FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE.
1660-1744.
The Stuart Restoration was a period of descent from poetry to prose,
from passion and imagination to wit and understanding. The serious,
exalted mood of the Civil War and the Commonwealth had spent itself and
issued in disillusion. There followed a generation of wits, logical,
skeptical, and prosaic, without earnestness, as without principle. The
characteristic literature of such a time is criticism, satire, and
burlesque, and such, indeed, continued to be the course of English
literary history for a century after the return of the Stuarts. The
age was not a stupid one, but one of active inquiry. The Royal
Society, for the cultivation of the natural sciences, was founded in
1662. There were able divines in the pulpit and at the
universities--Barrow, Tillotson, Stillingfleet, South, and others:
scholars, like Bentley; historians, like Clarendon and Burnet;
scientists, like Boyle and Newton; philosophers, like Hobbes and Locke.
But of poetry, in any high sense of the word, there was little between
the time of Milton and the time of Goldsmith and Gray.
{164} The English writers of this period were strongly influenced by
the contemporary literature of France, by the comedies of Moliere, the
tragedies of Corneille and Racine, and the satires, epistles, and
versified essays of Boileau. Many of the Restoration writers--Waller,
Cowley, Davenant, Wycherley, Villiers, and others--had been in France
during the exile, and brought back with them French tastes. John
Dryden (1631-1700), who is the great literary figure of his generation,
has been called the first of the moderns. From the reign of Charles
II., indeed, we may date the beginnings of modern English life. What
we call "society" was forming, the town, the London world. "Coffee,
which makes the politician wise," had just been introduced, and the
ordinaries of Ben Jonson's time gave way to coffee-houses, like Will's
and Button's, which became the head-quarters of literary and political
gossip. The two great English parties, as we know them to-day, were
organized: the words _Whig_ and _Tory_ date from this reign. French
etiquette and fashions came in and French phrases of convenience--such
as _coup de grace_, _bel esprit_, etc.--began to appear in English
prose. Literature became intensely urban and partisan. It reflected
city life, the disputes of faction, and the personal quarrels of
authors. The politics of the Great Rebellion had been of heroic
proportions, and found fitting expression in song. Rut in the
Revolution of 1688 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by
the arguments of lawyers. Measures were in {165} question rather than
principles, and there was little inspiration to the poet in Exclusion
Bills and Acts of Settlement.
Court and society, in the reign of Charles II. and James II., were
shockingly dissolute, and in literature, as in life, the reaction
against Puritanism went to great extremes. The social life of the time
is faithfully reflected in the diary of Samuel Pepys. He was a
simple-minded man, the son of a London tailor, and became, himself,
secretary to the admiralty. His diary was kept in cipher, and
published only in 1825. Being written for his own eye, it is
singularly outspoken; and its naive, gossipy, confidential tone makes
it a most diverting book, as it is, historically, a most valuable one.
Perhaps the most popular book of its time was Samuel Butler's
_Hudibras_ (1663-64), a burlesque romance in ridicule of the Puritans.
The king carried a copy of it in his pocket, and Pepys testifies that
it was quoted and praised on all sides. Ridicule of the Puritans was
nothing new. Zeal-of-the-land Busy, in Ben Jonson's _Bartholomew
Fair_, is an early instance of the kind. There was nothing laughable
about the earnestness of men like Cromwell, Milton, Algernon Sidney,
and Sir Henry Vane. But even the French Revolution had its humors; and
as the English Puritan Revolution gathered head and the extremer
sectaries pressed to the front--Quakers, New Lights, Fifth Monarchy
Men, Ranters, etc.--its grotesque sides came uppermost. Butler's hero
is a Presbyterian Justice of the Peace {166} who sallies forth with his
secretary, Ralpho--an Independent and Anabaptist--like Don Quixote with
Sancho Panza, to suppress May games and bear-baitings. (Macaulay, it
will be remembered, said that the Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting,
not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to
the spectators.) The humor of _Hudibras_ is not of the finest. The
knight and squire are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, hardly
removed from the rough, physical drolleries of a pantomime or a circus.
The deep heart-laughter of Cervantes, the pathos on which his humor
rests, is, of course, not to be looked for in Butler. But he had wit
of a sharp, logical kind, and his style surprises with all manner of
verbal antics. He is almost as great a phrase-master as Pope, though
in a coarser kind. His verse is a smart doggerel, and his poem has
furnished many stock sayings, as, for example,
"'Tis strange what difference there can be
'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee."
_Hudibras_ has had many imitators, not the least successful of whom was
the American John Trumbull, in his revolutionary satire _M'Fingal_,
some couplets of which are generally quoted as Butler's, as, for
example,
"No man e'er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law."
The rebound against Puritanism is seen no less plainly in the drama of
the Restoration, and the {167} stage now took vengeance for its
enforced silence under the Protectorate. Two theaters were opened
under the patronage, respectively, of the king and of his brother, the
Duke of York. The manager of the latter, Sir William Davenant--who had
fought on the king's side, been knighted for his services, escaped to
France, and was afterward captured and imprisoned in England for two
years--had managed to evade the law against stage plays as early as
1656, by presenting his _Siege of Rhodes_ as an "opera," with
instrumental music and dialogue in recitative, after a fashion newly
sprung up in Italy. This he brought out again in 1661, with the
dialogue recast into riming couplets in the French fashion. Movable
painted scenery was now introduced from France, and actresses took the
female parts formerly played by boys. This last innovation was said to
be at the request of the king, one of whose mistresses, the famous Nell
Gwynne, was the favorite actress at the King's Theater.
Upon the stage, thus reconstructed, the so-called "classical" rules of
the French theater were followed, at least in theory. The Louis XIV.
writers were not purely creative, like Shakspere and his contemporaries
in England, but critical and self-conscious. The Academy had been
formed in 1636, for the preservation of the purity of the French
language, and discussion abounded on the principles and methods of
literary art. Corneille not only wrote tragedies, but essays on
tragedy, and {168} one in particular on the _Three Unities_. Dryden
followed his example in his _Essay of Dramatic Poesie_ (1667), in which
he treated of the unities, and argued for the use of rime in tragedy in
preference to blank verse. His own practice varied. Most of his
tragedies were written in rime, but in the best of them, _All for
Love_, 1678, founded on Shakspere's _Antony and Cleopatra_, he returned
to blank verse. One of the principles of the classical school was to
keep comedy and tragedy distinct. The tragic dramatists of the
Restoration, Dryden, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Lee, and others, composed
what they called "heroic plays," such as the _Indian Emperor_, the
_Conquest of Granada_, the _Duke of Lerma_, the _Empress of Morocco_,
the _Destruction of Jerusalem_, _Nero_, and the _Rival Queens_. The
titles of these pieces indicate their character. Their heroes were
great historic personages. Subject and treatment were alike remote
from nature and real life. The diction was stilted and artificial, and
pompous declamation took the place of action and genuine passion. The
tragedies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman brought up on
Shakspere, but to see how great an artist Racine was, in his own
somewhat narrow way, one has but to compare his _Phedre_, or
_Iphigenie_, with Dryden's ranting tragedy of _Tyrannic Love_. These
bombastic heroic plays were made the subject of a capital burlesque,
the _Rehearsal_, by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 1671
at the King's Theater. The indebtedness of {169} the English stage to
the French did not stop with a general adoption of its dramatic
methods, but extended to direct imitation and translation. Dryden's
comedy, _An Evening's Love_, was adapted from Thomas Corneille's _Le
Feint Astrologue_, and his _Sir Martin Mar-all_, from Moliere's _L'
Etourdi_. Shadwell borrowed his _Miser_ from Moliere, and Otway made
versions of Racine's _Berenice_ and Moliere's _Fourberies de Scapin_.
Wycherley's _Country Wife_ and _Plain Dealer_, although not
translations, were based, in a sense, upon Moliere's _Ecole des Femmes_
and _Le Misanthrope_. The only one of the tragic dramatists of the
Restoration who prolonged the traditions of the Elisabethan stage, was
Otway, whose _Venice Preserved_, written in blank verse, still keeps
the boards. There are fine passages in Dryden's heroic plays, passages
weighty in thought and nobly sonorous in language. There is one great
scene (between Antony and Ventidius) in his _All for Love_. And one,
at least, of his comedies, the _Spanish Friar_, is skillfully
constructed. But his nature was not pliable enough for the drama, and
he acknowledged that, in writing for the stage, he "forced his genius."
In sharp contrast with these heroic plays was the comic drama of the
Restoration, the plays of Wycherley, Killigrew, Etherege, Farquhar, Van
Brugh, Congreve, and others; plays like the _Country Wife_, the
_Parson's Wedding_, _She Would if She Could_, the _Beaux' Stratagem_,
the _Relapse_, and the _Way of the World_. These were in prose, and
represented {170} the gay world and the surface of fashionable life.
Amorous intrigue was their constantly recurring theme. Some of them
were written expressly in ridicule of the Puritans. Such was the
_Committee_ of Dryden's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, the hero of
which is a distressed gentleman, and the villain a London cit, and
president of the committee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the
sequestration of the estates of royalists. Such were also the
_Roundheads_ and the _Banished Cavaliers_ of Mrs. Aphra Behn, who was a
female spy in the service of Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the
coarsest of the Restoration comedians. The profession of piety had
become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the
mark of a gentleman. The ideal hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the
witty young profligate, who had seen life, and learned to disbelieve in
virtue. His highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical
courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good-natured readiness
to back up a friend in a quarrel, or an amour. Virtue was
_bourgeois_--reserved for London trades-people. A man must be either a
rake or a hypocrite. The gentlemen were rakes, the city people were
hypocrites. Their wives, however, were all in love with the gentlemen,
and it was the proper thing to seduce them, and to borrow their
husbands' money. For the first and last time, perhaps, in the history
of the English drama, the sympathy of the audience was deliberately
sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the laugh {171} turned
against the dishonored husband and the honest man. (Contrast this with
Shakspere's _Merry Wives of Windsor_.) The women were represented as
worse than the men--scheming, ignorant, and corrupt. The dialogue in
the best of these plays was easy, lively, and witty; the situations in
some of them audacious almost beyond belief. Under a thin varnish of
good breeding, the sentiments and manners were really brutal. The
loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher's theater retain a fineness
of feeling and that _politesse de coeur_--which marks the gentleman.
They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic passion.
But the Manlys and Homers of the Restoration comedy have a prosaic,
cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts. Charles Lamb, in his ingenious
essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," apologized for
the Restoration stage, on the ground that it represented a world of
whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws of morality had no
application.
But Macaulay answered truly, that at no time has the stage been closer
in its imitation of real life. The theater of Wycherley and Etherege
was but the counterpart of that social condition which we read of in
Pepys's _Diary_, and in the _Memoirs_ of the Chevalier de Grammont.
This prose comedy of manners was not, indeed, "artificial" at all, in
the sense in which the contemporary tragedy--the "heroic play"--was
artificial. It was, on the contrary, far more natural, and,
intellectually, of {172} much higher value. In 1698 Jeremy Collier, a
non-juring Jacobite clergyman, published his _Short View of the
Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage_, which did much toward
reforming the practice of the dramatists. The formal characteristics,
without the immorality, of the Restoration comedy, re-appeared briefly
in Goldsmith's _She Stoops to Conquer_, 1772, and Sheridan's _Rival_,
_School for Scandal_, and _Critic_, 1775-9, our last strictly
"classical" comedies. None of this school of English comedians
approached their model, Moliere. He excelled his imitators not only in
his French urbanity--the polished wit and delicate grace of his
style--but in the dexterous unfolding of his plot, and in the wisdom
and truth of his criticism of life, and his insight into character. It
is a symptom of the false taste of the age that Shakspere's plays were
rewritten for the Restoration stage. Davenant made new versions of
_Macbeth_ and _Julius Caasar_, substituting rime for blank verse. In
conjunction with Dryden, he altered the _Tempest_, complicating the
intrigue by the introduction of a male counterpart to Miranda--a youth
who had never seen a woman. Shadwell "improved" _Timon of Athens_, and
Nahum Tate furnished a new fifth act to _King Lear_, which turned the
play into a comedy! In the prologue to his doctored version of
_Troilus and Cressida_, Dryden made the ghost of Shakspere speak of
himself as
"Untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age."
{172} Thomas Rymer, whom Pope pronounced a good critic, was very severe
upon Shakspere in his _Remarks on the Tragedies of the Last Age_; and
in his _Short View of Tragedy_, 1693, he said, "In the neighing of a
horse or in the growling of a mastiff, there is more humanity than,
many times, in the tragical flights of Shakspere." "To Deptford by
water," writes Pepys, in his diary for August 20, 1666, "reading
Othello, Moor of Venice; which I ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good
play; but, having so lately read the _Adventures of Five Hours_, it
seems a mean thing."
In undramatic poetry the new school, both in England and in France,
took its point of departure in a reform against the extravagances of
the Marinists, or conceited poets, specially represented in England by
Donne and Cowley. The new poets, both in their theory and practice,
insisted upon correctness, clearness, polish, moderation, and good
sense. Boileau's _L' Art Poetique_, 1673, inspired by Horace's _Ars
Poetica_, was a treatise in verse upon the rules of correct
composition, and it gave the law in criticism for over a century, not
only in France, but in Germany and England. It gave English poetry a
didactic turn and started the fashion of writing critical essays in
riming couplets. The Earl of Mulgrave published two "poems" of this
kind, an _Essay on Satire_, and an _Essay on Poetry_. The Earl of
Roscommon--who, said Addison, "makes even rules a noble poetry"--made a
metrical version of Horace's _Ars Poetica_, {174} and wrote an original
_Essay on Translated Verse_. Of the same kind were Addison's epistle
to Sacheverel, entitled _An Account of the Greatest English Poets_, and
Pope's _Essay on Criticism_, 1711, which was nothing more than
versified maxims of rhetoric, put with Pope's usual point and
brilliancy. The classicism of the 18th century, it has been said, was
a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It was Latin rather than
Greek; it turned to the least imaginative side of Latin literature and
found its models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius, but in the
satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Juvenal, Horace, and Persius.
The chosen medium of the new poetry was the heroic couplet. This had,
of course, been used before by English poets as far back as Chaucer.
The greater part of the _Canterbury Tales_ was written in heroic
couplets. But now a new strength and precision were given to the
familiar measure by imprisoning the sense within the limit of the
couplet, and by treating each line as also a unit in itself. Edmund
Waller had written verse of this kind as early as the reign of Charles
I. He, said Dryden, "first showed us to conclude the sense most
commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs on
for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake
it." Sir John Denham, also, in his _Cooper's Hill_, 1643, had written
such verse as this:
"O, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example as it is my theme!
{175}
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full."
Here we have the regular flow, and the nice balance between the first
and second member of each couplet, and the first and second part of
each line, which characterized the verse of Dryden and Pope.
"Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long resounding march and energy divine."
Thus wrote Pope, using for the nonce the triplet and alexandrine by
which Dryden frequently varied the couplet. Pope himself added a
greater neatness and polish to Dryden's verse and brought the system to
such monotonous perfection that he "made poetry a mere mechanic art."
The lyrical poetry of this generation was almost entirely worthless.
The dissolute wits of Charles the Second's court, Sedley, Rochester,
Sackville, and the "mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease" threw off a
few amatory trifles; but the age was not spontaneous or sincere enough
for genuine song. Cowley introduced the Pindaric ode, a highly
artificial form of the lyric, in which the language was tortured into a
kind of spurious grandeur, and the meter teased into a sound and fury,
signifying nothing. Cowley's Pindarics were filled with something
which passed for fire, but has now utterly gone out. Nevertheless, the
fashion spread, and "he who could do nothing else," said Dr. Johnson,
{176} "could write like Pindar." The best of these odes was Dryden's
famous _Alexander's Feast_, written for a celebration of St. Cecilia's
day by a musical club. To this same fashion, also, we owe Gray's two
fine odes, the _Progress of Poesy_ and the _Bard_, written a
half-century later.
Dryden was not so much a great poet, as a solid thinker, with a
splendid mastery of expression, who used his energetic verse as a
vehicle for political argument and satire. His first noteworthy poem,
_Annus Mirabilis_, 1667, was a narrative of the public events of the
year 1666, namely: the Dutch war and the great fire of London. The
subject of _Absalom and Ahitophel_--the first part of which appeared in
1681--was the alleged plot of the Whig leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury,
to defeat the succession of the Duke of York, afterward James II., by
securing the throne to Monmouth, a natural son of Charles II. The
parallel afforded by the story of Absalom's revolt against David was
wrought out by Dryden with admirable ingenuity and keeping. He was at
his best in satirical character-sketches, such as the brilliant
portraits in this poem of Shaftesbury, as the false counselor,
Ahitophel, and of the Duke of Buckingham as Zimri. The latter was
Dryden's reply to the _Rehearsal_. _Absalom and Ahitophel_ was
followed by the _Medal_, a continuation of the same subject, and _Mac
Flecknoe_, a personal onslaught on the "true blue Protestant poet,"
Thomas Shadwell, a political and literary foe of Dryden. Flecknoe, an
{177} obscure Irish poetaster, being about to retire from the throne of
duncedom, resolved to settle the succession upon his son, Shadwell,
whose claims to the inheritance are vigorously asserted.
"The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense. . . .
The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull
With this prophetic blessing--Be thou dull."
Dryden is our first great satirist. The formal satire had been written
in the reign of Elisabeth by Donne, and by Joseph Hall, Bishop of
Exeter, and subsequently by Marston, the dramatist, by Wither, Marvell,
and others; but all of these failed through an over violence of
language, and a purpose too pronouncedly moral. They had no lightness
of touch, no irony and mischief. They bore down too hard, imitated
Juvenal, and lashed English society in terms befitting the corruption
of Imperial Rome. They denounced, instructed, preached, did every
thing but satirize. The satirist must raise a laugh. Donne and Hall
abused men in classes: priests were worldly, lawyers greedy, courtiers
obsequious, etc. But the easy scorn of Dryden and the delightful
malice of Pope gave a pungent personal interest to their sarcasm,
infinitely more effective than these commonplaces of satire. Dryden
was as happy in controversy as in satire, and is unexcelled in the
power to reason in verse. His _Religio Laici_, 1682, was a poem in
defense of the {178} English Church. But when James II. came to the
throne Dryden turned Catholic and wrote the _Hind and Panther_, 1687,
to vindicate his new belief. Dryden had the misfortune to be dependent
upon royal patronage and upon a corrupt stage. He sold his pen to the
court, and in his comedies he was heavily and deliberately lewd, a sin
which he afterward acknowledged and regretted. Milton's "soul was like
a star and dwelt apart," but Dryden wrote for the trampling multitude.
He had a coarseness of moral fiber, but was not malignant in his
satire, being of a large, careless, and forgetting nature. He had that
masculine, enduring cast of mind which gathers heat and clearness from
motion, and grows better with age. His _Fables_--modernizations from
Chaucer and translations from Boccaccio--written the year before he
died, are among his best works.
Dryden is also our first critic of any importance. His critical essays
were mostly written as prefaces or dedications to his poems and plays.
But his _Essay on Dramatic Poesie_, which Dr. Johnson called our "first
regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing," was in the shape
of a Platonic dialogue. When not misled by the French classicism of
his day, Dryden was an admirable critic, full of penetration and sound
sense. He was the earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose. If
the imitation of French models was an injury to poetry it was a benefit
to prose. The best modern prose is French, and it was the essayists of
the {179} Gallicised Restoration age--Cowley, Sir William Temple, and,
above all, Dryden--who gave modern English prose that simplicity,
directness, and colloquial air, which marks it off from the more
artificial diction of Milton, Taylor, and Browne.
A few books whose shaping influences lay in the past belong by their
date to this period. John Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was
almost wholly in the Bible and Fox's _Book of Martyrs_, imprisoned for
twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching at conventicles, wrote and,
in 1678, published his _Pilgrim's Progress_, the greatest of religious
allegories. Bunyan's spiritual experiences were so real to him that
they took visible concrete shape in his imagination as men, women,
cities, landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transparent of
allegories. Unlike the _Faery Queene_, the story of _Pilgrim's
Progress_ has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and
yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the
Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of
Death with the same belief with which they read of Crusoe's cave or
Aladdin's palace.
It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the cultivated poet of
_Paradise Lost_. They represent the poles of the Puritan party. Yet
it may admit of a doubt, whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, as
vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory. They both came out
quietly and made little noise at first. But the _Pilgrim's Progress_
got at once {180} into circulation, and not even a single copy of the
first edition remains. Milton, too--who received 10 pounds for the
copyright of _Paradise Lost_--seemingly found that "fit audience though
few" for which he prayed, as his poem reached its second impression in
five years (1672). Dryden visited him in his retirement and asked
leave to turn it into rime and put it on the stage as an opera. "Ay,"
said Milton, good humoredly, "you may tag my verses." And accordingly
they appeared, duly tagged, in Dryden's operatic masque, the _State of
Innocence_. In this startling conjunction we have the two ages in a
nut-shell: the Commonwealth was an epic, the Restoration an opera.
The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 1688-1744, is marked
off by no distinct line from the generation before it. Taste continued
to be governed by the precepts of Boileau and the French classical
school. Poetry remained chiefly didactic and satirical, and satire in
Pope's hands was more personal even than in Dryden's, and addressed
itself less to public issues. The literature of the "Augustan age" of
Queen Anne (1702-1714) was still more a literature of the town and of
fashionable society than that of the Restoration had been. It was also
closely involved with party struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest
pens on either side were taken into alliance by the political leaders.
Swift was in high favor with the Tory ministers, Oxford and
Bolingbroke, and his pamphlets, the _Public Spirit of the Whigs_ and
the {181} _Conduct of the Allies_, were rewarded with the deanery of
St. Patrick's, Dublin. Addison became Secretary of State under a Whig
government. Prior was in the diplomatic service. Daniel De Foe, the
author of _Robinson Crusoe_, 1719, was a prolific political writer,
conducted his _Review_ in the interest of the Whigs and was imprisoned
and pilloried for his ironical pamphlet, _The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters_. Steele, who was a violent writer on the Whig side, held
various public offices, such as Commissioner of Stamps and Commissioner
for Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament. After the Revolution of
1688 the manners and morals of English society were somewhat on the
mend. The court of William and Mary, and of their successor, Queen
Anne, set no such example of open profligacy as that of Charles II.
But there was much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and intrigue in
London, and vice was fashionable till Addison partly preached and
partly laughed it down in the _Spectator_. The women were mostly
frivolous and uneducated, and not unfrequently fast. They are spoken
of with systematic disrespect by nearly every writer of the time,
except Steele. "Every woman," wrote Pope, "is at heart a rake." The
reading public had now become large enough to make letters a
profession. Dr. Johnson said that Pope was the first writer in whose
case the book-seller took the place of the patron. His translation of
Homer, published by subscription, brought him between eight and nine
thousand {182} pounds and made him independent. But the activity of
the press produced a swarm of poorly-paid hack-writers, penny-a-liners,
who lived from hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order.
Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their lampoons against Pope
and others of their more successful rivals called out Pope's _Dunciad_,
or epic of the dunces, by way of retaliation. The politics of the time
were sordid and consisted mainly of an ignoble scramble for office.
The Whigs were fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor of
the House of Hanover, and the Tories were secretly intriguing with the
exiled Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion,
John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle
or even personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of
spiritual deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold and given to
political favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were
worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were
practically unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism appeared in
the Deist controversy. Numbers of men in high position were Deists;
the Earl of Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant friend,
Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the head of the Tory ministry, whose
political writings had much influence upon his young French
acquaintance, Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Catholic, though there is
little to show it in his writings, and the underlying thought of his
famous _Essay {183} on Man_ was furnished him by Bolingbroke. The
letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfield to his son were accepted as a
manual of conduct, and La Rochefoucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as
authority on life and human nature. Said Swift:
"As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From nature, I believe them true.
They argue no corrupted mind
In him; the fault is in mankind."
The succession which Dryden had willed to Congreve was taken up by
Alexander Pope. He was a man quite unlike Dryden, sickly, deformed,
morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he joined on to and
continued Dryden. He was more careful in his literary workmanship than
his great forerunner, and in his _Moral Essays_ and _Satires_ he
brought the Horatian epistle in verse, the formal satire and that
species of didactic poem of which Boileau had given the first example,
to an exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dryden had
translated Vergil, and so Pope translated Homer. The throne of the
dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his
_Dunciad_, passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and
Colley Cibber. There is a great waste of strength in this elaborate
squib, and most of the petty writers, whose names it has preserved, as
has been said, like flies in amber, are now quite unknown. But,
although we have to read it with notes, to get the point of its
allusions, it is easy to {184} see what execution it must have done at
the time, and it is impossible to withhold admiration from the wit, the
wickedness, the triumphant mischief of the thing. The sketch of
Addison--who had offended Pope by praising a rival translation of
Homer--as "Atticus," is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in
Dryden. Pope's very malignity made his sting sharper than Dryden's.
He secreted venom, and worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing
all the resources of his art to bear upon the question of how to give
the most pain most cleverly.
Pope's masterpiece is, perhaps, the _Rape of the Lock_, a mock heroic
poem, a "dwarf Iliad," recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel,
which arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from the head of
Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in his _Lutrin_, had treated, with the
same epic dignity, a dispute over the placing of the reading desk in a
parish church. Pope was the Homer of the drawing-room, the boudoir,
the tea-urn, the omber-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage, and the
lap-dogs. This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, is the topmost
blossom of a highly artificial society, the quintessence of whatever
poetry was possible in those
"Teacup times of hood and hoop,
And when the patch was worn,"
with whose decorative features, at least, the recent Queen Anne revival
has made this generation familiar. It may be said of it, as Thackeray
said of {185} Gay's pastorals: "It is to poetry what charming little
Dresden china figures are to sculpture, graceful, minikin, fantastic,
with a certain beauty always accompanying them." The _Rape of the
Lock_, perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains elegance and
prettiness in a supreme degree. In imitation of the gods and goddesses
in the Iliad, who intermeddle for or against the human characters, Pope
introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicrucian philosophy. We may measure
the distance between imagination and fancy, if we will compare these
little filagree creatures with Shakspere's elves, whose occupation it
was
"To tread the ooze of the salt deep,
Or run upon the sharp wind of the north, . . .
Or on the beached margent of the sea,
To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind."
Very different were the offices of Pope's fays:
"Our humble province is to tend the fair;
Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care;
To save the powder from too rude a gale,
Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale. . . .
Nay oft in dreams invention we bestow
To change a flounce or add a furbelow."
Pope was not a great poet; it has been doubted whether he was a poet at
all. He does not touch the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the
true poet always does. In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of
passion, he was altogether impotent. {186} His _Windsor Forest_ and
his _Pastorals_ are artificial and false, not written with "the eye
upon the object." His epistle of _Eloisa to Abelard_ is declamatory
and academic, and leaves the reader cold. The only one of his poems
which is at all possessed with feeling is his pathetic _Elegy to the
Memory of an Unfortunate Lady_. But he was a great literary artist.
Within the cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which
the fashion of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he
secured the largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that
verse was capable. He used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with
great skill. His example dominated English poetry for nearly a
century, and even now, when a poet like Dr. Holmes, for example, would
write satire or humorous verse of a dignified kind, he turns
instinctively to the measure and manner of Pope. He was not a
consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared less about the truth of his
thought than about the pointedness of its expression. His language was
closer-grained than Dryden's. His great art was the art of putting
things. He is more quoted than any other English poet, but Shakspere.
He struck the average intelligence, the common sense of English
readers, and furnished it with neat, portable formulas, so that it no
longer needed to "vent its observation in mangled terms," but could
pour itself out compactly, artistically, in little, ready-made molds.
But his high-wrought brilliancy, this unceasing point, soon fatigue.
His {187} poems read like a series of epigrams; and every line has a
hit or an effect.
From the reign of Queen Anne date the beginnings of the periodical
essay. Newspapers had been published since the time of the Civil War;
at first irregularly, and then regularly. But no literature of
permanent value appeared in periodical form until Richard Steele
started the _Tatler_, in 1709. In this he was soon joined by his
friend, Joseph Addison and in its successor the _Spectator_, the first
number of which was issued March 1, 1711, Addison's contributions
outnumbered Steele's. The _Tatler_ was published on three, the
_Spectator_ on six, days of the week. The _Tatler_ gave political
news, but each number of the _Spectator_ consisted of a single essay.
The object of these periodicals was to reflect the passing humors of
the time, and to satirize the follies and minor immoralities of the
town. "I shall endeavor," wrote Addison, in the tenth paper of the
_Spectator_, "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with
morality. . . . It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy
down from Heaven to inhabit among men; and I shall be ambitious to have
it said of me that I have brought Philosophy out of closets and
libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at
tea-tables and in coffee-houses." Addison's satire was never personal.
He was a moderate man, and did what he could to restrain Steele's
intemperate party zeal. His character was dignified and pure, and his
strongest emotion seems to have {188} been his religious feeling. One
of his contemporaries called him "a parson in a tie wig," and he wrote
several excellent hymns. His mission was that of censor of the public
taste. Sometimes he lectures and sometimes he preaches, and in his
Saturday papers, he brought his wide reading and nice scholarship into
service for the instruction of his readers. Such was the series of
essays, in which he gave an elaborate review of _Paradise Lost_. Such
also was his famous paper, the _Vision of Mirza_, an oriental allegory
of human life. The adoption of this slightly pedagogic tone was
justified by the prevalent ignorance and frivolity of the age. But the
lighter portions of the _Spectator_ are those which have worn the best.
Their style is at once correct and easy, and it is as a humorist, a sly
observer of manners, and above all, a delightful talker, that Addison
is best known to posterity. In the personal sketches of the members of
the Spectator Club, of Will Honeycomb, Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew
Freeport, and, above all, Sir Roger de Coverley, the quaint and honest
country gentleman, may be found the nucleus of the modern prose fiction
of character. Addison's humor is always a trifle grave. There is no
whimsy, no frolic in it, as in Sterne or Lamb. "He thinks justly,"
said Dr. Johnson, "but he thinks faintly." The _Spectator_ had a host
of followers, from the somewhat heavy _Rambler_ and _Idler_ of Johnson,
down to the _Salmagundi_ papers of our own Irving, who was, perhaps,
Addison's latest and {189} best literary descendant. In his own age
Addison made some figure as a poet and dramatist. His _Campaign_,
celebrating the victory of Blenheim, had one much-admired couplet, in
which Marlborough was likened to the angel of tempest, who
"Pleased the Almighty's orders to perform,
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm."
His stately, classical tragedy, _Cato_, which was acted at Drury Lane
Theater in 1712, with immense applause, was pronounced by Dr. Johnson
"unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius." It is,
notwithstanding, cold and tedious, as a whole, though it has some fine
declamatory passages--in particular the soliloquy of Cato in the fifth
act--
"It must be so: Plato, thou reasonest well," etc.
The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of the most savage and
powerful satirists that ever lived, was Jonathan Swift. As secretary
in the family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chaplain to the Earl
of Berkeley, he had known in youth the bitterness of poverty and
dependence. Afterward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory
ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was put off with the
deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a
poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of
the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said
Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and
a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly
ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the
inscription, _Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit_. "So
great a man he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, "that thinking of him is
like thinking of an empire falling." Swift's first noteworthy
publication was his _Tale of a Tub_, 1704, a satire on religious
differences. But his great work was _Gulliver's Travels_, 1726, the
book in which his hate and scorn of mankind, and the long rage of
mortified pride and thwarted ambition found their fullest expression.
Children read the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to the flying
island of Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms, as they read
_Robinson Crusoe_, as stories of wonderful adventure. Swift had all of
De Foe's realism, his power of giving veri-similitude to his narrative
by the invention of a vast number of small, exact, consistent details.
But underneath its fairy tales, _Gulliver's Travels_ is a satire, far
more radical than any of Dryden's or Pope's, because directed, not
against particular parties or persons, but against human nature. In
his account of Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Swift tries to show--looking
first through one end of the telescope and then through the other--that
human greatness, goodness, beauty disappear if the scale be altered a
little. If men were six inches high instead of six feet--such is the
logic of his tale--their wars, governments, science, religion--all
their institutions, {191} in fine, and all the courage, wisdom, and
virtue by which these have been built up, would appear laughable. On
the other hand, if they were sixty feet high instead of six, they would
become disgusting. The complexion of the finest ladies would show
blotches, hairs, excrescences, and an overpowering effluvium would
breathe from the pores of the skin. Finally, in his loathsome
caricature of mankind, as Yahoos, he contrasts them to their shame with
the beasts, and sets instinct above reason.
The method of Swift's satire was grave irony. Among his minor writings
in this kind are his _Argument against Abolishing Christianity_, his
_Modest Proposal_ for utilizing the surplus population of Ireland by
eating the babies of the poor, and his _Predictions of Isaac
Bickerstaff_. In the last he predicted the death of one Partridge, an
almanac maker, at a certain day and hour. When the time set was past,
he published a minute account of Partridge's last moments; and when the
subject of this excellent fooling printed an indignant denial of his
own death, Swift answered very temperately, proving that he was dead
and remonstrating with him on the violence of his language. "To call a
man a fool and villain, an impudent fellow, only for differing from him
in a point merely speculative, is, in my humble opinion, a very
improper style for a person of his education." Swift wrote verses as
well as prose, but their motive was the reverse of poetical. His gross
and cynical humor vulgarized whatever it touched. He leaves us no
illusions, {192} and not only strips his subject, but flays it and
shows the raw muscles beneath the skin. He delighted to dwell upon the
lowest bodily functions of human nature. "He saw bloodshot," said
Thackeray.
1. Macaulay's Essay, The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration.
2. The Poetical Works of John Dryden. Globe Edition. Macmillan & Co.
3. Thackeray's English Humorists of the Last Century.
4. Sir Roger de Coverley. New York: Harper, 1878.
5. Swift's Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, Directions to Servants,
Polite Conversation, The Great Question Debated, Verses on the Death of
Dean Swift.
6. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. Globe Edition. Macmillan &
Co.
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