development of English literary genius should commence only with the
restoration of the Stuarts in 1660; and then it was a leisure secured in
very different circumstances from those which would have attended a
perpetuation of Cromwell's rule. With Charles II. there came back into the
island, after many years of banishment, all the excesses of the cavalier
spirit, more reckless than before, and considerably changed by long
residence in continental cities, and especially in the French capital.
Cavalier noblemen and gentlemen came back, bringing with them French
tastes, French fashions, and foreign ladies of pleasure. As Charles II.
was a different man from his father, so the courtiers that gathered round
him at Whitehall were very different from those who had fought with
Charles I. against the Parliamentarians. Their political principles and
prejudices were nominally the same; but they were for the most part men of
a younger generation, less stiff and English in their demeanour, and more
openly dissolute in their morals. Such was the court the restoration of
which England virtually confessed to be necessary to prevent a new era of
anarchy. It was inaugurated amid the shouts of the multitude; and
Puritanism, already much weakened by defections before the event, hastened
to disappear from the public stage, diffusing itself once more as a mere
element of secret efficacy through the veins of the community, and
purchasing even this favour by the sacrifice of its most notorious
leaders.
* * * * *
Miserable in some respects as was this change for England, it offered, by
reason of the very unanimity with which it was effected, all the
conditions necessary for the forthcoming of a new literature. But where
were the materials for the commencement of this new literature?
First, as regards _persons_ fit to initiate it. There were all those who
had been left over from the Protectorate, together with such wits as the
Restoration itself had brought back, or called into being. There was the
old dramatist, Shirley, now in his sixty-fifth year, very glad, no doubt,
to come back to town, after his hard fare as a country-schoolmaster during
the eclipse of the stage, and to resume his former occupation as a writer
of plays in the style that had been in fashion thirty years before. There
was Hobbes, older still than Shirley, a tough old soul of seventy-three,
but with twenty more years of life in him, and, though not exactly a
literary man, yet sturdy enough to be whatever he liked within certain
limits. There was mild Izaak Walton, of Chancery-lane, only five years
younger than Hobbes, but destined to live as long, and capable of writing
very nicely if he could have been kept from sauntering into the fields to
fish. There was the gentlemanly Waller, now fifty-six years of age, quite
ready to be a poet about the court of Charles, and to write panegyrics on
the new side to atone for that on Cromwell. There was the no less
gentlemanly Davenant, also fifty-six years of age, steady to his royalist
principles, as became a man who had received the honour of knighthood from
the royal martyr, and enjoying a wide reputation, partly from his poetical
talents, and partly from his want of nose. There was Milton, in his
fifty-second year, blind, desolate, and stern, hiding in obscure lodgings
till his defences of regicide should be sufficiently forgotten to save him
from molestation, and building up in imagination the scheme of his
promised epic. There was Butler, four years younger, brimful of hatred to
the Puritans, and already engaged on his poem of _Hudibras_, which was to
lash them so much to the popular taste. There was Denham, known as a
versifier little inferior to Waller, and with such superior claims on the
score of loyalty as to be considered worthy of knighthood and the first
vacant post. There was Cowley, still only in his forty-third year, and
with a ready-made reputation, both as a poet and as a prose-writer, such
as none of his contemporaries possessed, and such indeed as no English
writer had acquired since the days of Ben Jonson and Donne. Younger still,
and with his fame as a satirist not yet made, there was Milton's friend,
honest Andrew Marvell, whom the people of Hull had chosen as their
representative in Parliament. Had the search been extended to theologians,
and such of them selected as were capable of influencing the literature by
the form of their writings, as distinct from their matter, Jeremy Taylor
would have been noted as still alive, though his work was nearly over,
while Richard Baxter, with a longer life before him, was in the prime of
his strength, and there was in Bedford an eccentric Baptist preacher, once
a tinker, who was to be the author, though no one supposed it, of the
greatest prose allegory in the language. Close about the person of the
king, too, there were able men and wits, capable of writing themselves, or
of criticising what was written by others, from the famous Clarendon down
to such younger and lighter men as Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, Sackville,
Earl of Dorset, and Sir Charles Sedley. Lastly, not to extend the list
farther, there was then in London, aged twenty-nine, and going about in a
stout plain dress of grey drugget, a Northamptonshire squire's son, named
John Dryden, who, after having been educated at Cambridge, had come up to
town in the last year of the Protectorate to push his fortune under a
Puritan relative then in office, and who had already once or twice tried
his hand at poetry. Like Waller, he had written and published a series of
panegyrical stanzas on Cromwell after his death; and, like Waller also, he
had attempted to atone for this miscalculation by writing another poem,
called _Astraea Redux_, to celebrate the return of Charles. As a taste of
what this poet, in particular, could do, take the last of his stanzas on
Cromwell:--
"His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest;
His name a great example stands to show
How strangely high endeavours may be blessed,
Where piety and valour jointly go";
or, in another metre and another strain of politics, the conclusion of the
poem addressed to Charles:--
"The discontented now are only they
Whose crimes before did your just cause betray:
Of those your edicts some reclaim from sin,
But most your life and blest example win.
Oh happy prince! whom Heaven hath taught the way
By paying vows to have more vows to pay!
Oh happy age! Oh times like those alone
By fate reserved for great Augustus' throne,
When the joint growth of arms and arts foreshow
The world a monarch, and that monarch you!"
Such were the _personal elements_, if we may so call them, available at
the beginning of the reign of Charles II. for the commencement of a new
era in English literature. Let us see next what were the more pronounced
_tendencies_ visible amid these personal elements--in other words, what
tone of moral sentiment, and what peculiarities of literary style and
method, were then in the ascendant, and likely to determine the character
of the budding authorship.
It was pre-eminently clear that the forthcoming literature would be
Royalist and anti-Puritan. With the exception of Milton, there was not one
man of known literary power whose heart still beat as it did when Cromwell
sat on the throne, and whose muse magnanimously disdained the change that
had befallen the nation. Puritanism, as a whole, was driven back into the
concealed vitals of the community, to sustain itself meanwhile as a
sectarian theology lurking in chapels and conventicles, and only to
re-appear after a lapse of years as an ingredient in the philosophy of
Locke and his contemporaries. The literary men who stepped forward to lead
the literature of the Restoration were royalists and courtiers: some of
them honest cavaliers, rejoicing at being let loose from the restraints of
the Commonwealth; others timeservers, making up for delay by the fulsome
excess of their zeal for the new state of things. It was part of this
change that there should be an affectation, even where there was not the
reality, of lax morals. According to the sarcasm of the time, it was
necessary now for those who would escape the risk of being thought
Puritans to contract a habit of swearing and pretend to be great rakes.
And this increase, both in the practice and in the profession of
profligacy, at once connected itself with that institution of English
society which, from the very fact that it had been suppressed by the
Puritans, now became doubly attractive and popular. The same revolution
which restored royalty in England re-opened the play-houses; and in them,
as the established organs of popular sentiment, all the anti-Puritanic
tendencies of the time hastened to find vent. The custom of having female
actors on the stage for female parts, instead of boys as heretofore, was
now permanently introduced, and brought many scandals along with it.
Whether, as some surmise, the very suppression of the theatres during the
reign of Puritanism contributed to their unusual corruptness when they
were again allowed by law--by damming up, as it were, a quantity of
pruriency which had afterwards to be let loose in a mass--it is not easy
to say; it is certain, however, that never in this country did impurity
run so openly at riot in literary guise as it did in the Drama of the
Restoration. To use a phrenological figure, it seemed as if the national
cranium of England had suddenly been contracted in every other direction
so as to permit an inordinate increase of that particular region which is
situated above the nape of the neck. This enormous preponderance of the
back of the head in literature was most conspicuously exhibited in Comedy.
Every comedy that was produced represented life as a meagre action of
persons and interests on a slight proscenium of streets and bits of green
field, behind which lay the real business, transacted in stews. To set
against this, it is true, there was a so-called Tragic Drama. The tragedy
that was now in favour, however, was no longer the old English tragedy of
rich and complex materials, but the French tragedy of heroic declamation.
Familiarized by their stay in France with the tragic style of Corneille
and other dramatists of the court of Louis XIV., the Royalists brought
back the taste with them into England; and the poets who catered for them
hastened to abandon the Shakespearian tragedy, with its large range of
time and action and its blank verse, and to put on the stage tragedies of
sustained and decorous declamation in the heroic or rhymed couplet,
conceived, as much as possible, after the model of Corneille. Natural to
the French, this classic or regular style accorded ill with English
faculties and habits; and Corneille himself would have been horrified at
the slovenly and laborious attempts of the English in imitation of his
masterpieces. The effect of French influence at this time, however, on
English literary taste, did not consist merely in the introduction of the
heroic or rhymed drama. The same influence extended, and in some respects
beneficially, to all departments of English literature. It helped, for
example, to correct that peculiar style of so-called "wit" which,
originating with the dregs of the Elizabethan age, had during a whole
generation infected English prose and poetry, but more especially the
latter. The characteristic of the "metaphysical school of poetry," as it
is called, which took its rise in a literary vice perceptible even in the
great works of the Elizabethan age, and of which Donne and Cowley were the
most celebrated representatives, consisted in the identification of mere
intellectual subtlety with poetic genius. To spin out a fantastic conceit,
to pursue a thread of quaint thought as long as it could be held between
the fingers of the metre without snapping, and, in doing so, to wind it
about as many oddities of the real world as possible, and introduce as
many verbal quibbles as possible, was the aim of the "metaphysical poets."
Some of them, like Donne and Cowley, were men of independent merit; but
the style of poetry itself, as all modern readers confess by the alacrity
with which they avoid reprinted specimens of it, was as unprofitable an
investment of human ingenuity as ever was attempted. At the period of the
Restoration, and partly in consequence of French influence, this kind of
wit was falling into disrepute. There were still practitioners of it; but,
on the whole, a more direct, clear, and light manner of writing was coming
into fashion. Discourse became less stiff and pedantic; or, as Dryden
himself has expressed it, "the fire of English wit, which was before
stifled under a constrained melancholy way of breeding, began to display
its force by mixing the solidity of our nation with the air and gaiety of
our neighbours." And the change in discourse passed without difficulty
into literature, calling into being a nimbler style of wit, a more direct,
rapid, and decisive manner of thought and expression, than had beseemed
authorship before. In particular, and apart from the tendency to greater
directness and concision of thought, there was an increased attention to
correctness of expression. The younger literary men began to object to
what they called the involved and incorrect syntax of the writers of the
previous age, and to pretend to greater neatness and accuracy in the
construction of their sentences. It was at this time, for example, that
the rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition or other little word
began to be attended to. Whether the notion of correctness, implied in
this, and other such rules, was a true notion, and whether the writers of
the Restoration excelled their Elizabethan predecessors in this quality of
correctness, admits of being doubted. Certain it is, however, that a
change in the mechanism of writing--this change being on the whole towards
increased neatness--did become apparent about this time. The change was
visible in prose, but far more in verse. For, to conclude this enumeration
of the literary signs or tendencies of the age of the Restoration, it was
a firm belief of the writers of the period that then for the first time
was the art of correct English versification exemplified and appreciated.
It was, we say, a firm belief of the time, and indeed it has been a
common-place of criticism ever since, that Edmund Waller was the first
poet who wrote smooth and accurate verse, that in this he was followed by
Sir John Denham, and that these two men were reformers of English metre.
"Well-placing of words, for the sweetness of pronunciation, was not known
till Mr. Waller introduced it," is a deliberate statement of Dryden
himself, meant to apply especially to verse. Here, again, we have to
separate a matter of fact from a matter of doctrine. To aver, with such
specimens of older English verse before us as the works of Chaucer and
Spenser, and the minor poems of Milton, that it was Waller or any other
petty writer of the Restoration that first taught us sweetness, or
smoothness, or even correctness of verse, is so ridiculous that the
currency of such a notion can only be accounted for by the servility with
which small critics go on repeating whatever any one big critic has said.
That Waller and Denham, however, did set the example of something new in
the manner of English versification,--which "something" Dryden, Pope, and
other poets who afterwards adopted it, regarded as an improvement,--needs
not be doubted. For us it is sufficient in the meantime to recognise the
change as an attempt after greater neatness of mechanical structure,
leaving open the question whether it was a change for the better.
It was natural that the tendencies of English literature thus enumerated
should be represented in the poet-laureate for the time being. Who was the
fit man to be appointed laureate at the Restoration? Milton was out of the
question, having none of the requisites. Butler, the man of greatest
natural power of a different order, and possessing certainly as much of
the anti-Puritan sentiment as Charles and his courtiers could have desired
in their laureate, was not yet sufficiently known, and was, besides,
neither a dramatist nor a fine gentleman. Cowley, whom public opinion
would have pointed out as best entitled to the honour, was somehow not in
much favour at court, and was spending the remainder of his days on a
little property near Chertsey. Waller and Denham were wealthy men, with
whom literature was but an amusement. On the whole, Sir William Davenant
was felt to be the proper man for the office. He was an approved royalist;
he had, in fact, been laureate to Charles I. after Ben Jonson's death in
1637; and he had suffered much in the cause of the king. He was, moreover,
a literary man by profession. He had been an actor and a theatre-manager
before the Commonwealth; he had been the first to start a theatre after
the relaxed rule of Cromwell made it possible; and he was one of the first
to attempt heroic or rhymed tragedies after the French model. He was also,
far more than Cowley, a wit of the new school; and, as a versifier, he
practised, with no small reputation, the neat, lucid style introduced by
Denham and Waller. He was the author of an epic called _Gondibert_,
written in rhymed stanzas of four lines each, which Hobbes praised as
showing "more shape of art, health of morality, and vigour and beauty of
expression," than any poem he had ever read. We defy anyone to read the
poem now; but there have been worse things written; and it has the merit
of being a careful and rather serious composition by a man who had
industry, education, and taste, without genius. There was but one
awkwardness in having such a man for laureate: he had no nose. This
awkwardness, however, had existed at the time of his first appointment in
the preceding reign. At least, Suckling adverts to it in the _Session of
the Poets_, where he makes the wits of that time contend for the bays--
"Will Davenant, ashamed of a foolish mischance,
That he had got lately, travelling in France,
Modestly hoped the handsomeness of 's muse
Might any deformity about him excuse.
"And surely the company would have been content,
If they could have found any precedent;
But in all their records, either in verse or prose,
There was not one laureate without a nose."
If the more decorous court of Charles I., however, overlooked this
deficiency, it was not for that of Charles II. to take objection to it.
After all, Davenant, notwithstanding his misfortune, seems to have been
not the worst gentleman about Charles's court, either in morals or
manners. Milton is said to have known and liked him.
Davenant's laureateship extended over the first eight years of the
Restoration, or from 1660 to 1668. Much was done in those eight years both
by himself and others. Heroic plays and comedies were produced in
sufficient abundance to supply the two chief theatres then open in
London--one of them that of the Duke's company, under Davenant's
management; the other, that of the King's company, under the management
of an actor named Killigrew. The number of writers for the stage was very
great, including not only those whose names have been mentioned, but
others new to fame. The literature of the stage formed by far the largest
proportion of what was written, or even of what was published. Literary
efforts of other kinds, however, were not wanting. Of satires, and small
poems in the witty or amatory style, there was no end. The publication by
Butler of the first part of his _Hudibras_ in 1663, and of the second in
1664, drew public attention, for the first time, to a man, already past
his fiftieth year, who had more true wit in him than all the aristocratic
poets put together. The poem was received by the king and the courtiers
with shouts of laughter; quotations from it were in everybody's mouth;
but, notwithstanding large promises, nothing substantial was done for the
author. Meanwhile Milton, blind and gouty, and living in his house near
Bunhill Fields, where his visitors were hardly of the kind that admired
Butler's poem, was calmly proceeding with his _Paradise Lost_. The poem
was finished and published in 1667, leaving Milton free for other work.
Cowley, who would have welcomed such a poem, and whose praise Milton would
have valued more than that of any other contemporary, died in the year of
its publication. Davenant may have read it before his death in the
following year; but perhaps the only poet of the time who hailed its
appearance with enthusiasm adequate to the occasion was Milton's personal
friend Marvell. Gradually, however, copies of the poem found their way
about town, and drew public attention once more to Cromwell's old
secretary.
The laureateship remained vacant two years after Davenant's death; and
then it was conferred--on whom? There can be little doubt that, of those
eligible to it, Butler had, in some respects, the best title. The author
of _Hudibras_, however, seems to have been one of those ill-conditioned
men whom patronage never comes near, and who are left, by a kind of
necessity, to the bitter enjoyment of their own humours. There does not
seem to have been even a question of appointing him; and the office, the
income of which would have been a competence to him, was conferred on a
man twenty years his junior, and whose circumstances required it
less--John Dryden. The appointment, which was made in August, 1670,
conferred on Dryden not only the laureateship, but also the office of
"historiographer royal," which chanced to be vacant at the same time. The
income accruing from the two offices thus conjoined was 200_l._ a-year,
which was about as valuable then as 600_l._ a-year would be now; and it
was expressly stated in the deed of appointment that these emoluments were
conferred on Dryden "in consideration of his many acceptable services done
to his majesty, and from an observation of his learning and eminent
abilities, and his great skill and elegant style both in verse and prose."
At the time of the Restoration, or even for a year or two after it, such
language could, by no stretch of courtesy, have been applied to Dryden. At
that time, as we have seen, though already past his thirtieth year, he was
certainly about the least distinguished person in the little band of wits
that were looking forward to the good time coming. He was a stout,
fresh-complexioned man, in grey drugget, who had written some robust
stanzas on Cromwell's death, and a short poem, also robust, but rather
wooden, on Charles's return. That was about all that was then known about
him. What had he done, in the interval, to raise him so high, and to make
it natural for the Court to prefer him to what was in fact the titular
supremacy of English literature, over the heads of others who might be
supposed to have claims, and especially over poor battered old Butler? A
glance at Dryden's life during Davenant's laureateship, or between 1660
and 1670, will answer this question.