THE AGE OF MILTON.
1608-1674.
The Elisabethan 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
Elisabethan 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 {126} the ritual
and ceremonies many "rags of popery" had been retained, which the
extreme reformers wished to tear away. But Elisabeth 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 reigns 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 excited
imagination of English Puritanism. The {127} spokesman of this
movement was Milton, whose great figure dominates the literary history
of his generation, as Shakspere's 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 {128} 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 {129} 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
Maia'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, {130} 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, {131} 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 Elisabethan stage the female
parts were taken by boys, made the deception easier. Viola's situation
in _Twelfth Night_ is precisely similar to Euphrasia's, but there is a
{132} 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 {133} 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.
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 the 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 {134} 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
madmen 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!
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 Elisabethan 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 {135} 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 Elisabethan imagination. It was
to them the land of the Borgias and the Cenci; of families of proud
nobles, luxurious, cultivated, but full of revenges 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 Elisabeth, 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
is 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 of {136} the time 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 rural 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 barge-men, and
in compiling this _Anatomy_, in which the causes, symptoms,
prognostics, and cures of {137} 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 schoolmen and the Christian fathers. He was {138} 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 rithmical 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 {139} 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 expressions, and bits
of eccentric {140} 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 _Magnalia_,
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 _Faery 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 concluding chapter in
{141} _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 _Reliquiae Wottonianae_, 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 {142} 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 pupil _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
Elisabethan poets was {143} 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 {144} 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 schoolmen for ink-horn terms and similes. He was
in verse what Browne was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions,
hyperboles, paradoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love or
devotion.
"Thou canst not every day give me thy 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 {145} 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 1631. 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," etc.
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_, the _Pulley_,
are full of deep thought and spiritual {146} 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_. Francis Quarles'
_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 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, {147} 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 {148} _Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may_,
and _To Corinna, To Go a Maying_.
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 Althaea 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 Stratford,
raised a troop of horse {149} 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. 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.
Gallantry 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
Elisabethan 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."
{150} 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 influences 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, {151} 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
is 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 tyranny 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 {152} 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 heighth 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 two contrasted moods. _Comus_, which
belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elisabethan 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 Elisabethan {153} 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 Elisabethan 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 Sepmaine_, 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 Elisabethans, and {154} 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 Elisabethan
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 mediaeval
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
rithmical rise and fall to it, as in parts of the English Book of
Common Prayer. But in {155} general his sentences are long and
involved, full of inventions 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, {156}
_Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_, he overtasked 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 Elisabethans the sonnet 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 {157} 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 {158} 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 {159} 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
{160} 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 in spirit, was in form a
Greek tragedy. It had 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 Elisabethan work--such
as one notices in _Comus_ and the {161} 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_, 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. Macmillan.
2. Selections from Milton's Prose. Edited by F. D. Myers. (Parchment
Series.)
{162}
3. England's Antiphon. By George Macdonald.
4. Robert Herrick's Hesperides.
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.
7. Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler.
{163}