intercourse with the world of past and present things, was in part
performed by what he did in large measure possess--intellectual
_inquisitiveness_: respect for intellect, its accomplishments, and its
rights. If any quality in the actions or writings of other men could have
won Milton's favourable regards, even where his moral sense condemned,
that quality, we believe, was intellectual greatness, and especially
greatness of his own stamp, or marked by any of his own features. Hence
that tone of almost pitying admiration which pervades his representation
of the ruined Archangel; hence his uniformly respectful references to the
great intellects of Paganism and of the Catholic world; and hence, we
think, his unbounded and, for a time at least, unqualified reverence for
Shakespeare. As by the direct exercise of his own intellect, on the one
hand, applied to the rational discrimination for himself of what was
really wrong from what was only ignorantly reputed to be so, he had kept
his mind clear, as Cromwell also did, from many of those sectarian
prejudices in the matter of moral observance which were current in his
time--justified, for example, his love of music, his liking for natural
beauty, his habits of cheerful recreation, his devotion to various
literature, and even, most questionable of all, as would then have been
thought, his affection for the massy pillars and storied windows of
ecclesiastical architecture,--so, reflexly, by a recognition of the
intellectual liberty of others, he seems to have distinctly apprehended
the fact that there might be legitimate manifestations of intellect of a
kind very different from his own. A Falstaff in real life, for example,
might have been to Milton the most unendurable of horrors, just as,
according to his own confession, a play-acting clergyman was his
abomination; and yet, in the pages of his honoured Shakespeare, Sir John
as mentor to the Prince, and Parson Hugh Evans as the Welch fairy among
the mummers, may have been creations he would con over and very dearly
appreciate. And this accounts for the multifarious and unrestricted
character of his literary studies. Milton, we believe, was a man whose
intellectual inquisitiveness and respect for talent would have led him, in
other instances than that of the College theatricals, to see and hear much
that his heart derided, to study and know what he would not strictly have
wished to imitate. Ovid and Tibullus, for example, contain much that is
far from Miltonic; and yet that he read poets of this class with
particular pleasure let the following quotation prove:--
"I had my time, readers, as others have who have good learning
bestowed upon them, to be sent to those places where, the opinion
was, it might be soonest attained; and, as the manner is, was not
unstudied in those authors which are most commended: whereof some
were grave orators and historians, whose matter methought I loved
indeed, but, as my age was, so I understood them; others were the
smooth elegiac poets whereof the schools are not scarce, whom, both
for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing (which, in
imitation, I found most easy, and most agreeable to nature's part in
me) and for their matter (which, what it is, there be few who know
not), I was so allured to read that no recreation came to me more
welcome--for, that it was then those years with me which are excused
though they be least severe I may be saved the labour to remember
ye."--_Apology for Smectymnuus._
That Milton, then, notwithstanding his natural austerity and seriousness
even in youth, was led by his keen appreciation of literary beauty and
finish, and especially by his delight in sweet and melodious verse, to
read and enjoy the poetry of those writers who are usually quoted as
examples of the lusciousness and sensuousness of the poetic nature, and
even to prefer them to all others, is specially stated by himself. But let
the reader, if he should think he sees in this a ground for suspecting
that we have assigned too much importance to Milton's personal seriousness
of disposition as a cause affecting his aims and art as a poet, distinctly
mark the continuation--
"Whence, having observed them [the elegiac and love poets] to account
it the chief glory of their wit, in that they were ablest to judge,
to praise, and by that could esteem themselves worthiest to love,
those high perfections which, under one or other name, they took to
celebrate, I thought with myself, by every instinct and presage of
nature (which is not wont to be false), that what emboldened them to
this task might, with such diligence as they used, embolden me, and
that what judgment, wit, or elegance was my share would herein best
appear, and best value itself, by how much more wisely and with more
love of virtue I should choose (let rude ears be absent!) the object
of not unlike praises. For, albeit these thoughts to some will seem
virtuous and commendable, to others only pardonable, to a third sort
perhaps idle, yet the mentioning of them now will end in serious. Nor
blame it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a
reward as the noblest dispositions above other things in this life
have sometimes preferred; whereof not to be sensible, when good and
fair in one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment,
and withal an ungentle and swainish breast. For, by the firm settling
of these persuasions, I became, to my best memory, so much a
proficient that, if I found those authors anywhere speaking unworthy
things of themselves, or unchaste those names which before they had
extolled, this effect it wrought in me: From that time forward their
art I still applauded, but the men I deplored; and above them all
preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never
wrote but honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying
sublime and pure thoughts without transgression. And long it was not
after when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be
frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things
ought himself to be a true poem--that is, a composition and pattern
of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high
praises of heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself the
experience and the practice of all that which is
praiseworthy."--_Apology for Smectymnuus._
Here, at last, therefore, we have Milton's own judgment on the matter of
our inquiry. He had speculated himself on that subject; he had made it a
matter of conscious investigation what kind of moral tone and career would
best fit a man to be a poet, on the one hand, or would be most likely to
frustrate his hopes of writing well, on the other; and his conclusion, as
we see, was dead against the "wild oats" theory. Had Ben Jonson,
according to our previous fancy, proffered him, out of kindly interest, a
touch of that theory, while criticising his juvenile poems, and telling
him how he might learn to write better, there would have descended on the
lecturer, as sure as fate, a rebuke, though from young lips, that would
have made his strong face blush. "_He who would not be frustrate of his
hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true
poem_:" fancy that sentence, an early and often pronounced formula of
Milton's, as we may be sure it was, hurled some evening, could time and
chance have permitted it, into the midst of the assembled Elizabethan wits
at the Mermaid! What interruption of the jollity, what mingled uneasiness
and resentment, what turning of faces towards the new speaker, what forced
laughter to conceal consternation! Only Shakespeare, one thinks, had he
been present, would have fixed on the bold youth a mild and approving eye,
would have looked round the room thoroughly to observe the whole scene,
and, remembering some passages in his own life, would mayhap have had his
own thoughts! Certainly, at least, the essence of that wonderful and
special development of the literary genius of England which came between
the Elizabethan epoch and the epoch of the Restoration, and which was
represented and consummated in Milton himself, consisted in the fact that
then there was a temporary protest, and by a man able to make it good,
against the theory of "wild oats," current before and current since. The
nearest poet to Milton in this respect, since Milton's time, has
undoubtedly been Wordsworth.
DRYDEN, AND THE LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION.
DRYDEN, AND THE LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION.[6]
It is a common remark that literature flourishes best in times of social
order and leisure, and suffers immediate depression whenever the public
mind is agitated by violent civil controversies. The remark is more true
than such popular inductions usually are. It is confirmed, on the small
scale, by what every one finds in his own experience. When a family is
agitated by any matter affecting its interests, there is an immediate
cessation from all the lighter luxuries of books and music wherewith it
used to beguile its leisure. All the members of the family are intent for
the time being on the matter in hand; if books are consulted it is for
some purpose of practical reference; and, if pens are active, it is in
writing letters of business. Not till the matter is fairly concluded are
the recreations of music and literature resumed; though then, possibly,
with a keener zest and a mind more full and fresh than before. Precisely
so it is on the large scale. If everything that is spoken or written be
called literature, there is probably always about the same amount of
literature going on in a community; or, if there is any increase or
decrease, it is but in proportion to the increase of the population. But,
if by literature we mean a certain peculiar kind and quality of spoken or
written matter, recognisable by its likeness to certain known precedents,
then, undoubtedly literature flourishes in times of quiet and security,
and wanes in times of convulsion and disorder. When the storm of some
great civil contest is blowing, it is impossible for even the serenest man
to shut himself quite in from the noise, and turn over the leaves of his
Horace, or practise his violin, as undistractedly as before. Great is the
power of _pococurantism_; and it is a noble sight to see, in the midst of
some Whig and Tory excitement which is throwing the general community into
sixes and sevens, and sending mobs along the streets, the calm devotee of
hard science, or the impassioned lover of the ideal, going on his way,
aloof from it all, and smiling at it all. But there are times when even
these obdurate gentlemen will be touched, in spite of themselves, to the
tune of what is going on; when the shouts of the mob will penetrate to the
closets of the most studious; and when, as Archimedes of old had to leave
his darling diagrams and trudge along the Syracusan streets to superintend
the construction of rough cranes and catapults, so philosophers and poets
alike will have to quit their favourite occupations, and be whirled along
in the common agitation. Those are times when whatever literature there is
assumes a character of immediate and practical interest. Just as, in the
supposed case, the literary activity of the family is consumed in mere
letters of business, so, in this, the literary activity of the community
exhausts itself in newspaper articles, public speeches, and pamphlets,
more or less elaborate, on the present crisis. There may be a vast amount
of mind at work, and as much, on the whole, may be written as before; but
the very excess of what may be called the pamphlet literature, which is
perishable in its nature, will leave a deficiency in the various
departments of literature more strictly so called--philosophical or
expository literature, historical literature, and the literature of pure
imagination. Not till the turmoil is over, not till the battle has been
fairly fought out, and the mental activity involved in it has been let
loose for more scattered work, will the calmer muses resume their sway,
and the press send forth treatises and histories, poems and romances, as
well as pamphlets. Then, however, men may return to literature with a new
zest, and the very storm which has interrupted the course of pure
literature for a time may infuse into such literature, when it begins
again, a fresher and stronger spirit. If the battle has ended in a
victory, there will be a tone of joy, of exultation, and of scorn, in what
men think and write after it; if it has ended in a defeat, all that is
thought and written will be tinged by a deeper and finer sorrow.
The history of English literature affords some curious illustrations of
this law. It has always puzzled historians, for example, to account for
such a great unoccupied gap in our literary progress as occurs between the
death of Chaucer and the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. From the year
1250, when the English language first makes its appearance in anything
like its present form, to the year 1400, when Chaucer died, forms, as all
know, the infant age of our literature. It was an age of great literary
activity; and how much was achieved in it remains apparent in the fact
that it culminated in a man like Chaucer--a man whom, without any drawback
for the early epoch at which he lived, we still regard as one of our
literary princes. Nor was Chaucer the solitary name of his age. He had
some notable contemporaries, both in verse and in prose. When we pass from
Chaucer's age, however, we have to overleap nearly a hundred and eighty
years before we alight upon a period presenting anything like an adequate
show of literary continuation. A few smaller names, like those of
Lydgate, Surrey, and Skelton, are all that can be cited as poetical
representatives of this sterile interval in the literary history of
England: whatever of Chaucer's genius still lingered in the island seeming
to have travelled northward, and taken refuge in a series of Scottish
poets, excelling any of their English contemporaries. How is this to be
accounted for? Is it that really, during this period, there was less of
available mind than before in England, that the quality of the English
nerve had degenerated? By no means necessarily so. Englishmen, during this
period were engaged in enterprises requiring no small amount of
intellectual and moral vigour; and there remain to us, from the same
period, specimens of grave and serious prose, which, if we do not place
them among the gems of our literature, we at least regard as evidence that
our ancestors of those days were men of heart and wit and solid sense. In
short, we are driven to suppose that there was something in the social
circumstances of England during the long period in question which
prevented such talent as there was from assuming the particular form of
literature. Fully to make out what this "something" was may baffle us;
but, when we remember that this was the period of the Civil Wars of the
Roses, and also of the great Anglican Reformation, we have reason enough
to conclude that the dearth of pure literature may have been owing, in
part, to the engrossing nature of those practical questions which then
disturbed English society. When Chaucer wrote, England, under the splendid
rule of the third Edward, was potent and triumphant abroad, but large and
leisurely at home; but scarcely had that monarch vacated the throne when a
series of civil jars began, which tore the nation into factions, and was
speedily followed by a religious movement as powerful in its effects.
Accordingly, though printing was introduced during this period, and thus
Englishmen had greater temptations to write, what they did write was
almost exclusively plain grave prose, intended for practical or polemical
occasions, and making no figure in a historical retrospect. How different
when, passing the controversial reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and
Mary, we come upon the golden days of Queen Bess! Controversy enough
remained to give occasion to plenty of polemical prose; but about the
middle of her reign, when England, once more great and powerful abroad as
in the time of the Edwards, settled down within herself into a new lease
of social order and leisure under an ascertained government, there began
an outburst of literary genius such as no age or country had ever before
witnessed. The literary fecundity of that period of English history which
embraces the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth and the whole of the
reign of James I. (1580-1625) is a perpetual astonishment to us all. In
the entire preceding three centuries and a half we can with difficulty
name six men that can, by any charity of judgment, be regarded as stars in
our literature, and of these only one that is a star of the first
magnitude: whereas in this brief period of forty-five or fifty years we
can reckon up a host of poets and prose-writers all noticeable on high
literary grounds, and of whom at least thirty were men of extraordinary
dimensions. Indeed, in the contemplation of the intellectual abundance and
variety of this age--the age of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Bacon, of
Raleigh and Hooker, of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Donne, Herbert,
Massinger, and their illustrious contemporaries--we feel ourselves driven
from the theory that so rich a literary crop could have resulted from that
mere access of social leisure after a long series of national broils to
which we do in part attribute it, and are obliged to suppose that there
must have been, along with this, an actually finer substance and
condition, for the time being, of the national nerve. The very brain of
England must have become more "quick, nimble, and forgetive," before the
time of leisure came.
We have spoken of this great age of English literature as terminating with
the reign of James I., in 1625. In point of fact, however, it extended
some way into the reign of his son, Charles I. Spenser had died in 1599,
before James had ascended the English throne; Shakespeare and Beaumont had
died in 1616, while James still reigned; Fletcher died in 1625; Bacon
died in 1626, when the crown had been but a year on Charles's head. But,
while these great men and many of their contemporaries had vanished from
the scene before England had any experience of the first Charles, some of
their peers survived to tell what kind of men they had been. Ben Jonson
lived till 1637, and was poet-laureate to Charles I.; Donne and Drayton
lived till 1631; Herbert till 1632; Chapman till 1634; Dekker till 1638;
Ford till 1639; and Heywood and Massinger till 1640.
There is one point in the reign of Charles, however, where a clear line
may be drawn separating the last of the Elizabethan giants from their
literary successors. This is the point at which the Civil War commences.
The whole of the earlier part of Charles's reign was a preparation for
this war; but it cannot be said to have fairly begun till the meeting of
the Long Parliament in 1640, when Charles had been fifteen years on the
throne. If we select this year as the commencement of the great Puritan
and Republican Revolution in England, and the year 1660, when Charles II.
was restored, as the close of the same Revolution, we shall have a period
of twenty years to which, if there is any truth in the notion that the
Muses shun strife, this notion should be found peculiarly applicable. Is
it so? We think it is. In the first place, as we have just said, the last
of the Elizabethan giants died off before this period began, as if killed
by the mere approach to an atmosphere so lurid and tempestuous. In the
second place, in the case of such writers as were old enough to have
learnt in the school of those giants and yet young enough to survive them
and enter on the period of struggle,--as for example, Herrick (1591-1660),
Shirley (1596-1666), Waller (1605-1687), Davenant (1605-1668), Suckling
(1608-1643), Milton (1608-1674), Butler (1612-1680), Cleveland
(1613-1658), Denham (1615-1668), and Cowley (1618-1667),--it will be
found, on examination, either that the time of their literary activity did
not coincide with the period of struggle, but came before it, or after it,
or lay on both sides of it; or that what they did write of a purely
literary character during this period was written in exile; or, lastly,
that what they did write at home of a genuine literary character during
this period is inconsiderable in quantity, and dashed with a vein of
polemical allusion rendering it hardly an exception to the rule. The
literary career of Milton illustrates very strikingly this fact of the all
but entire cessation of pure literature in England between 1640 and 1660.
Milton's life consists of three distinctly marked periods--the first
ending with 1640, during which he composed his exquisite minor poems; the
second extending precisely from 1640 to 1660, during which he wrote no
poetry at all, except a few sonnets, but produced his various polemical
prose treatises or pamphlets, and served the state as a public
functionary; and the third, which may be called the period of his later
muse, extending from 1660 to his death in 1674, and famous for the
composition of his greater poems. Thus Milton's prose-period, if we may so
term it, coincided exactly with the period of civil strife and Cromwellian
rule. And, if this was the case with Milton--if he, who was essentially
the poet of Puritanism, with his whole heart and soul in the struggle
which Cromwell led, was obliged, during the process of that struggle, to
lay aside his singing robes, postpone his plans of a great immortal poem,
and in the meanwhile drudge laboriously as a prose pamphleteer--how much
more must those have been reduced to silence, or brought down into
practical prose, who found no such inspiration in the movement as it gave
to the soul of Milton, but regarded it all as desolation and disaster!
Indeed, one large department of the national literature at this period was
proscribed by civil enactment. Stage-plays were prohibited in 1642, and it
was not till after the Restoration that the theatres were re-opened. Such
a prohibition, though it left the sublime muse of Milton at liberty, had
it cared to sing, was a virtual extinction for the time of all the
customary literature. In fine, if all the literary produce of England in
the interval between 1640 and 1660 is examined, it will be found to
consist in the main of a huge mass of controversial prose, by far the
greater proportion of which, though effective at the time, is little
better now than antiquarian rubbish, astonishing from its bulk, though
some small percentage including all that came from the terrible pen of
Milton is saved by reason of its strength and grandeur. The intellect of
England was as active and as abundant as ever, but it was all required for
the current service of the time. Perhaps the only exception of any
consequence was in the case of the philosophical and calm-minded Sir
Thomas Browne, author of the _Religio Medici_. While all England was in
throes and confusion Browne was quietly attending his patients, or
pottering along his garden at Norwich, or pursuing his meditations about
sepulchral urns and his inquiries respecting the Quincuncial Lozenge. His
views of things might have been considerably quickened by billeting upon
his household a few of the Ironsides.
Had Cromwell lived longer, or had he established a dynasty capable of
maintaining itself, there can be little doubt that there would have come a
time of leisure during which, even under a Puritan rule, there would have
been a new outburst of English Literature. There were symptoms, towards
the close of the Protectorate that Cromwell, having now "reasonable good
leisure," was willing and even anxious that the nation should resume its
old literary industry and all its innocent liberties and pleasures. He
allowed Cowley, Waller, Denham, Davenant, and other Royalists, to come
over from France, and was glad to see them employed in writing verses.
Waller became one of his courtiers, and composed panegyrics on him. He
released Cleveland from prison in a very handsome manner, considering what
hard things the witty roysterer had written about "O.P." and his "copper
nose." He appears even to have winked at Davenant, when, in violation of
the act against stage-plays, that gentlemanly poet began to give private
theatrical entertainments under the name of operas. Davenant's heretical
friend, Hobbes, too, already obnoxious by his opinions even to his own
political party, availed himself of the liberty of the press to issue some
fresh metaphysical essays, which the Protector may have read. In fact, had
Cromwell survived a few years, there would, in all probability, have
arisen, under his auspices, a new literature, of which his admirer and
secretary, Milton, would have been the laureate. What might have been the
characteristics of this literature of the Commonwealth, had it developed
itself to full form and proportions, we can but guess. That, in some
respects, it would not have been so broad and various as the literature
which took its rise from the Restoration is very likely; for, so long as
the Puritan element remained dominant in English society, it was
impossible that, with any amount of liberty of the press, there should
have been such an outbreak of the merely comic spirit as did occur when
that element succumbed to its antagonist, and genius had official licence
to be as profligate as it chose. But, if less gay and riotous, it might
have been more earnest, powerful, and impressive. For its masterpiece it
would still have had _Paradise Lost_,--a work which, as it is, we must
regard as its peculiar offspring, though posthumously born; nor can we
doubt that, if influenced by the example and the recognised supremacy of
such a laureate as Milton, the younger literary men of the time would have
found themselves capable of other things than epigrams and farces.