French influence.
_Literature from 1660 to 1700._--The Renaissance of letters in England
entered on a fresh and peculiar phase in the third quarter of the
century. The balance of intellectual and artistic power in Europe had
completely shifted since 1580. Inspiration had died down in Italy, and
its older classics were no longer a stimulus. The Spanish drama had
flourished, but its influence though real was scattered and indirect.
The Germanic countries were slowly emerging into literature; England
they scarcely touched. But the literary empire of France began to
declare itself both in Northern and Southern lands, and within half a
century was assured. Under this empire the English genius partly fell,
though it soon asserted its own equality, and by 1720 had so reacted
upon France as more than to repay the debt. Thus between 1660 and 1700
is prepared a temporary dual control of European letters. But in the age
of Dryden France gave England more than it received; it gave more than
it had ever given since the age of Chaucer. During Charles II.'s days
Racine, Moliere, La Fontaine and Bossuet ran the best of their course.
Cavalier exiles like Waller, Cowley and Hobbes had come back from the
winter of their discontent in Paris, and Saint-Evremond, the typical
_bel esprit_ and critic, settled long in England. A vast body of
translations from the French is recounted, including latterly the works
of the Protestant refugees printed in the free Low Countries or in
England. Naturally this influence told most strongly on the social forms
of verse and prose--upon comedy and satire, upon criticism and maxim and
epigram, while it also affected theology and thought. And this meant the
Renaissance once more, still unexhausted, only working less immediately
and in fresh if narrower channels. Greek literature, Plato and Homer and
the dramatists, became dimmer; the secondary forms of Latin poetry came
to the fore, especially those of Juvenal and the satirists, and the
_pedestris sermo_, epistolary and critical, of Horace. These had some
direct influence, as Dryden's translation of them, accompanying his
Virgil and Lucretius, may show. But they came commended by Boileau,
their chief modernizer, and in their train was the fashion of gallant,
epigrammatic and social verse. The tragedy of Corneille and Racine,
developed originally from the Senecan drama, contended with the
traditions of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and was reinforced by that of
the correcter Jonson, in shaping the new theatre of England. The French
codifiers, who were often also the distorters, of Aristotle's _Poetics_
and Horace's _Ars poetica_, furnished a canonical body of criticism on
the epic and the drama, to which Dryden is half a disciple and half a
rebel. All this implied at once a loss of the larger and fuller
inspirations of poetry, a decadence in its great and primary forms,
epic, lyric and tragic, and a disposition, in default of such creative
power, to turn and take stock of past production. In England, therefore,
it is the age of secondary verse and of nascent, often searching
criticism.
Science and Letters.
The same critical spirit was also whetted in the fields of science and
speculation, which the war and the Puritan rule had not encouraged. The
activities of the newly-founded Royal Society told directly upon
literature, and counted powerfully in the organization of a clear,
uniform prose--the "close, naked, natural way of speaking," which the
historian of the Society, Sprat, cites as part of its programme. And
the style of Sprat, as of scientific masters like Newton and Ray the
botanist, itself attests the change. A time of profound and peaceful and
fruitful scientific labour began; the whole of Newton's _Principia_
appeared in 1687; the dream of Bacon came nearer, and England was less
isolated from the international work of knowledge. The spirit of method
and observation and induction spread over the whole field of thought and
was typified in John Locke, whose _Essay concerning Human Understanding_
came out in English in 1690, and who applied the same deeply sagacious
and cautious calculus to education and religion and the "conduct of the
understanding." But his works, though their often mellow and dignified
style has been ignorantly underrated, also show the change in
philosophic writing since Hobbes. The old grandeur and pugnacity are
gone; the imaginative play of science, or quasi-science, on the
literature of reflection is gone; the eccentrics, the fantasts, the
dreamers are gone, or only survive in curious transitional writers like
Joseph Glanvil (_Scepsis scientifica_, 1665) or Thomas Burnet (_Sacred
Theory of the Earth_, 1684). This change was in part a conscious and an
angry change, as is clear from the attacks made in Samuel Butler's
_Hudibras_ (1663-1668) upon scholastic verbiage, astrology, fanatical
sects and their disputes, poetic and "heroic" enthusiasm and
intellectual whim.
Courtly and social influence.
Before the Restoration men of letters, with signal exceptions like
Milton and Marvell, had been Cavalier, courtly and Anglican in their
sympathies. The Civil War had scattered them away from the capital,
which, despite Milton's dream in _Areopagitica_ of its humming and
surging energies, had ceased to be, what it now again became, the
natural haunt and Rialto of authors. The taste of the new king and court
served to rally them. Charles II. relished _Hudibras_, used and
pensioned Dryden, sat under Barrow and South and heard them with
appreciation, countenanced science, visited comedies, and held his own
in talk by mother-wit. Letters became the pastime, and therefore one of
the more serious pursuits, of men of quality, who soon excelled in song
and light scarifying verse and comedy, and took their own tragedies and
criticisms gravely. Poetry under such auspices became gallant and
social, and also personal and partisan; and satire was soon its most
vital form, with the accessories of compliment, rhymed popular
argumentation and elegy. The social and conversational instinct was the
master-influence in prose. It produced a subtle but fundamental change
in the attitude of author to reader. Prose came nearer to living speech,
it became more civil and natural and persuasive, and this not least in
the pulpit. The sense of ennui, or boredom, which seemed as unknown in
the earlier part of the century as it is to the modern German, became
strongly developed, and prose was much improved by the fear of provoking
it. In all these ways the Restoration accompanied and quickened a
speedier and greater change in letters than any political event in
English history since the reign of Alfred, when prose itself was
created.
Prose and criticism.
The formal change in prose can thus be assigned to no one writer, for
the good reason that it presupposes a change of spoken style lying
deeper than any personal influence. If we begin with the writing that is
nearest living talk--the letters of Otway or Lady Rachel Russell, or the
diary of Pepys (1659-1669)--that supreme disclosure of our
mother-earth--or the evidence in a state trial, or the dialogue in the
more natural comedies; if we then work upwards through some of the
plainer kinds of authorship, like the less slangy of L'Estrange's
pamphlets, or Burnet's _History of My Own Time_, a solid Whig memoir of
historical value, until we reach really admirable or lasting prose like
Dryden's _Preface_ to his _Fables_ (1700), or the maxims of Halifax;--if
we do this, we are aware, amid all varieties, survivals and reversions,
of a strong and rapid drift towards the style that we call modern. And
one sign of this movement is the revulsion against any over-saturating
of the working, daily language, and even of the language of appeal and
eloquence, with the Latin element. In Barrow and Glanvil, descendants of
Taylor and Browne, many Latinized words remain, which were soon
expelled from style like foreign bodies from an organism. As in the
mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth century, the process is visible by
which the Latin vocabulary and Latin complication of sentence first
gathers strength, and then, though not without leaving its traces, is
forced to ebb. The instinct of the best writers secured this result, and
secured it for good and all. In Dryden's diction there is a nearly
perfect balance and harmony of learned and native constituents, and a
sensitive tact in Gallicizing; in his build of sentence there is the
same balance between curtness or bareness and complexity or ungainly
lengthiness. For ceremony and compliment he keeps a rolling period, for
invective a short sharp stroke without the gloves. And he not only uses
in general a sentence of moderate scale, inclining to brevity, but he
finds out its harmonies; he is a seeming-careless but an absolute master
of rhythm. In delusive ease he is unexcelled; and we only regret that he
could not have written prose oftener instead of plays. We should thus,
however, have lost their prefaces, in which the bulk and the best of
Dryden's criticisms appear. From the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ (1668)
down to the _Preface to Fables_ (1700) runs a series of essays: _On the
Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy_, _On Heroic Plays_, _On Translated
Verse_, _On Satire_ and many more; which form the first connected body
of criticisms in the language, and are nobly written always. Dryden's
prose is literature as it stands, and yet is talk, and yet again is
mysteriously better than talk. The critical writings of John Dennis are
but a sincere application of the rules and canons that were now becoming
conventional; Rymer, though not so despicable as Macaulay said, is still
more depressing than Dennis; and for any critic at once so free, so
generous and so sure as Dryden we wait in vain for a century.
Contributors to the new prose.
Three or four names are usually associated with Dryden's in the work of
reforming or modifying prose: Sprat, Tillotson, Sir William Temple, and
George Savile, marquis of Halifax; but the honours rest with Halifax.
Sprat, though clear and easy, has little range; Tillotson, though lucid,
orderly, and a very popular preacher, has little distinction; Temple,
the elegant essayist, has a kind of barren gloss and fine literary
manners, but very little to say. The political tracts, essays and maxims
of Halifax (died 1695) are the most typically modern prose between
Dryden and Swift, and are nearer than anything else to the best French
writing of the same order, in their finality of epigram, their neatness
and mannerliness and sharpness. The _Character of a Trimmer_ and _Advice
to a Daughter_ are the best examples.
Preachers.
Religious literature, Anglican and Puritan, is the chief remaining
department to be named. The strong, eloquent and coloured preaching of
Isaac Barrow the mathematician, who died in 1677, is a survival of the
larger and older manner of the Church. In its balance of logic, learning
and emotion, in its command alike of Latin splendour and native force,
it deserves a recognition it has lost. Another athlete of the pulpit,
Robert South, who is so often praised for his wit that his force is
forgotten, continues the lineage, while Tillotson and the elder Sherlock
show the tendency to the smoother and more level prose. But the
revulsion against strangeness and fancy and magnificence went too far;
it made for a temporary bareness and meanness and disharmony, which had
to be checked by Addison, Bolingbroke and Berkeley. From what Addison
saved our daily written English, may be seen in the vigorous slangy
hackwork of Roger L'Estrange, the translator and pamphleteer, in the
news-sheets of Dunton, and in the satires of Tom Brown. These writers
were debasing the coinage with their street journalism.
Puritan prose.
Bunyan.
Another and far nobler variety of vernacular prose is found in the
Puritans. Baxter and Howe, Fox and Bunyan, had the English Bible behind
them, which gave them the best of their inspiration, though the first
two of them were also erudite men. Richard Baxter, an immensely fertile
writer, is best remembered by those of his own fold for his _Saint's
Everlasting Rest_ (1650) and his autobiography, John Howe for his
evangelical apologia _The Living Temple of God_ (1675), Fox for his
_Journal_ and its mixture of quaintness and rapturous mysticism. John
Bunyan, the least instructed of them all, is their only born artist. His
creed and point of view were those of half the nation--the half that was
usually inarticulate in literature, or spoke without style or genius.
His reading, consisting not only of the Bible, but of the popular
allegories of giants, pilgrims and adventure, was also that of his
class. _The Pilgrim's Progress_, of which the first part appeared in
1678, the second in 1684, is the happy flowering sport amidst a growth
of barren plants of the same tribe. The _Progress_ is a dream, more
vivid to its author than most men's waking memories to themselves; the
emblem and the thing signified are merged at every point, so that
Christian's journey is not so much an allegory with a key as a spiritual
vision of this earth and our neighbours. _Grace Abounding_, Bunyan's
diary of his own voyage to salvation, _The Holy War_, an overloaded
fable of the fall and recovery of mankind, and _The Life and Death of Mr
Badman_, a novel telling of the triumphal earthly progress of a
scoundrelly tradesman, are among Bunyan's other contributions to
literature. His union of spiritual intensity, sharp humorous vision, and
power of simple speech consummately chosen, mark his work off alike from
his own inarticulate public and from all other literary performance of
his time.
Transitional verse.
Hudibras.
Songsters.
The transition from the older to the newer poetry was not abrupt. Old
themes and tunes were slowly disused, others previously of lesser mark
rose into favour, and a few quite fresh ones were introduced. The poems
of John Oldham and Andrew Marvell belong to both periods. Both of them
begin with fantasy and elegy, and end with satires, which indeed are
rather documents than works of art. The monody of Oldham on his friend
Morwent is poorly exchanged for the _Satires on the Jesuits_ (1681), and
the lovely metaphysical verses of Marvell on gardens and orchards and
the spiritual love sadly give place to his _Last Instructions to a
Painter_ (1669). In his _Horatian Ode_ Marvell had nobly and impartially
applied his earlier style to national affairs; but the time proved too
strong for this delightful poet. Another and a stranger satire had soon
greeted the Restoration, the _Hudibras_ (1663-1678) of Samuel Butler,
with its companion pieces. The returned wanderers delighted in this
horribly agile, boisterous and fierce attack on the popular party and
its religions, and its wrangles and its manners. Profoundly eccentric
and tiresomely allusive in his form, and working in the short rhyming
couplets thenceforth called "Hudibrastics," Butler founded a small and
peculiar but long-lived school of satire. The other verse of the time is
largely satire of a different tone and metre; but the earlier kind of
finished and gallant lyric persisted through the reign of Charles II.
The songs of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, are usually malicious,
sometimes passionate; they have a music and a splendid self-abandonment
such as we never meet again till Burns. Sedley and Dorset and Aphra Behn
and Dryden are the rightful heirs of Carew and Lovelace, those
infallible masters of short rhythms; and this secret also was lost for a
century afterwards.
Dryden.
In poetry, in prose, and to some extent in drama, John Dryden, the
creature of his time, is the master of its expression. He began with
panegyric verse, first on Cromwell and then on Charles, which is full of
fine things and false writing. The _Annus Mirabilis_ (1667) is the chief
example, celebrating the Plague, the Fire and the naval victory, in the
quatrains for which Davenant's pompous _Gondibert_ had shown the way.
The _Essay on Dramatic Poesy_ (1668), a dialogue on the rivalries of
blank verse with rhyme, and of the Elizabethan drama with the French, is
perfect modern prose; and to this perfection Dryden attained at a bound,
while he attained his poetical style more gradually. He practised his
couplet in panegyric, in heroic tragedy, and in dramatic prologue and
epilogue for twenty years before it was consummate. Till 1680 he
supported himself chiefly by his plays, which have not lived so long as
their critical prefaces, already mentioned. His diction and
versification came to their full power in his satires, rhymed arguments,
dedications and translations. _Absalom and Achitophel_ (part i., 1681;
part ii., with Nahum Tate, 1682), as well as _The Medal_ and _Mac
Flecknoe_, marked a new birth of English satire, placing it at once on a
level with that of any ancient or modern country. The mixture of deadly
good temper, Olympian unfairness, and rhetorical and metrical skill in
each of these poems has never been repeated. The presentment of
Achitophel, earl of Shaftesbury, in his relations with Absalom Walters
and Charles the minstrel-king of Judah, as well as the portraits of
Shimei and Barzillai and Jotham, the eminent Whigs and Tories, and of
the poets Og and Doeg, are things whose vividness age has never
discoloured. Dryden's Protestant arguings in _Religio Laici_ (1682) and
his equally sincere Papistical arguings in _The Hind and the Panther_
(1687) are just as skilful. His translations of Virgil and parts of
Lucretius, of Chaucer and Boccaccio (_Fables_, 1700), set the seal on
his command of his favourite couplet for the higher kinds of appeal and
oratory. His _Ode_ on Anne Killigrew, and his popular but coarser
_Alexander's Feast_, have a more lyric harmony; and his songs, inserted
in his plays, reflect the change of fashion by their metrical adeptness
and often thorough-going wantonness. The epithet of "glorious," in its
older sense of a certain conscious and warranted pride of place, not in
that of boastful or pretentious, suits Dryden well. Not only did he
leave a model and a point of departure for Pope, but his influence
recurs in Churchill, in Gray, in Johnson and in Crabbe, where he is seen
counteracting, with his large, wholesome and sincere bluntness, the
acidity of Pope. Dryden was counted near Shakespeare and Milton until
the romantic revival renewed the sense of proportion; but the same sense
now demands his acknowledgment as the English poet who is nearest to
their frontiers of all those who are exiled from their kingdom.
Tragedy.
Otway.
Restoration and Revolution tragedy is nearly all abortive; it is now
hard to read it for pleasure. But it has noble flights, and its historic
interest is high. Two of its species, the rhymed heroic play and the
rehandling of Shakespeare in blank verse, were also brought to their
utmost by Dryden, though in both he had many companions. The heroic
tragedies were a hybrid offspring of the heroic romance and French
tragedy; and though _The Conquest of Granada_ (1669-1670) and _Tyrannic
Love_ would be very open to satire in Dryden's own vein, they are at
least generously absurd. Their intention is never ignoble, if often
impossible. After a time Dryden went back to Shakespeare, after a
fashion already set by Sir William Davenant, the connecting link with
the older tragedy and the inaugurator of the new. They "revived"
Shakespeare; they vamped him in a style that did not wholly perish till
after the time of Garrick. _The Tempest_, _Troilus and Cressida_, and
_Antony and Cleopatra_ were thus handled by Dryden; and the last of
these, as converted by him into _All for Love_ (1678), is loftier and
stronger than any of his original plays, its blank verse renewing the
ties of Restoration poetry with the great age. The heroic plays, written
in one or other metre, lived long, and expired in the burlesques of
Fielding and Sheridan. _The Rehearsal_ (1671), a gracious piece of
fooling partially aimed at Dryden by Buckingham and his friends, did not
suffice to kill its victims. Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee, both of
whom generally used blank verse, are the other tragic writers of note,
children indeed of the extreme old age of the drama. Otway's long-acted
_Venice Preserved_ (1682) has an almost Shakespearian skill in
melodrama, a wonderful tide of passionate language, and a blunt and bold
delineation of character; but Otway's inferior style and verse could
only be admired in an age like his own. Lee is far more of a poet,
though less of a dramatist, and he wasted a certain talent in noise and
fury.
Comedy.
Wycherley.
Restoration comedy at first followed Jonson, whom it was easy to try and
imitate; Shadwell and Wilson, whose works are a museum for the social
antiquary, photographed the humours of the town. Dryden's many comedies
often show his more boisterous and blatant, rarely his finer qualities.
Like all playwrights of the time he pillages from the French, and
vulgarizes Moliere without stint or shame. A truer light comedy began
with Sir George Etherege, who mirrored in his fops the gaiety and
insolence of the world he knew. The society depicted by William
Wycherley, the one comic dramatist of power between Massinger and
Congreve, at first seems hardly human; but his energy is skilful and
faithful as well as brutal; he excels in the graphic reckless exhibition
of outward humours and bustle; he scavenges in the most callous good
spirits and with careful cynicism. _The Plain Dealer_ (1677), a skilful
transplantation, as well as a depravation of Moliere's _Le Misanthrope_,
is his best piece: he writes in prose, and his prose is excellent,
modern and lifelike.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--General Histories: Hallam, _Introduction to the Lit. of
Europe_ (1838-1839); G. Saintsbury, _Elizabethan Literature_ (1890),
and _History of Literary Criticism_, vol. ii. (1902); W.J. Courthorpe,
_History of English Poetry_, vols. i.-v. (1895-1905); J.J. Jusserand,
_Histoire litteraire du peuple anglais_, vol. ii. (1904); T. Seccombe
and J.W. Allen, _The Age of Shakespeare_ (2 vols., 1903); D. Hannay,
_The Later Renaissance_ (1898); H.J.C. Grierson, _First Half of 17th
Century_; O. Elton, _The Augustan Ages_ (1899); Masson, _Life of
Milton_ (6 vols., London, 1881-1894); R. Garnett, _The Age of Dryden_
(1901); W. Raleigh, _The English Novel_ (1894); J.J. Jusserand, _Le
Roman anglais au temps de Shakespeare_ (1887, Eng. tr., 1901); G.
Gregory Smith, _Elizabethan Critical Essays_ (2 vols., 1904, reprints
and introd.). Classical and Foreign Influences.--Mary A. Scott,
_Elizabethan Translations from the Italian_ (bibliography),
(Baltimore, 1895); E. Koeppel, _Studien zur Gesch. der ital. Novelle
i. d. eng. Litteratur des 16ten Jahrh._ (Strasb., 1892); L. Einstein
_The Italian Renaissance in England_ (New York, 1902); J. Erskine,
_The Elizabethan Lyric_ (New York, 1903); J.S. Harrison, _Platonism in
Eliz. Poetry of the 16th and 17th Centuries_ (New York, 1903); S. Lee,
_Elizabethan Sonnets_ (2 vols., 1904); C.H. Herford, _Literary
Relations of England and Germany in 16th Century_; J.G. Underhill,
_Spanish Lit. in the England of the Tudors_ (New York, 1899); J.E.
Spingarn, _Hist. of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance_ (New York,
1899). Many articles in _Englische Studien_, _Anglia_, &c., on
influences, texts and sources. See too arts. DRAMA; SONNET;
RENAISSANCE. (O. E.*)