. The transplantation into English of classical forms
which had been the aim of Sidney and the endeavour of Jonson he finally
accomplished; in his work the dream of all the poets of the
Renaissance--the heroic poem--finds its fulfilment. There was no poet of
the time but wanted to do for his country what Vergil had planned to do
for Rome, to sing its origins, and to celebrate its morality and its
citizenship in the epic form. Spenser had tried it in _The Fairy Queen_
and failed splendidly. Where he failed, Milton succeeded, though his
poem is not on the origins of England but on the ultimate subject of the
origins of mankind. We know from his notebooks that he turned over in
his mind a national subject and that the Arthurian legend for a while
appealed to him. But to Milton's earnest temper nothing that was not
true was a fit subject for poetry. It was inevitable he should lay it
aside. The Arthurian story he knew to be a myth and a myth was a lie;
the story of the Fall, on the other hand, he accepted in common with his
time for literal fact. It is to be noted as characteristic of his
confident and assured egotism that he accepted no less sincerely and
literally the imaginative structure which he himself reared on it.
However that may be, the solid fact about him is that in this
"adventurous song" with its pursuit of
"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,"
he succeeded in his attempt, that alone among the moderns he contrived
to write an epic which stands on the same eminence as the ancient
writings of the kind, and that he found time in a life, which hardly
extended to old age as we know it, to write, besides noble lyrics and a
series of fiercely argumentative prose treatises, two other masterpieces
in the grand style, a tragedy modelled on the Greeks and a second epic
on the "compact" style of the book of Job. No English poet can compare
with him in majesty or completeness.
An adequate study of his achievement is impossible within the limits of
the few pages that are all a book like this can spare to a single
author. Readers who desire it will find it in the work of his two best
critics, Mark Pattison and Sir Walter Raleigh.[4] All that can be done
here is to call attention to some of his most striking qualities.
Foremost, of course, is the temper of the man. From the beginning he
was sure of himself and sure of his mission; he had his purpose plain
and clear. There is no mental development, hardly, visible in his work,
only training, undertaken anxiously and prayerfully and with a clearly
conceived end. He designed to write a masterpiece and he would not start
till he was ready. The first twenty years of his life were spent in
assiduous reading; for twenty more he was immersed in the dust and toil
of political conflict, using his pen and his extraordinary equipment of
learning and eloquence to defend the cause of liberty, civil and
religious, and to attack its enemies; not till he was past middle age
had he reached the leisure and the preparedness necessary to accomplish
his self-imposed work. But all the time, as we know, he had it in his
mind. In _Lycidas_, written in his Cambridge days, he apologizes to his
readers for plucking the fruit of his poetry before it is ripe. In
passage after passage in his prose works he begs for his reader's
patience for a little while longer till his preparation be complete.
When the time came at last for beginning he was in no doubt; in his very
opening lines he intends, he says, to soar no "middle flight." This
self-assured unrelenting certainty of his, carried into his prose essays
in argument, produces sometimes strange results. One is peculiarly
interesting to us now in view of current controversy. He was unhappily
married, and because he was unhappy the law of divorce must be changed.
A modern--George Eliot for instance--would have pleaded the artistic
temperament and been content to remain outside the law. Milton always
argued from himself to mankind at large.
[Footnote 4: "Milton," E.M.L., and "Milton" (Edward Arnold).]
In everything he did, he put forth all his strength. Each of his poems,
long or short, is by itself a perfect whole, wrought complete. The
reader always must feel that the planning of each is the work of
conscious, deliberate, and selecting art. Milton never digresses; he
never violates harmony of sound or sense; his poems have all their
regular movement from quiet beginning through a rising and breaking wave
of passion and splendour to quiet close. His art is nowhere better seen
than in his endings.
Is it _Lycidas_? After the thunder of approaching vengeance on the
hireling shepherds of the Church, comes sunset and quiet:
"And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."
Is it _Paradise Lost_? After the agonies of expulsion and the flaming
sword--
"Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The world was all before them where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."
Is it finally _Samson Agonistes_?
"His servants he with new acquist,
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation hath dismist,
And calm of mind all passion spent."
"Calm of mind, all passion spent," it is the essence of Milton's art.
He worked in large ideas and painted splendid canvases; it was
necessary for him to invent a style which should be capable of sustained
and lofty dignity, which should be ornate enough to maintain the
interest of the reader and charm him and at the same time not so ornate
as to give an air of meretricious decoration to what was largely and
simply conceived. Particularly it was necessary for him to avoid those
incursions of vulgar associations which words carelessly used will bring
in their train. He succeeded brilliantly in this difficult task. The
unit of the Miltonic style is not the phrase but the word, each word
fastidiously chosen, commonly with some air of an original and lost
meaning about it, and all set in a verse in which he contrived by an
artful variation of pause and stress to give the variety which other
writers had from rhyme. In this as in his structure he accomplished what
the Renaissance had only dreamed. Though he had imitators (the poetic
diction of the age following is modelled on him) he had no followers. No
one has been big enough to find his secret since.